mirrored file at http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ For complete access to all the files of this collection see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php ========================================================== Human Origins the ape-ancestry myth David Pratt *February 2004* / Part 1 of 3/ 1. Darwinian claims and controversies According to mainstream science, humans are evolved apes who, as a result of random genetic mutations and environmental pressures, happened to acquire the unique power of selfconsciousness. However, the loud publicity and slick propaganda for the ape-ancestry theory cannot alter the fact that the evidence is scanty and contradictory and open to other interpretations. Anthropologist Richard Leakey has said that ?If someone went to the trouble of collecting together in one room all the fossil remains so far discovered of our ancestors (and their biological relatives) who lived, say, between five and one million years ago, he would need only a couple of large trestle tables on which to spread them out.?^1 Most hominid fossils are fragments of jaws and scraps of skulls but, as palaeontologist Stephen J. Gould once said, ?they serve as a basis for endless speculation and elaborate storytelling?.^2 Beliefs, expectations, and prejudices inevitably play a role in the interpretation of fossils, as do personal rivalries and the desire for fame. More than one palaeoanthropologist has become famous overnight by announcing sensational and extravagant claims after finding some fragmentary remains of a creature he or she believes to be related to man?s origin. But such claims have a habit of being undermined or invalidated by further research and discoveries. The details of our supposed descent from the apes remain obscure and are the subject of heated debate among evolutionists. A number of blunders in the interpretation of fossils have been made over the years. In 1922 a tooth was discovered in western Nebraska (USA), which was declared by several scientists to combine the characteristics of the chimpanzee, /Pithecanthropus/ (a postulated apeman), and man. He became popularly known as Nebraska man and was regarded by some as a potential human ancestor. Five years later, it was announced that the tooth actually belonged to a pig. Creationist scientist Duane Gish remarks: ?This is a case in which a scientist made a man out of a pig, and the pig made a monkey out of the scientist!?^3 *Fig. 1.1.* Nebraska man ? according to an artist?s wild imagination.^4 The first skeleton of Neanderthal man was unearthed in 1856. He was originally depicted as an ugly, brutish half-monster with short bow-legs and a shuffling, stooping gait, and regarded as intermediate between man and apes. A century later, a close examination of the skeleton revealed that it was that of an old man crippled with osteoarthritis and rickets! It is now recognized that Neanderthal man walked upright as we do. In fact, ?[i]f we were to put a cardigan sweater on a Neanderthal and stick a pipe in his mouth and then were to have him walk across the campus of one of our major universities he could quite easily be mistaken for a professor of paleontology.?^5 In 1983 palaeoanthropologist Tim White accused another scientist, Noel Boaz, of having mistaken a dolphin?s rib for a clavicle (shoulder bone) of a pygmy chimpanzee, and jested that the fossil should be designated /Flipperpithecus/! Boaz had even suggested that the curve of the bone might indicate habitual bipedalism. Anthropologists have also erroneously described the femur (thighbone) of an alligator and the toe of a 3-toed horse as clavicles. In May 1984 it was announced that a skull fragment found in Spain a year earlier and hailed by experts as the oldest human fossil ever found in Europe may have come from a 4-month-old donkey! A symposium organized to discuss the fossil was hastily cancelled.^6 Even outright fraud is not unknown in the minefield of human origins. In 1912 a jawbone and part of a skull were discovered in a gravel pit near Piltdown, England. The jawbone appeared very simianlike except for the teeth, which showed the type of wear expected for humans. The skull was very humanlike. The specimens were combined into a single individual, who became known as Piltdown man. He was judged to be about half a million years old, and regarded as an authentic link in the evolution of man. In 1950 a new test revealed that the jawbone contained practically no fluoride, suggesting it was very recent. The skull did have a significant amount of fluoride, but was estimated to be only a few thousand years old. It was then discovered that the bones had been treated with iron salts to make them look old, and scratch marks