Saturday, July 24, 2021

The Age Of Man

 


It's commonly accepted that modern man, Homo Sapiens, evolved in Africa in a Kenyan garden of Eden around 350,000 BC (Pleistocene) and spread out from there, eventually reaching Europe around 40,000 BC, and the America's some 30,000 years later across the Bering Strait land bridge.


Typical

All well and good, and the schema runs something like this: Ancient apes evolve into smarter apes, who evolve into still smarter apes, until over millions of years you get apelike semi-humans, hominins. Then, at last, in the middle Pleistocene, Homo Sapiens arrives, following on from Homo Erectus. The latter being the "missing link" between us and the ape people of prehistory.


Eoliths, which you can see are clearly not shaped in any way at all

It sounds good, but what if stone tools were found dating to a far earlier period in the earth's history, say the Miocene (23-5 million years BC), in the earth's Tertiary? What's more, tools which were indistinguishable from their counterparts in East Africa (Olduvai) in the Pleistocene some million years later. Or, for that matter, from stone tools made by modern humans, in Africa and elsewhere.


Yet More Ancient Stone

Without getting down in the weeds in an admittedly complex and fractious subject, what if Homo Sapiens is far older than currently thought, and existed with hominins for many hundreds of thousands of years, perhaps interbreeding, as we apparently did with Neanderthals? What then.


Out of Africa?

All the history books would have to be rewritten, for a start, and dates pushed back much further. More seriously, the process and theory of evolution itself would come under question. As opposed to something gradual, taking place in tiny increments over thousands of years, we'd be faced by the sudden emergence of rational man at a very early date. 


Ahem

Gradualism to catastrophism? Perhaps. Maybe the same impetus that drove the explosion of megafauna after the cataclysmic demise of the dinosaurs drove the remarkable rise of our early human cousins and humanity itself. Then again, can intelligence evolve into reason? C.S. Lewis, famously, says no, the two are qualitatively different.


Hmmmmm

In the meanwhile, here at the Compound, sweet and sour pork's on the menu.




Bifacial Chipped Flint Forever,

LSP

17 comments:

Undergroundpewster said...

Around my homestead, worked quartz shards appear to be the most common tool used by the first arrivals of North America although I have found one well fashioned flint spear tip. While nice, I am glad we have sharpened steel tips for bow hunting. The forest goats (deer) don't stand a chance as we stalk them in the Indians (horrors, I used the incorrect term) former hunting grounds.

LL said...

I don't want to get all racial here on a Sunday.

Sweet and Sour Pork sounds delicious. We're having fried chicken here at the White Wolf Mine today, said to be a favorite of ancient man and inner-city people, who resemble each other.

SgtBob said...

Where the theory of ape/man dies: Draw a horizontal line. Draw a vertical line to intersect the horizontal line, doesn't matter where. Left side of intersection is an ape. The right side is man. At the intersection, two apes produced a man, or an ape all on its own became a man.

Well Seasoned Fool said...

The Creator's timetable can be quessed at by no human can define it.

Kid said...

Micro-evolution yes, macro-No.

Paul M said...

WSF, my thinking as well. Genesis gives us an account that is merely a glimpse into God’s hand with Creation (“breathed/leapt into being”), beyond that I’ll leave it to “all will be revealed in due time”, assuming in His presence I wouldn’t be on the floor unable to watch (“I Can Only Imagine” comes to mind).

Old NFO said...

Interesting questions...

Ed Bonderenka said...

If man goes back a million years, he took longer to learn to write than would seem reasonable.

LSP said...

I'm jealous, Pewster!

And never been bow hunting, oddly. I should sort that out.

LSP said...

LL, I do love some of that tasty fried chicken! But the pork was good too. Testing out your chicken piccata tonight.

LSP said...

Well said, Sgt. I may have to quote you.

Lewis gets into it, you're either rational or not. And while there may be a gradualism of intelligence leading up to a breakthrough, there can't be at the breakthrough itself. It's either there or not. Something like that.

LSP said...

Wisdom, WSF.

LSP said...

Paul, fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And Peter's words spring to mind, "Depart from me for I am a sinful man."

LSP said...

They sure are, NFO. And it's curious to note even the official histories putting our advent further and further back into prehistory. Me? I want to find some flints :)

LSP said...

And Ed, the same applies to the mid Pleistocene. What, 390,000+ to learn how to write? Huh. Maybe.

Well Seasoned Fool said...

Ed
Writing can take many forms. Some may not look like writing to us. Also, time erodes.
The plains natives would bend trees to grow in a manner that pointed to things of importance, like water. Was this, and other signs, writing?

LSP said...

Good call, WSF.