>> Regarding the evidence for recent, modern man, especially vis-a-vis tool
>> making, I quote Dr. Jeffrey Goodman [note, his use of the terms "explosion"
>> and "sudden appearance" is NOT something I put him up to]:
I looked up Goodman's book "The Genesis Mystery", and found:
AUTHOR(s): Goodman, Jeffrey.
TITLE(s): The genesis mystery : a startling new theory of outside
intervention in the development of modern man / Jeffrey
Goodman.
New York, N.Y. : Times Books, c1983.
xiv, 304 p. : ill. ; 22 cm.
Includes index.
Bibliography: p. 283-291.
I will find this book and evaluate it at more length, but that phrase "a
startling new theory" doesn't sound to me like someone interested in
presenting an unbiased view of the current thinking. It sounds like
someone interested in presenting his own radical view. Let's face it,
most "startling new theories" turn out to be wrong. And "outside
intervention": does he have a religious agenda, or is he a space-alien
nut?
>> "To represent fully modern man, Cro-Magnon or otherwise, as the final step in
>> the Darwinian gradualistic evolutionary scheme, the devotees of gradualism
>> have to overlook his sudden appearance and remarkable incongruity with his
>> predecessors. While modern man's skull on the average is not particularly
>> larger than Neanderthal man's, it has undergone great reorganization. Its new
>> and distinctive high-foreheaded shape packages an even more radical
>> evolutionary departure: the expanded frontal section of the brain, which
>> controls nearly every distinctively human activity. With modern man's
>> internally reorganized brain and high forehead to house it came thin skull
>> wals, weak if any brow ridges, diminished teeth (particularly the molars) in a
>> much less ponderous jaw, smaller eye orbits, a streamlined pelvis, a
>> redesigned vocal tract, and the first chin in primate history....
>> "According to the traditional view, approximately 40,000 years ago, at the
>> start of the last 1 percent of hominid evolutionary time, a natural miracle
>> took place: Within a critical period of 5,000 years--just one-seventh of 1
>> percent of the time that has elapsed since the first-known australopithecine's
>> day--we get more significant evolutionary change than the other 99 6/7 percent
>> of that time; we get a veritable explosion of change. This disquieting fact is
>> cheerfully overlooked by the gradualists....
Ye gods! This sounds like rubbish for so many reasons that it will take
me a while to list them.
Goodman talks as if we evolved from Neandertals. There are, I think,
some anthropologists who claim that Europeans may have some Neandertal
heritage, but it's a minority view. No-one, to my knowledge, says all
modern humans descended from Neandertals.
Furthermore, no-one is saying it happened 40,000 years ago. As I've
repeatedly pointed out, to no apparent effect, _Homo sapiens sapiens_ is
over 100,000 years old, and it is preceded by archaic but very similar
forms.
The chin, pelvis, jaw, teeth, brow ridge differences between us and
Neandertals tell us nothing about their mental capabilities. (Some
Neandertals did have a chin, by the way). Most people would also be
*very* cautious about interpreting the Neandertal brain shape. The
brain is plenty soft and squishy enough to mold itself to whatever shape
container it is in. Plenty of cultures, for example, have used brain
deformation to change the shape of the skull with no apparent mental
side effects. Saying that our brains are "greatly reorganized" compared
to those of Neandertals is pure speculation.
And he's right that our skulls are not particularly larger than
Neandertals; we're actually a bit smaller on average.
Suppose we did evolve from Neandertals, as Goodman claims. I defy
anyone to compare an australopithecine from over 3 million years ago, a
Neandertal, and a modern human, and to say with a straight face that
there is "more significant evolutionary change" between Neandertal and
us than between a pith and a Neandertal. It's the exact opposite of the
truth: compared to an australopithecine, Neandertals and us are almost
identical twins.
My impression is that Goodman is totally clueless about the human fossil
record, and that like many owners of "radical new theories", he has gone
fishing for any information that can be interpreted, or misinterpreted,
as support for his theory.
>> "Homo sapiens sapiens' increased mental and physical abilities brought on a
>> parallel explosion in technology and culture. Changes in the brain combined
>> with changes in the vocal tract made articulate language physically possible
>> at the same time as the complex processes of human thought became
>> intellectually possible.
Again, analyses of the speech capability of Neandertals and Homo erectus
from fossilized remains is *very* controversial. Even more so for
"mental and physical abilities", and "human thought". When I've pointed
out plausible evidence that early hominids had some speech capability,
people have been quick to point out that we can't prove it. Quite
right, but the above paragraph is, as far as I know, total speculation:
it's way, way out on a limb,
>> Because "explosion" and "sudden appearance" are so far out of
>> Darwinian predictablity, we have to account for it in some other
>> way. Naturalists are holding out for a naturalistic answer. But I
>> think God did it, and relatively recently, too.
Jim, you've cited three sources for this, but two of them (Goodman and
Percy) have made what I consider obvious errors in their references to
the fossil record. I don't consider either of them at all reliable. Is
there any reason I should? Do either of them have qualifications in
this area?
Your third source, Ian Tattersall, I do accept as a recognized
authority. But Tattersall's claims are far, far more modest than yours;
he's not talking about and major (or minor) anatomical changes, he's not
claiming that earlier hominids couldn't speak (just maybe not as well as
us). He's talking about what I've been talking about: a cultural
revolution. That might *conceivably* have been triggered by a minor
neurological change that would have been undetectable in the fossil
record. Or maybe not. Or maybe the "cultural revolution" is a
consequence of the fact that our archeological record is very rich in
Europe, and modern humans arrived there 40,000 years ago.
-- Jim Foley Symbios Logic, Fort Collins, COJim.Foley@symbios.com (303) 223-5100 x9765* 1st 1.11 #4955 * "I am Homer of Borg! Prepare to be...OOooooo! Donuts!!!"