were detected on the teeth, indicating that they had been filed. In other words, Piltdown man was a fraud. A modern ape?s jaw and a human skull had been doctored to resemble an apeman, and the forgery had fooled most of the world?s greatest experts. Debate on who was responsible for the fraud continues to this day. / Primates and hominoids/ Modern man, /Homo sapiens/ (?wise man?), is placed in the order Primates, one of the 24 orders of mammals. Living primates include the prosimians (lemurs, lorises, tarsiers), the monkeys, and the great apes (gibbons, orangutans, chimpanzees, gorillas). All primates share certain characteristics, such as highly developed binocular vision, mobile fingers and toes with flat nails instead of claws, a shortened snout with a reduced sense of smell, and large brains relative to body size. Most evolutionists interpret these similarities as evidence that all primates have descended from a common ancestor. The earliest primate fossils date to the Early Eocene or perhaps to the Late Palaeocene, but the origin of the primates is shrouded in mystery. They supposedly evolved from a primitive insect-eating mammal, but there are no transitional forms connecting primates to insectivores. The ancestor was thought to be the tree shrew, but there is now abundant evidence that tree shrews are unrelated to primates. The fossil record fails to produce any evidence for transitional forms between prosimians, the earliest primates, and the New World and Old World monkeys, and there are also no identifiable transitional forms between monkeys and apes ? only a large gap.^1 *Science* *Theosophy* Began (years BP) Began (years BP) *Phanerozoic eon* _Cenozoic era_ Quaternary period: Holocene epoch 10,000 Pleistocene 1,600,000 870,000 Tertiary period: Pliocene epoch 5,300,000 1,870,000 Miocene 23,700,000 3,670,000 Oligocene 36,600,000 5,280,000 Eocene 57,800,000 7,140,000 Palaeocene 66,400,000 7,870,000 _Mesozoic era_ Cretaceous 144,000,000 16,000,000 Jurassic 208,000,000 28,000,000 Triassic 245,000,000 44,000,000 _Palaeozoic era_ Permian 286,000,000 74,000,000 Carboniferous 360,000,000 110,000,000 Devonian 408,000,000 148,000,000 Silurian 438,000,000 179,000,000 Ordovician 505,000,000 214,000,000 Cambrian 540,000,000 250,000,000 *Proterozoic eon* (Laurentian) (640,000,000) 320,000,000 (start of 4th round) Late 900,000,000 Middle 1,600,000,000 720,000,000 (start of 3rd round?) Early 2,500,000,000 *Archean eon* Late 3,000,000,000 1,300,000,000 (start of 2nd round?) Middle 3,400,000,000 Early 3,960,000,000 *Hadean eon* 4,600,000,000 1,973,000,000 (start of 1st round) *Fig. 1.2.* Chronology of the geological ages. All the dates given in this article are official ?scientific? dates unless indicated otherwise. According to theosophy, the scientific time-periods are too long by a factor of between about 2 and 9, due to the false assumptions on which radiometric dating is based.^2 Within the order Primates, humans, apes, and their ancestors are classified within the superfamily Hominoidea (hominoids), which includes the 2 families known as pongids (anthropoid apes) and hominids (upright-walking primates with relatively large brains). The ape-ancestry theory does not propose that man descended directly from the living apes, but that both modern apes and man descended from a common /apelike/ ancestor. The first apelike creatures appeared in the Oligocene, while the first apes thought to be on the line to humans appeared in the Miocene. These are believed to include /Dryopithecus/, but this has been challenged on the grounds that although the dryopithecines had a far less specialized anatomy than modern apes, they were still too specialized to have given rise to either the hominids or the great apes.^3 Contrary to the impression created by the fanciful illustrations that decorate popular science publications, a smooth series of fossils leading from an apelike common ancestor to man on the one hand and present-day apes on the other has not been found. For nearly 50 years, based on jaw fragments and a few teeth, palaeoanthropologists insisted that /Ramapithecus/, which lived between 16.7 and 5.3 million years ago, was an intermediate between ape and man, but it is now generally believed to be an ancestor of the orangutan, rather than a hominid. Another creature that was once proposed as a ?missing link? is /Oreopithecus/, which lived from 11.2 to 3.4 million years ago, but it has since been demoted. Palaeontologist David Pilbeam has commented: ?/Oreopithecus/ has had quite a checkered history and has been described as a monkey, ape, hominid and even pig!?