Stephen wrote:
>"Paleontologists don't pretend to know everything about how Homo
>erectus lived, but it's a safe bet the ancient prehumans passed their
>days in unremarkable ways. Their language was probably little more
>than a system of gestures and grunts. Their diet, consisting of foraged
>fruits and crudely cooked animals, was not an easy one to force
>down-if the attachment points on their skulls for stout chewing
>muscles and their large front teeth suggest anything. Their skill in
>making tools was limited: a flaked stone or a crude ax was probably
>as good as it got." (Kluger J., "Not So Extinct After All", Time,
>December 23, 1996, p64)
>
>The last sentence is relevant to Glenn's claim that a H. habilus/erectus
>named Noah built a 3-decker ark! :-)
>
there is some evidence to suggest the possibility of boats being built by
H.erectus and you are aware of it. There is no way to get to Australia except
by boat. Even at the lowest sealevels Australia was never connected with Asia.
It was at least a 70 km voyage. You are being very inconsistent here. As you
read this, How can you possibly criticise me for what you, yourself must
believe. You wrote in another post tonight
>There is good evidence that "the first colonizers of Australia" may
>in fact have been descendants of H. erectus:
>"Believed to have lived 10 kya, Kow Swamp fossils are noted for
>their robustness: sloping forehead, thick bones, heavy supraorbital
>torus, and so on. It is strange that humans living 30 kya should be
>more gracile than those living 20 ky later." (Nelson H. & Jurmain R.,
>"Introduction To Physical Anthropology", West Publishing Company:
>St. Paul, Fifth Edition, 1991, p539)
>"Most of these people of the Willandra lakes region were slender,
>with high-domed, thin-walled skulls. They appear, in fact, to have
>been more slender-boned than the present-day inhabitants of the
>region, the Bagundji tribe. There is one exception in the form of a
>single find that was given the designation W.L.H. 50, a skull and
>some postcranial fragments of what was apparently a very large and
>heavy-boned male. These fragments were discovered on the surface
>of one of the lakes where they had been exposed by a flash flood, so
>it is not possible to say how old they are. But they are heavily
>mineralized, even more so than any of the other finds in the area. The
>skull is enormously thick with a pronounced and continuous
>browridge and a low and sloping forehead. When it is viewed from
>above there is a severe postorbital constriction, so that it looks from
>that angle like a typically flask-shaped skull of Homo erectus. Yet the
>skull is much larger, with a cranial capacity of about 1,300 cubic
>centimeters. At Kow Swamp, the skeletal remains of about fifty
>individuals with features like those of W.L.H. 50, although not as
>extreme, have been found...Larger than most present-day aborigines,
>they typically had thick-walled, sugar-loaf-shaped skulls, a shape also
>found in some present-day tribes. There has been a great deal of
>argument about whether their unusual skull shape could have been
>due to deliberate deformation, and it seems likely that some of it may
>be. Yet, these people were strikingly different from the majority of
>the peoples of the Willandra lakes and the other gracile peoples
>whose remains have been found elsewhere in Australia." (Wills C.,
>>"The Runaway Brain: The Evolution of Human Uniqueness",
>HarperCollins: London, 1994, pp148-149)
When you combine your statement with Shreeve's:
"On his trip, Woploff pored over the museum drawers of four continents
and found nothing to alter his faith until one day in a laboratory in Java he
held in his hands a recent discovery from the site of Sangiran, where the
Dutchman G. H.R. von Koenigswald had worked forty years before. Called
Sangiran 17, the new find was the most complete Homo erectus skull yet
discovered. But in spite of its importance, a long-standing feud between two
Javanese investigators --both of them famous for guarding their fossils like
jealous lovers--had kept the skull largely hidden from sight. Given a
privileged peek at it, Wolpoff was surprised to see that the face had been
attached to the skull with rubber bands, so that it swung in and out, as if it
were hinged onto the cranium at the forehead. Fossils are hard enough to
interpret when their features are fixed in place; a speciment with movable
anatomy is impossible to pin down.
"'I saw this thing, as badly reconstructed as it was,' Wolpoff
remembered, 'and I said,"Look, can I take a crack at redoing this?"'
"Instead of using rubber bands Wopoff built a framework of toothpicks
and in a couple of hours he had the face glued in place. He let the glue set
for another half hour and only then picked up the specimen and turned it in
profile. 'I nearly dropped dead. Instead of being just another erectus, here
was this great big, hyper-robust Australian aborigine. I knew at that moment
that Thorne was right, and I was wrong.
"What astonished Wolpoff was the fossil's face, especially the way it
projected out from the skull. Once he had completed the toothpick,
reconstruction, he could see that the jutting face was unlike anything he'd
seen in erectus specimens from africa or among the Peking Man casts in
Beijing,
where he had been just days before. Though some 700,000 years old, the face
eerily resembled those of far younger, modern human fossils from Australia.
The 'robust' Australian sapiens were as modern in brain size as any in the
world, but they showed the same facial projection--big browridges, thick
bones,
sloping foreheads, and heavy molars--that Wolpoff saw in Sangiran 17. Many
living Australian aborigines carry the same traits today."
"Decades before, Weidenreich had suggested a connection between the
erectus fossils of Java and modern Australian aborigines. But Weidenreich had
only skullcaps to work from, like those of Solo Man from Ngandong. In the
face
of Sangiran, Wolpoff saw the missing anchor to Weidenreich's Australian
lineaage. Another researcher had suggested that the anatomy of Australian
aborigines bore 'the mark of ancient Java.' For Wolpoff, Sangiran was stunning
proof. In their arguments, Alan Thorne had been trying to convince Wolpoff
that regional features would appear first at the remote edges of the hominid
range, farthest away from the African birthplace of the earlist hominids. And
here sat Sangiran 17, three quarters of a million years old and about as far
from the African 'center' as one could get--but already full-fledged native
Australasian."~James R. Shreeve, The Neandertal Enigma, (New York: William
Morrow and Co., 1995), p. 102-103
and with this:
"One of the stumbling blocks to accepting an early colonization has
always been that, because Australia was never attached to Asia, even at the
lowest sea levels of the Ice Age a journey there required an ocean voyage of
at least 70 km. But now the discovery of a stone-tool industry on the
Indonesian island of Flores, in a layer dated by palaeomagnetism to about
700,000 years ago, has provided good evidence for open-sea voyages by H.
erectus, so there can be no question that whoever colonized Australia was
capable of such a journey, even 176,000 years ago."~Paul G. Bahn, "Further
Back Down Under," Nature, Oct 17, 1996, p. 577-578, p. 578
One must come to the inescapable conclusion that there is evidence that
H.erectus may have built a boat. If the earliest inhabitants of Australia
were erectus, Stephen, there is no way for them to get there EXCEPT BY BOAT!
They would have had to have built it.
For you to criticise me for what you yourself is hypocritical.
glenn
Foundation,Fall and Flood
http://members.gnn.com/GRMorton/dmd.htm