You know good Glenn-bait when you see it. I can't pass this one up.
>This is not good news for Glenn's theory. As the story notes:
>
><<Surprisingly, these earliest toolmakers were slow to improve on their
>invention, making the same tools virtually unchanged for almost a million
>years.>>
>It's not surprising to me. Modern humanity is a record of inexorable, rapid,
>ever upward artistic and technological advancement. But the stone tool
>industry is striking evidence of lackluster stagnation. Even moreso now,
>because the time has been pushed back another 250,000 years! These were not
>human beings.
Let me suggest that there are people on earth today whose technology is no
more advanced than that of the pre-farming peoples of 30,000 years ago. They
still live in the stone age, do not engage in farming, have shown no
creativity technologically from their ancient ancestors. I guess by your
standard they are not true humans either. Stagnation for the past 30,000 years
is surely evidence of their lack of humanity.
Secondly, as I have noted many times, anatomically modern man appeared 120,000
years ago. He looked almost like you and I. His brain was big. He engaged in
unimproved stone-age technology for the next 50,000 years. His stone tools
were just like Neanderthal's (which were the most complex tools ever made by
ancient man), but they didn't alter them for the first 50,000 years of their
existence.
"Overall, however, the level of technology and
behavior found at Qafzeh, where the much older Homo sapiens remains occurred,
appears identical to that of the Neandertals at Kebara."~Donald C. Johanson,
Lenora Johanson, and Blake Edgar, Ancestors, (New York: Villard Books, 1994),
p. 276
They look like us, their technology was that of Neanderthal.
I am going to say something that applies to all old earth anti-evolutionists
who believe that spiritual mankind was created around 30-35000 years ago.
With the advent of new data over the past 20 years, that position has moved
from one which was defensible to one which, in my opinion, is indefensible for
entirely unexpected reasons. Twenty years ago, it was believed that
anatomically modern man did not appear on earth until around 35,000 years ago.
Christians built up their apologetic based upon that number. But the
apologists have not kept up with what is going on and still advocate this
30-35000 year advent for modern man. Since the late 1980s with the advent of
new dating techniques it has become clear that modern man appeared 120,000
years ago. The changed landscape going unnoticed has changed the implications
of the older Christian view. It used to be that the advent of spirituality was
simultaneous with the advent of anatomically modern humanity. This conjunction
of events was good. There was a clean break between spiritual and non
spiritual. But as I said, things have changed. Now the data gives us a choice
of having either an anatomically modern human acting like a "nonhuman" or
having a previously believed "nonhuman" now be viewed as a human. Current
data forces this choice upon us.
The logic involved with continued advocacy of the 35,000 year beginning of
spiritual man is quite scary to me and I am sure that those who advocate it do
not understand the implications because I KNOW that they do not believe the
conclusion which follows from this position. But others might not be so
scupulous and they might be lead astray.
The position is that spiritual humanity began around 30-35,000 years ago. But
anatomically modern men appeared 120,000 years ago. If these early modern men
look like us but were not human in a spiritual sense, then they are animals.
Hugh Ross has said as much. Then it is natural to ask the question: Do some
of their descendants live today? If so, then the terrible conclusion must be
drawn that there is a group of people alive today upon which we CAN experiment
in any way we wish. They are animals, they are not human. In your view there
is no evidence that they all died out because they look almost exactly like
us. And you can't say that the small differences distinguish them because
there are small differences between me and all the other "races". And that
answer would raise the question of their human status. How would we recognize
such non-humans? Jim, according to what you are suggesting, it is by their
lack of innovation. So what do we do with people who live in the stone-age
today? This is the terrible conclusion of this position. Those holding this
view should seriously consider its implications. It is a position I will
ALWAYS oppose.
>This confirms again the huge gap between modern man and other hominidae.
> It's a devastating blow to Glenn's theory.
The problems my view has are miniscule compared to those of a 35k Adam.
glenn
Foundation,Fall and Flood
http://members.gnn.com/GRMorton/dmd.htm