^4 Before the rise of the new science of evolutionary genetics, estimates for the date of the split between hominids and apes ranged from 4 to 30 million years ago, with most fossil experts choosing a date somewhere in the middle. However, since the early 1960s, various molecular techniques have been developed for determining when 2 species shared a common ancestor. They involve quantifying the amount of difference between particular molecules or proteins in the 2 species, together with the rate of evolution in the molecule concerned (which is assumed to be constant). The various ?molecular clocks? are often calibrated on the basis of a date of 30 million years for the alleged split between Old World monkeys and hominoids, a date based on ?fossil evidence? and radiometric dating.^5 These studies led to the conclusion that African apes and humans diverged between about 6 and 8 million years ago, with some giving a date as low as 5 million years or as high as 10 million years. One of the researchers involved even declared that ?one no longer has the option of considering a fossil older than about eight million years as a hominid /no matter what it looks like/?!^6 After much contentious debate, palaeoanthropologists have accepted this shortened timescale for human evolution. /Australopithecus and other ?ancestors? / Physical characteristics distinguishing hominids from pongids include erect posture, bipedal locomotion, rounded skulls, larger brains, and small teeth (including unspecialized canines). The hominid family includes not only our own species, /Homo sapiens/, but also more primitive human forms belonging to the genus /Homo/, and partially bipedal apes belonging mostly to the genus /Australopithecus/ (?southern ape?). All hominid species except our own are now thought to be extinct. Arranging the various species into an evolutionary sequence has become increasingly difficult as more fossils have been found. Anthropologists Donald Johanson and Blake Edgar write: Paleoanthropological discoveries make it clear that the human family tree is not a single lineage in which one species succeeded another, leading relentlessly to the appearance of modern humans. Instead, the hominid fossil record suggests that our ancestry is better thought of as a bush, with the branches representing a number of bipedal species that evolved along different evolutionary lines.^1 In 2002 the Toumai skull, 6 to 7 million years old, was found in Chad, in the southern Sahara desert, and given the name /Sahelanthropus tchadensis/. It shares chimpanzee and australopithecine anatomical features, and it is not known whether it walked upright. It was hyped in the media as a potential human ancestor, but some anthropologists say the latest ?apeman? may be no more than an early female gorilla or chimpanzee.^2 Palaeoanthropologist Bernard Wood remarked: ?If the new find has taught us anything it is that, paradoxically, the more we discover about our origins, the less we know.?^3 In 2000, bones of a creature named /Orrorin tugenensis/ (also known as Millennium Man), dated at about 6 million years, were found in Kenya by a French and Kenyan research team. They argued that it was ancestral to /Homo/ through /Praeanthropus/ (a name used to refer to /Australopithecus afarensis/ by those who do not consider it ancestral to later australopithecines). Their dismissal of the australopithecines as a whole as a dead-end side-branch is very controversial, and their claim that /Orrorin/ was bipedal is widely regarded as premature.^4 Some researchers have pointed out that primates with skeletal remains indicating bipedalism should not automatically be considered human ancestors. In 1994 researchers uncovered bones attributed to /Ardipithecus ramidus/, who lived in Ethiopia 4.4 million years ago (some researchers refer to it as /Australopithecus ramidus/). More /Ardipithecus/ bones, 5.8 million years old, were discovered in 2001. /Ardipithecus/ had roughly the same size and body structure as a chimpanzee, but its foramen magnum (the hole at the base of a skull through which the spinal cord passes) indicates that it walked upright, as does a toe bone with a humanlike structure found 15 km away that is also attributed to /ramidus/. Some researchers have proposed that the line of human origins went through the older /Ardipithecus/ to the younger one to /Australopithecus afarensis/ at 3.2 million years and then to the first members of /Homo/ at around 2.5 million years ago. Other scientists reject /Ardipithecus/ as a human ancestor. Its foramen magnum is situated farther forward than in any other hominid, and Ian Tattersall and Jeffrey Schwartz argue that such a position ?is so uniquely derived compared with every one of its presumed descendants that it couldn?t have been ancestral to any of them?.