>All right, what words would you use? I'm really stumped on this. If you can
>cite me some literature, or a section in your website, please do. Here is
>the problem I see:
>
>You want to take the picture of the biblical Adam, Even, Cain, Abel, and
>Noah and place them back over 5 million years ago. To overcome the obvious
>question of what happened to their technology, you posit a technological
>dark age. OK. Even though this is contradicted by passages such as Gen.
>5:22 and 9:20, we'll grant it for a moment.
Genesis 5:22 ???? "And after he became the father of Methuselah, Enoch
walked with God 300 years and had other sons and daughters."NIV?? Since this
was before the flood, how exactly does this contradict a technological dark
age AFTER the flood? I don't know what your point is.
Genesis 9:20??? "Noah, a man of the soil proceeded to plant a vineyard"
So Noah planted some grapes. that doens't meand that his great
grandchildren did the same. After all the orginal ancestors of the
Tasmanians made clothing. Their great, greate...grandchildren, 8000 years
later, didn't. Your logic is highly flawed.
>You are still left with people
>that had sophisiticated language, spiritual and mental abilities--the sort
>of things modern man has.
>
>But now, going back a mere 300,000 years, you don't have any of that. You
>point to indicators you say evidences humanity, but the futher back you go
>the weaker they are, which is why all the experts you happily quote argue
>over whether they are in the line of modern man or not.
Wait a minute. You are grossly mis-representing the anthropological record.
NO ONE, absolutely NO ONE disputes that Homo Erectus was on the line to
modern humans. NO ONE absolutely NO ONE disputes that archaic Homo sapiens
is on the line to modern humans. The only dispute is about Neanderthal.
The Sima people are archic Homo sapiens or Homo erectus. The same can be
said of the Bilzingsleben people who scratched the image of a quadruped on a
bone. You can not find anyone who says that Homo erectus or archaic Homo
sapiens were not on the line leading to modern man!!!!
>
>But these hominids didn't have the mental, vocal or spiritual capacity of
>the early Genesis characters. No one believe that, apparently not even you.
>
Milford Wolpoff, no slouch in anthropology, beleives that Homo erectus,
Neanderthal and us are members of the same species. He writes:
"No speciation events seem to separate us from our immediate
ancestors, and cladogenesis, the splitting of one species into
two, last characterized our lineage at the origin of Homo sapiens
some 2 million years ago, when members of what we once called
'Homo erectus' first appeared in East Africa. For 2 million
years, from the end of the Pliocene until now, ancient and modern
Homo sapiens populations are members of the sames
species."~Milford Wolpoff and Rachael Caspari, Race and Human
Evolution, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), p. 34
Franz Weidenreich, one of the discoverers of Peking Man also thought that
Homo erectus was merely a subspecies of us.
"His use of 'Sinanthropus pekinensis' was a convenience
'...without any 'generic' or 'specific' meaning or, in other
words, as a 'latininzation' of Peking Man....it would not be
correct to call our fossil 'Homo pekinensis' or 'Homo erectus
pekinensis'; it would be best to call it 'Homo sapiens erectus
pekinensis.' Otherwise it would appear as a proper 'species,'
different from 'Homo sapiens,' which remains doubtful, to say
the least.'"~Franz Weidenreich, "The Skull of Sinanthropus
pekinensis: A comparative study of a primitive hominid skull,"
Palaeontologia Sinica, new Series D, Number 10 (wole series No.
127), p. 246, cited by Milford Wolpoff and Rachael Caspari, Race
and Human Evolution, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), p.
186
Try Helmut Hemmer who says the same,
"Since these features vary among the recent races no less
significantly than between different fossil groups, or between
fossil and recent populations, it is impossible to draw a line
anywhere for species delimitation unless one intends also to
split up recent man into several species. Therefore it seems
necessary to include all of these fossil and recent groups in the
single species H. sapiens."~Helmut Hemmer, "A New View of the
Evolution of Man," Current Anthropology, 10(2-3):179-180, p. 179
Robinson argued that in the broad view of human evolution, 'most
of the obvious physical change had already occurred' at the time
of the appearance of homo erectus. All subsequent human
populations were mainly characterized by a single evolutionary
trend, in his view, 'the realization of the cultural potential.'
he believed homo erectus and Homo sapiens should therefore be
subsumed in the single species Homo sapiens, because it has
priority."~Milford Wolpoff and Rachael Caspari, Race and Human
Evolution, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), p. 251
John Robinson, Jan Jelinek, Emiliano Aquirre are among the many, many
anthropologists that believe that Homo erectus IS Homo sapiens. Even Richard
Leakey wrote:
"'I am increasingly of the view that all of the material
currently referred to as homo erectus should in fact be placed
within the species sapiens [which would]project Homo sapiens as a
species that can be traced from the present, back to a little
over two million years.' R. E. Leakey, 1989, "Recent Fossil finds from East
Africa," in J.R. Durant ed. Human Origins, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989),
p. 57
Sorry, Jim. These guys are strongly implying that they ARE us!!!! The fact
that Homo erectus was a hunter who could make spears as mean as any made by
the Massai, says a lot about their intelligence.
>So, my question to you is, What happened? It looks like an obvious mental
>regression. What words would you use?
Were the Dark Ages after the fall of the western Roman empire a regression
that took the Europeans out of humanity? Of course not.
>
>This, it seems to me, is the more fruitful path to follow. We can play
>duelling experts again, but that obviously doesn't help. You already admit
>no one in the world agrees with you, so what good will it do me to keep on
>making THAT case?
>
But the facts fit my view and I and the experts agree on the facts. We
disagree on the interpretation of those same facts. I do not disagree with
the expert on Sima de los Huesos, who believes that this was evidence of
ritual. You are the one disagreeing with that expert, not me. I also don't
see the experts agreeing with you that evolution didn't happen.
>That being said, however, I do admire your continuing tenacity in the teeth
>of expert opinion. It's OK to stand alone, so long as one remembers the
>risks. Copernicus did it, but so, may I remind you, did the cheese. The
>latter was consumed without ceremony.
I doubt if that will happen to me. :-) Burned at the stake maybe.
glenn
Foundation, Fall and Flood
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm