On 06 Dec 96 14:01:04 EST, Jim Bell wrote:
JB>In the latest Facts & Faith, Hugh Ross deals with the so-called
>Neanderthal "flute" and other matters. There is a nice picture of
>the bone with holes, too. The article is a good one, entitled "The
>Meaning of Art and Music."
Yes. It has a picture of Glenn's "so-called Neanderthal flute". I
must say I was less than impressed.
JB>One important point he makes, which bears repeating, is how
>difficult it is to say that "art" is associated with biblical
>humanness. "Most of us have seen chimpanzee art that compares
>favorably with modern art. Bower birds are known to decorate their
>nests." But we don't really consider birds human, or even
>incipient humans, do we? (Well, there might be a few...)
Absolutely! Anything that Homo sapiens has in common with animals
cannot be disgnostic of "humanness". IMHO the *only* test of full
"humanness" is the ability to have a relationship with God.
>JB> Ross mentions a debate going on about "spirit art," art that would
>indicate "shaman-like" awareness, and thus true humanity. The
>debate is detailed in Bower, "Visions on the Rocks," Science News,
>vol. 150 (1996) pp. 217-217. But note: neither group suggests
>that spirit art dates back earlier than 27,000 years.
Interesting. But even this is I would be cautious as interpreting
as a true diagnostic of full humanity. Even Ross says:
"Others say that without some independent evidence of the
shamanistic activity, conclusions about spirit expression in ancient
art remain highly speculative, at best." (Ross H, "The Meaning of
Art and Music", Facts & Faith, Reasons To Believe: Pasadena CA,
Vol. 10, No. 4, Fourth Quarter 1996, p6)
>JB> As for the "flute": "The three Slovenian archeologists who
>made the discovery addressed, and reasonably dismissed, the idea
>that the holes might have been bored by the teeth of a large
>carnivore rather than by a bipedal primate. However, the seem to
>overlook some more obvious considerations. The bone was found near
>a hearth with charcoal and many burnt fragments of animal bones.
>One of the holes goes all the way through the bone and the other
>does not.
IMHO this almost certainly rules it out as a flute, or even a
whistle. I am not a musician, but AFAIK wind instruments rely on
asymmetry of hole spacing for musical effect. Something with a hole
drilled right through it sounds like an ornament with a cord passed
through it, or some sort of implement.
JB>These facts suggest at least some likelihood that the
>bone was an instrument for lighting fires (by twirling a twig in or
>through one of the holes with a bow). The holes may result from
>the bone's use as a hammer head or an axe head. Other
>possibilities abound. Most importantly, the researchers apparently
>did not construct a bear femur flute according to this bone's
>specifications to test whether or not it is capable of producing
>music....
This is exactly what I suggested to Glenn. It is difficult to
understand why they don't carry out this simple test.
>JB>"[W]e may also question to what degree of certainty music an be
>declared a manifestation of the spirit. Some music may simply
>express the soulishness we share with bird and mammal species.
>Neurobiologists Albert Yu and Daniel Margoliash have just published
>a paper documenting the amazing musical abilities of zebra finches
>[Yu and Margoliash, "Temporal Hierarchical Control of Singing
>Birds," Science, vol. 273 (1996) pp. 1871-1875], advancing the
>JB>theme of a recent book on bird songs by C. K. Catchpole and P.J.B.
>Slater [Catchpole and Slater, Bird Song: Biological Themes and
>Variations (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995)]."
>(Facts & Faith, Vol 10, No. 4, Fourth Quarter 1996 at p. 11).
Yes. No doubt the religion of the Canaanites was big on music too,
but that does not necessarily mean it was spiritual! Living with two
children and a niece in their twenties, I can definitely confirm
that music is *not* a diagnostic of spirituality! :-)
>JB>*** In a sidebar:
>
>"Ironically, as the three Slovenian archeologists annonced their
>flute discovery, two American anthropologists, Jeffrey Schwartz and
>Ian Tattersall, published their research on thirteen Neanderthal
>skulls. They found huge nasal bones, much larger sinus cavities
>than modern humas, and no tear ducts. Such features not only
>differ radically from humans, but they also appear unique among all
>land mammals yet discovered. This skeletal evidence provides one
>more proof, perhaps the strongest indicator to date, that modern
>humans cannot be Neanderthals' descendants." (Ibid.)