^5 The discoverers of /Orrorin tugenensis/ believe that /Ardipithecus/ was a descendant of /Orrorin/ but was ancestral to chimpanzees rather than humans. The australopithecines lived from about 4½ million to roughly 1 million years ago. The modern consensus is that they possessed an upright posture and bipedal gait, but some species show features such as relatively long arms and curved finger and toe bones reminiscent of an arboreal way of life. These ?apemen? stood between 1 and 1.5 m tall and had a small braincase ranging from 410 to 600 cc, not very different from those of living apes, but their teeth were more similar to those of humans. /Homo/ is distinguished from the australopithecines by a larger cranial capacity, ranging from roughly 530 cc in earlier species to over 2000 cc in modern humans. The official view is that the australopithecines lived only in Africa, but some scientists have reported australopithecines from China, Indonesia, and Southeast Asia.^6 The ?robust? australopithecines (which include the species: /robustus/, /boisei/, and /aethiopicus/) are not thought to be on a direct line of descent to modern humans, and some palaeoanthropologists assign them to a separate genus, /Paranthropus/. The ?gracile? australopithecines are widely thought to have given rise to the earliest /Homo/ species around 2.5 million years ago, in the Late Pliocene. *Fig. 1.3. */Australopithecus africanus/ (left) and /Australopithecus robustus/.^7 There is vigorous debate on the status of the various species of /Australopithecus/. For instance, some scientists believe that the fossils assigned to /afarensis/ and those assigned to /anamensis/ really belong to several species. Some see /africanus/ as a regional variation or subspecies of /afarensis/, some consider it to be a descendant of /afarensis/, and some believe the /africanus/ fossil material should be assigned to 2 completely different species. * Fig. 1.4. *Left: /Australopithecus afarensis/. Centre: /Australopithecus boisei/. Right: A modern human skull.^8 * Fig. 1.5.* Two contrasting views by evolutionists of /Zinjanthropus boisei/ (now known as /Australopithecus boisei/).^9 Interestingly, the oldest hominids, such as /Sahelanthropus/, /Orrorin/, /Ardipithecus/, and /Australopithecus afarensis/, lived in a woodland environment, whereas darwinists always used to argue that bipedalism developed when our ancestors moved into a grassland environment, as it enabled them to see farther when hunting for game or watching for predators. This scenario was never very convincing. Humans, as bipeds, are notably slower than quadrupeds ? a serious problem for a tree-dweller that supposedly moved out onto the predator-rich savannas. Moreover, prairie dogs and bears are very good at surveying their surroundings but have not adopted full bipedalism. On the basis of fragments of the pelvis, limb, and foot bones it is widely believed that the australopithecines walked habitually upright. But there is ?increasing evidence from studies of the limb bones of the australopithecines that the skeletal adaptations for climbing and bipedal walking are similar?, and that some of the australopithecines ?may well have spent more time resting and feeding in trees than has hitherto been believed?.^10 Some dissenting scientists have challenged the australopithecines? status as hominids and/or as our direct ancestors. Louis Leakey held that the australopithecines were not in the main line of human evolution, but an early offshoot from it. Anatomist Sir Solly Zuckerman took the view that the teeth, skull, jaws, brain, and limbs of /Australopithecus/ were essentially apelike, and concluded that it was in no way related to the origin of man. Charles Oxnard held that, although the australopithecines were bipedal, they were also at home in the trees, and did not have a place in the direct human lineage. Some modern researchers are continuing to raise objections to overly humanlike portrayals of /Australopithecus/.^11 Tattersall and Schwartz point out that because palaeoanthropology focuses heavily on discovering ancestors, the uniqueness of the australopithecines has been downplayed, and that it is debatable whether ?we really can point to any australopith as an early but direct human ancestor?. They add that neither /afarensis/, /africanus/, /aethiopicus/, /robustus/, nor /boisei/ can be ancestral to the /Homo/ lineage because in certain features, e.g. the femur, they are more ?evolved?, i.e. specialized, whereas ?an ancestor should be more primitive, not more derived, than its presumed descendants?.