Glenn wrote:
>Well if size of the brain does not define humanity then I am sure that you
>would agree that Homo erectus, with his smaller brain, might be as human as
>you and I?
I suppose this is possible, but I don't believe that the cranial endocasts
can even come close to proving it.
Glenn continues:
>I would like to point out that subsequent work using the New Guinea
>population, (which does not involve any evolutionary assumptions) confirms
>the order of magnitude of Eve's age. Shreeve writes:
No Assumptions? Hmmm.
>"In his talk, Stoneking took the offensive and unveiled a shocking new age
>for Eve. For several years, he had been examining mitochondrial evolution
>within the populations of Papua New Guinea. According to the latest
>thermoluminescence dates, New Guinea and Australia were first colonized
>around 60,000 years ago, when they were still joined to the greater continent
>of Sahul. Given the sheer physical difficulty of reaching New Guinea before
>modern times, it is unlikely that there was much gene flow back and forth to
>the mainland after the original colonization. Most native New Guineans can
>therefore trace their common ancestry back to a single point in time.
> Equally important, they are about as far off the human mainstream as people
>can be. The rugged, jungled mountans isolate different tribes--almost a
>thousand separate languages, or one-fifth the total on earth, are spoken
>there--and the sea isolates them from everyone else. This isolation,
>combined with the likelihood of a single, known point of common origin, makes
>New Guinea the best possible natural laboratory for studying the rate of
>human molecular evolution.
The problem here is the date of 60,000 years. If the date is actually smaller,
then Eve becomes more recent. How certain is the date? If the date could be as recent as 20,000 years, then there is no conflict whatever between the Ross PC
scenario and this evidence. This shockingly recent date, in fact, would
validate PC claims while destroying the possibility that older hominids could
be ancestral to humanity.
Stoneking, by the way, may have chosen a date at the upper end of the range
because it made more sense evolutionarily and this would mean that Glenn's
argument is again circular.
In Christ
robert van de water
associate researcher
UCLA