Sunday 20 October 2013

New fossil evidence that men have always been men


A new discovery of an old skull has, according to some commentators, cast extreme doubt on the standard evolutionary understanding of humanity. See, for example, this item in the Guardian.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/oct/17/skull-homo-erectus-human-evolution
 

>>>The spectacular fossilised skull of an ancient human ancestor that died nearly two million years ago has forced scientists to rethink the story of early human evolution.

Anthropologists unearthed the skull at a site in Dmanisi, a small town in southern Georgia, where other remains of human ancestors, simple stone tools and long-extinct animals have been dated to 1.8m years old.

Experts believe the skull is one of the most important fossil finds to date, but it has proved as controversial as it is stunning. Analysis of the skull and other remains at Dmanisi suggests that scientists have been too ready to name separate species of human ancestors in Africa. Many of those species may now have to be wiped from the textbooks.

The discovery of a cache of fossils suggests that the earliest members of the Homo genus – currently split into half a dozen species – were actually a single species<<<

The actual hard evidence on which supposed evolutionary progress from ‘ape men’ to humans is very thin indeed. Classic examples like Java man, Pekin man were largely based on imaginative reconstructions from fragments of skull, which in the case of Pekin man have disappeared! Nebraska man led to full scale artists' impressions based on the finding of ONE TOOTH that later turned out to be from a pig)  and let's never forget Piltdown man (a FRAUD not a hoax) which was given pride of place at the Natural History Museum for 40 years before being uncovered. I have seen the supposed evolutionary sequence of skulls at the Darwin Temple (Natural History Museum) in London and found them utterly unconvincing. Some were clearly apes, some were clearly human. And even if you could demonstrate a gradation, that would not prove descent.

And now the Dmanisi skulls apparently suggest that all of our ancestors were fully human, one species as far back as we can go. 

It has become increasingly clear that Neanderthal men were full  human and interbred with Cro- Magnon man. So what’s the difference between them and us? Anyone who spends an hour sitting on a bench in Oxford Street or outside Euston station in London watching people walk by would see many different skull shapes in men and women who were all clearly human and of one species. If we only knew, for example, Australian aboriginals from their fossil skulls, quite likely they would be called an ape like ancestor. In fact as I recall Darwin made some comments about such folks, who he assumed would be exterminated 'not many centuries hence'. But they are as fully human as you and I.
 
There is plenty other evidence against the Darwinian assumptions that we descended gradually from apes. Not least the evidence from the speed at which human technology advances. Can we really believe that our human ancestors whose brains were as big as ours (as this skull apparently confirms) took hundreds of thousands of years to invent the wheel and other technologies? And why are there so few paleolithic and Neolithic burials? If, as we are told, skulls can be as old as 1.8 million years, why aren't there more of them? Neanderthals buried their dead, if they and other supposed early human ancestors lived for so long, why are there not many more burial evidences?

The evidence we actually have points to the fact that men have always been men. Its long past time time that secularists stopped imposing their philosophy on the evidence to try to make it say what it doesn’t.
 
However many fossil discoveries upset evolutionary theory, for example carbon 14 and semi soft tissue in dinosaur bones, it will never be abandoned because, as I say in the title, evolutionism is foundational to secular humanism, agnosticism and atheism. If it fails, then we must have a Creator, and therefore possibly a Lawgiver and Judge. In which case,  as sinners we need a Saviour.

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