^12 According to mainstream anthropology, the australopithecines were transitional between early quadrupedal apes and fully bipedal modern humans. However, some scientists, including supporters of the theory of initial bipedalism (see section 5), have turned the orthodox position on its head, and argue that the australopithecines are actually offshoots of /bipedal/ hominids and were evolving towards /quadrupedalism/. Fossil evidence provides some support for this. /Australopithecus anamensis/, discovered in Kenya in 1995, appears to have been perfectly bipedal 4 million years ago. ?Lucy? (/A. afarensis/), dated at 3.2 million years old, discovered at Hadar, Ethiopia, in 1974, has bipedal characteristics, but she also has divergent big toes like those used by the apes of today to climb trees. /Afarensis/ also had an upward-pointing shoulder joint indicating that the arm was used for suspensory behaviour, and a hand with a powerful wrist and curved fingers, suitable for climbing. ?Little Foot?, an australopithecine skeleton found at the Sterkfontein caves in South Africa in 1998, and dated at around 3.3 million years old, had an ankle joint that shows it was already bipedal but was also able to climb trees thanks to its divergent big toes. As palaeontologist Yvette Deloison points out, this means we have a 4-million-year-old australopithecine that was perfectly bipedal, and two more recent skeletons that are /less/ bipedal and more arboreal.^13 *Fig. 1.6.* The footprints found at Laetoli, Tanzania, dated at 3.6 million years, are usually attributed to /A. afarensis/. Though very similar to human footprints, they have certain apelike characteristics indicating that the creature that made them had a bipedal gait, but not entirely like that of humans.^14 Some anthropologists argue that the robust australopithecines, which survived about 1½ million years longer than the gracile forms (such as /afarensis/), had a pelvis better adapted for climbing than for walking.^15 /A. garhi/, some 2.5 million years old, is thought to have descended from /afarensis/, yet it has /longer/ forearms. Another ?intriguing puzzle? is the fact that the OH 62 skeleton, 1.8 million years old, which has been assigned to /Homo habilis/, has longer arms and shorter legs than /afarensis/, its proposed ancestor (see fig. 1.8).^16 Taking the view that evolution never goes backwards (known as Dollo?s law), Deloison argues that ?the human foot, highly specialized for bipedal use, cannot have been derived from a foot adapted to climbing trees, which is also highly specialized but in a different way?. She estimates that a primitive ape walked upright as long as 15 million years ago. She believes there were 3 species of bipedal primates: one of them developed into hominids (/Homo/), another became semi-bipedal, semi-arboreal australopithecines, and the third developed into quadrupedal orangutans, gorillas, and chimpanzees.^17 François de Sarre has argued that it was actually some of the australopithecines that eventually evolved into gorillas and chimps. The controversy surrounding /Australopithecus/ shows no signs of abating. In late 2001 Meave Leakey added to the already confused early hominid picture by announcing the discovery of a new hominid in Kenya, 3.5 million years old, roughly the same age as /Australopithecus afarensis/. Instead of identifying it as a new member of the genus /Australopithecus/, she stirred up the hominid world by creating a new genus and species for it, /Kenyanthropus platyops/, implying that the australopithecines are a side-branch unrelated to humans.^18 However, the mainstream view that we had australopithecine ancestors is unlikely to be given up without a fight. In 1986 Pat Shipman made the following confession: ?we could assert that we have no evidence whatsoever of where /Homo/ arises from and remove all members of the genus /Australopithecus/ from the hominid family. ... I?ve such a visceral negative reaction to this idea that I suspect I am unable to evaluate it rationally. I was brought up on the notion that /Australopithecus/ is a hominid.?^19 The rise of Homo Explaining the assumed evolutionary transition from /Australopithecus/ to /Homo / poses grave problems. Tattersall and Schwartz believe /A. africanus/ and /A. garhi/ were closest to the /Homo/ line, whereas Johanson and Edgar believe it was /A. afarensis /(see fig. 1.7). The latter admit that ?there is a long gap in the fossil record between 2 and 3 million years ago where convincing intermediates between /A. afarensis / ... and earliest /Homo/ are essentially absent?. They add: For the moment, the evolutionary roots of /Homo/ are still poorly understood, but they will ultimately be found in pre-2 million-year-old deposits. Despite the widely held view that /A. africanus/ makes a good candidate for ancestor to /Homo/, equally convincing arguments can be mounted to support a unique link between /africanus/ and /A. robustus/. Should this be the case, then the three species of Pliocene-Pleistocene /Homo / [i.e. /rudolfensis/, /habilis/, and /ergaster/] are without an identifiable predecessor.^1 *Fig. 1.7.* Two hominid family trees: /above/, from Tattersall and Schwartz;/ below/, from Johanson and Edgar. The latter write: ?The variety of human family trees now cluttering the literature makes it virtually impossible to identify the correct tree because of the forest.?^2 There are serious disagreements about how many species of /Homo/ should be recognized and how to arrange them into a family tree. The original simplistic scenario in which /Homo habilis/ (?handy man?) evolved into /Homo erectus/ (?upright man?) which then evolved into /Homo sapiens/ has long since been abandoned, and several new and controversial species have been added. While some anthropologists hail /H. habilis / as the most likely ancestor of our lineage, others argue that it was a dead-end side-branch. It is widely recognized that /habilis/ has become an all-embracing ?wastebasket? species into which a variety of fossils have been conveniently swept. Some anthropologists believe that the ?real? /habilis/ should be assigned to the genus /Australopithecus/ rather than /Homo/. *Fig. 1.8. */Left:/ /Homo habilis/ as generally depicted before 1987. Below the head, the anatomy is essentially human. /Right: / After the femur OH 62 was found at Olduvai Gorge in 1987, a new picture of /H. habilis / emerged, far smaller and more apelike than before.^3 /Habilis/ won majority acceptance in the late 1970s, especially after the discovery of the ER 1470 skull. However, some scientists have now assigned this skull to a second species of early /Homo/ known as /rudolfensis/, while others argue that it belongs to a larger-brained gracile australopithecine.^4 Some researchers believe /rudolfensis/ rivals /habilis/ for the status of our earliest /Homo/ ancestor, but others argue that /rudolfensis/ had certain specializations which make it less likely than smaller-brained and more primitive-limbed /habilis/ to have given rise to later humans. Some see /rudolfensis/ as the ancestor of /habilis/, others see the two on completely different evolutionary lines, and yet others reject the existence of /rudolfensis/ altogether. /Homo erectus/ stood between 1.5 and 1.8 m tall and had a brain size of between 700 and 1300 cc. Most palaeoanthropologists now believe that from the neck down, /Homo erectus/ was almost the same as modern humans. The forehead, however, sloped back from behind massive brow ridges, the jaws and teeth were large, and the lower jaw lacked a chin. He is generally regarded as being incapable of anything but the most rudimentary speech. Although most palaeoanthropologists still regard /erectus/ as a direct ancestor to modern humans, some now suggest that it is too specialized. Tattersall says that /erectus/ was made the ancestor of /H. sapiens/ ?not on any compelling morphological grounds, but because it simply happened to occur at the right /time/ to be that ancestor?.^5 *Fig. 1.9.* An artist?s impression of /Homo erectus/.^6 Dates for /erectus/ have become earlier and earlier, while /habilis/ remains have been found in later and later deposits, making a lineage in which /habilis/ evolves into /erectus/ increasingly unlikely. The oldest /erectus /fossils are dated at 1.8 million years and it persisted until about 300,000 years ago in Africa and Europe, but perhaps as recently as 40,000 years ago in Java.^7 (There is evidence that /erectus/-like creatures may still exist today in isolated wilderness regions, including China; see section 4.) /Erectus/ is supposed to have evolved in Africa, but /erectus/ fossils have been found in Java which are just as old as the oldest African fossils.^8 Stone tools and a few hominid fossil fragments dated at 2.25 million years have been discovered in eastern China, and many Chinese scientists believe that /erectus/ evolved independently in Asia.^9 The validity of the /erectus/ species has been challenged. Some anthropologists have assigned African /erectus/ fossils to /Homo ergaster/, while others fossils have been assigned to /Homo sapiens/. However, researchers who see /ergaster / as a valid species tend to assign different specimens to it. They generally regard it as a direct ancestor of modern humans with /erectus/ being an evolutionary dead-end. Many scientists reject the validity of /ergaster/ as it is too similar to /erectus/. Some palaeoanthropologists, such as Milford Wolpoff, propose that /erectus/, too, should be abolished as it is insufficiently distinct from /sapiens/.