You wrote:
>>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.<<
If you put it that way, I can't prove that any other person I see is human.
Just because I see a body with a head balanced on it, does not mean that
there is a person at home inside that object. But I must reasonably conclude
that there is, even if they look a little different than me. Similarly, if
the Homo erectus engaged in woodworking (which only man does) and carried
around ochre (which only man doe) and harnessed fire (which only man does)
and manufactured stone tools (which only man does), and had both Broca's and
Wernicke's areas (which only man does), then I see little difference in
according him some status of humanity just like I accord you the status of
humanity.
You wrote:
>>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.<<
You misquote me again. I didn't say 'no assumptions'. I said 'no
evolutionary assumptions.' There is a big difference. All science makes
assumptions. And indeed there are no evolutionary assumptions here unless
you are implying that New Guineans are less than human!
You wrote:
>>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.<<
Why must Ross' PC scenario be the standard against which to judge Stonekings
work? As admitted by you H. erectus MIGHT be human. And I just cited a
whole lot of data showing that he engaged in uniquely human activities, so
why do you hang on to Ross? The date is based upon the dating of deposits in
which New Guinean fossils are found. The dating method is
thermoluminescence.
You misunderstand the Eve hypothesis. Each generation some women, like my
wife, and her sister, fail to have daughters to pass the mitochrondria on to.
Thus their lineage has died. As generations go on and various
mitochrondrial lineages die you get fewer and fewer represented. Eventually
everyone is from the same lineage. This quote illustrates the same thing
with paternal lineages.
"Let's say you are an anthropologist sometime in the future,' he told me
over dessert. 'You go to West Chicago and find fifteen hundred families
living there, all named Gablinski and all descended from immigrags from
Gdansk. It will look like these thousands of Gablinskis were the descendants
of a single Gablinski couple who came over from Poland. Through hard work
they succeeded, becoming more numerous through the generations and
eventualoly replacing all their neighbors. But what if there had been not
just the Gablinskis who came to West Chicago, but thousands of Poles with
thousands of different names? Every time one of these families had a
generation without sons, you'd lose a family name, right? Eventually, you'd
come down to just one name left: Gablinski! If you buy the Out of Gdansk
theory like the people who jump on the Out of Africa bandwagon, you'll
assume that ;they all came from that one
original couple. But you'll be making a mistake.
"Wolpoff's analogy is not just hypothetical. John Avise, a geneticist
at the University of Georgia who also works on mtDNA, has pointed to the case
of Pitcairn Island in the South Pacific. In 1790, six mutineers from H.M.S
Bounty arrived on the tiny island, bringing thriteen Tahitian women with
them. Few others have ever gone there to live. Recently, a population of
fifty people on the island shared only four surnames, and one of these was
that of a whaler who had later settled on Pitcairn. Thus in only six or
seven generations, 50 percent of the six original surnames had already
disappeared. After a few more generations, only one will remain."~James R.
Shreeve, The Neandertal Enigma, (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1995), p.
77
This does not rule out the possiblity that the older hominids could be
ancestral to humanity.
You wrote:
>>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.<<
Actually Stoneking's results make a better case for Ross' view than the
previous results. Thus if anything his bias was in favor of the direction
you prefer.
In a later post, you wrote:
>>Recall what I said about the original objection to the Mitochondrial Eve
theory? That two of the KUNG! tribeswomen surveyed showed the greatest
level of diversity? Now, evolutionists (including supporters of the Eve
theory) agreed that this was a problem. Why? Because they believe that it
is obvious that the two KUNG! tribeswomen must have had a more recent common
ancestor than all the women done in the survey. Remember also that this
pattern was repeated in Hammer's data (cited by Glenn).<<
To my knowledge no one has ever said what you are saying. Can you provide a
reference? What they say is that the !Kung appear to be the most logical
common link between all populations, not that the !Kung themselves are
extremely diverse.
glenn