Yes. Also the fact that Neandertals co-existed with anatomically
modern humans for milennia with no trace of interbreeding:
"When Neanderthals and modern humans came into contact in the
Levant, they would have interbred, no matter how "strange" they
might initially have seemed to each other. If their cohabitation
stretched over tens of thousands of years, the fossils should show a
convergence through time toward a single morphological pattern, or
at least some swapping of traits back and forth. But the evidence just
isn't there, not if the TL and ESR dates are correct. Instead the
Neanderthals stay staunchly themselves. In fact, according to some
recent ESR dates, the least "Neanderthalish" among them is also the
oldest...If these humans were isolated in neither space nor time but
were truly contemporaneous, then how on earth did they fail to mate?
Only one solution to the mystery is left. Neanderthals and moderns
did not interbreed in the Levant because they could not. They were
reproductively incompatible, separate species-equally human, perhaps
but biologically distinct. Two separate species, who both just
happened to be human at the same time, in the same place." (Shreeve
J., "The Neanderthal Peace", Discover, Vol. 16, No. 9, September
1995, pP78-79)
Indeed, the evidence is that anatomically modern humans actually
existed *before* Neanderthals:
"In the late 1980s, however, this neat sequence was overturned.
Researchers from Britain and France employed new methods of
dating, known as electron spin resonance and thermoluminescence,
on some of these fossils; both techniques depend on the decay of
certain radioisotopes common in many rocks-a process that acts as an
atomic clock for minerals in the rocks. The researchers found that the
modern human fossils from Skhul and Qafzeh were older than most
of the Neanderthal fossils, by as much as 40,000 years. If these results
are correct, Neanderthals can not be ancestors of modem humans, as
the multiregional evolution model demands. What, then, is the
alternative? Instead of being the product of an evolutionary trend
throughout the Old World, modern humans are seen in the alternative
model as having arisen in a single geographical location . Bands of
modern Homo sapiens would have migrated from this location and
expanded into the rest of the Old World, replacing existing
premodern populations. This model has had several labels, such as the
"Noah's Ark" hypothesis and the "Garden of Eden" hypothesis.
(Leakey R., "The Origin of Humankind", Phoenix: London, 1994,
pp86-87).
The evidence is more and more against evolutionary views of Homo
sapiens evolving on a broad front from other Homo species, ie. the
mutlt-regional hypothesis. More and more the evidence is pointing
to a sudden appearance of a new superior `model' of humanity with a
rewired brain:
"Steven Mithen, a lecturer in archaeology at the University of
Reading...believes modern humans emerged after a final redesign of
the brain, resulting in a `big bang' of cultural advances that
started 40,000 years ago in Europe with the production of objects
such as beads, pendants, statuettes, paintings and engravings. Rock
art appears to have been most prolific in Europe, after this
cultural big bang...Other prehistorians are more sceptical of
Mithen's proposal that rewiring in the brain allowed humans to begin
decorating walls and making beads." (Patel T., "Stone Age
Picassos", New Scientist, 13 July 1996, p34)
Leakey agrees:
"When change did come, however, it was dazzling-so dazzling that we
should be aware that we might be blind to the reality behind it.
About 35,000 years ago in Europe, people began making tools of the
finest form, fashioned from delicately struck stone blades. For the
first time, bone and antler were used as raw material for toolmaking.
Tool kits now comprised more than one hundred items, and included
implements for fashioning rough clothing and for engraving and
sculpting. For the first time, tools became works of art: antler
spear throwers, for example, were adorned with lifelike animal
carvings. Beads and pendants appear in the fossil record, announcing
the new practice of body decoration. And-most evocative of all
paintings on the walls of deep caves speak of a mental world we
readily recognize as our own. Unlike previous eras, when stasis
dominated, innovation is now the essence of culture, with change
being measured in millennia rather than hundreds of millennia.
Known as the Upper Paleolithic Revolution, this collective
archeological signal is unmistakable evidence of the modern human
mind at work." (Leakey R., "The Origin of Humankind", Phoenix:
London, 1994, pp93-94)
All we need is conclusive evidence that this to new `model', with its
rewired brain, came from the Middle East, not Africa, about 40,000
years ago, and the Biblical picture will be supported about as well
as it could ever be expected to be:
"It is possible, therefore, that modern humans first arose in northern
Africa or the Middle East, and then migrated from there"..If modern
humans were migrating into Western Europe beginning 50,000 years
ago, where did they come from? On the basis of the fossil evidence,
we would say Africa, in all probability-or perhaps the Middle East."
(Leakey R., "The Origin of Humankind", Phoenix: London, 1994,
pp90,94)
"This tree is an unrooted tree-no attempt has been made to specify
where the mitochondrial Eve might be, and indeed you can see that it
would be very difficult to decide where to put her. Somewhere in the
middle of the starburst, undoubtedly, but it is not obvious where. She
could have been African, Asian, or even European. Indeed, the
famous African branch-you can still see it at twelve o'clock on the
tree-now has some Asians in it." (Wills C., "The Runaway Brain: The
Evolution of Human Uniqueness", Harper-Collins: London, 1994,
p52)
>JB>References: 1. Schwartz and Tattersall, "Significance of Some
>Previously Unrecognized Apomorphies in the Nasal Region of Homo
>neanderthalensis," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
>USA, vol. 93 (1996), pp. 10852-10854. Laitman, et al., "What
>the Nose Knows: New Understandings of Neanderthal Upper
>Respiratory Tract Specializations," id. at pp. 10543-10545.
Thanks to Jim for posting this.
On Fri, 06 Dec 1996 22:21:26, Glenn Morton wrote:
[...]
GM>Jim, Thanks for telling me this. In September, I met Hugh
>Ross.They had specifically e-mailed me asking me to come to a
>meeting Hugh was having in town. I went an hour early to see if I
>could talk to him. I was lucky. I gave him a picture of the flute
>and told him that he was wrong in what he was saying about
>anthopology.
This from the person who is "saying about anthopology" that: 1
Homo habolis/erectus lived 5.5 mya; and 2. that he had the technology
to build a 3-decker Ark; 3. afterwards he forgot all that technology; 4. following
a gap of 5 my he began to regain the technology!
GM>He told me that that was why he never got into the anthropology
>issues; it was way out of his field. I wanted to tell him that
>someone was writing about anthro in his newsletter. But I was
>polite. I am glad that he is actually saying something about it.
>But this is getting silly when a being that makes flutes and engages
>in art is not to be considered human. Get real.
A lot of time and trouble would be saved if Glenn tried to
understand what Ross means by "human". He defines humanity
primarily by its *spiritual* qualitities, rather than artistic or
technological:
"In Genesis 1, God speaks of adham (male and female), and only adham,
as being made in His image. The point is emphasized by repetition.
As humanity's story unfolds through subsequent chapters, we discover
that what makes humans different is a quality called "spirit." None
of the rest of Earth's creatures possesses it. By "spirit" the Bible
means awareness of God and capacity to form a relationship with Him.
Worship is the key evidence of the spiritual quality of the human
race, and the universality of worship is evidenced in altars,
temples, and religious relics of all kinds. Burial of dead, use of
tools, or even painting do not qualify as evidence of the spirit, for
non-spirit beings such as bower birds, elephants, and chimpanzees
engage in such activities to a limited extent. Bipedal tool-using,
large-brained primates (called hominids by anthropologists) may have
roamed the earth as long ago as one million years, but religious
relics and altars date back only 8,000 to 24,000 years. Thus, the
secular archaeological date for the first spirit creatures is
incomplete agreement with the biblical date. Some differences,
however, between the Bible and secular anthropology remain. By the
biblical definition, these hominids may have been intelligent
mammals, but they were not humans. Nor did Adam and Eve physically
descend from them..." (Ross H., "Creation and Time", NavPress:
Colorado Springs CO, 1994, p141)
Ross would grant everything that Glenn says about the hominids, but
he would not call them "human". I disagree with Ross on this (I
would grant members of the genus Homo were "human" but not *fully*
human"), but at least I understand his definition and where he is
coming from.
BTW I went to the zoo the other day. I watched some young kids
playing through a window with a young orang-utan. They were doing
high-fives to each other, matching hands on the glass. I have also
once watched a dolphin reach up and kiss a child who had puckered up
to it. I was impressed by the dolphin's evident intelligence, which
seemed more purposeful than a dog's. There is no doubt in my mind
that the apes are nearer to us than any other animals, but there
is still this vast gulf between us and them. I have no doubt
that if Homo erectus was still alive today, he would be even closer
to us than an orang-utan. Yes, I also have no doubt there would
still be this vast gulf between him and us.
[...]
Happy New Year!
Steve
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