^10 While some researchers recognize 7 or 8 /Homo/ species, Wolpoff and his colleagues recognize only 2: /sapiens/ and /habilis/, with /ergaster/, /erectus/, and /heidelbergensis/ being subsumed within /sapiens/, who would therefore extend back some 2.5 million years. Our own species, /Homo sapiens/, is generally thought to have arisen in Africa some 200,000 to 250,000 years ago; the oldest generally accepted fossils to date are 160,000 years old, and were found in Ethiopia in 2003. (Candidate /Homo sapiens/ fossils up to 300,000 years old have been found in eastern and southern Africa but are usually fragmentary and hard to date.)^11 /Sapiens/ then proceeded to spread out over the world. According to the currently dominant out-of-Africa replacement theory, which is based mainly on mitochondrial DNA evidence, /sapiens/ largely replaced the native hominid populations that it encountered (which allegedly originated in a far earlier migration of /Homo erectus/ or /ergaster / out of Africa). Advocates of the rival multiregional continuity theory, such as Wolpoff and Alan Thorne, on the other hand, argue on the basis of fossil and archaeological evidence that /sapiens/ interbred with other hominid populations after leaving Africa. The Neanderthals lived from about 230,000 to 30,000 years ago. They are sometimes classed as a separate species, /Homo neanderthalensis/, but other anthropologists classify them as /Homo sapiens neanderthalensis/, i.e. a subspecies of /H. sapiens/. The modern form of our species is exemplified by Cro-Magnon man (/H. sapiens sapiens/), who started to arrive in Europe about 40,000 years ago and whose origins have been called ?a complete mystery?.* His arrival coincides with the disappearance of the Neanderthals. In Western Europe, the Neanderthals were replaced by modern humans rather suddenly, but in Central Europe there is abundant evidence of genetic admixture and interbreeding. In the Middle East, one group of anthropologists sees 2 distinct species, /H. neanderthalensis/ and /H. sapiens/, coexisting for 60,000 years, with no significant interbreeding or transformation. Another faction holds that all Middle East skeletons are variants of a single species, /H. sapiens/, and interbreeding was common, and that even the European Neanderthals are merely a variant of /H. sapiens/.^12 *One (nonmainstream!) theory is that Cro-Magnon originated on Poseidonis (Plato?s ?Atlantis?) and other islands in the Atlantic, and migrated to Europe in several waves as the islands showed increasingly signs of geological instability, culminating in the submergence of Poseidonis 11½ thousand years ago. Certain blood-group and genetic findings are consistent with a series of migrations of different groups of Atlanteans both eastward and westward.^13 */Evolutionary interpretations/* The theory that one species gradually evolves into another species through the slow accumulation of minute changes over extremely long periods of time is contradicted by the fossil record, including the hominid fossil record. Stephen J. Gould points out that ?we still have no firm evidence for any progressive change within any hominid species?.^1 Instead, species persist unchanged for millions of years, and these periods are followed by the sudden appearance of several new species. This has prompted the development of the modified darwinian theory of punctuated equilibrium, first proposed by Gould and Niles Eldredge in 1972, which says that new species split off from ancestral species so rapidly that there is little chance of a smooth series of transitional fossils being preserved. However, the probability of the right /random/ genetic variations (amidst all the unfavourable ones) occurring and being ?selected for? within a very short space of time, leading to the appearance of a new species, is even more remote than the prospect of such changes occurring over a very long period. 99.9% of all genetic mutations are harmful or even lethal. In the 1950s geneticist J.B.S. Haldane showed that, even under very favourable assumptions, only one new, beneficial mutation could be completely substituted in a population every 300 generations. So in 10 million years ? far longer than the time that has elapsed since the alleged chimp/human split from a common ancestor ? only 1667 substitutions of beneficial genes could occur.^2 This amounts to three ten-millionths of the human genome ? which is hardly likely to turn an ape into a human! Moreover, recent studies have found that the human mutation rate is so high that each breeding couple would have to produce at least 10 offspring, and more likely 40 or even 60 offspring, merely to prevent the population suffering genetic deterioration.^3 To get round this problem, darwinists invoke ?truncation selection? or ?synergistic epistasis?, whereby harmful mutations are eliminated ?in bunches? ? a purely speculative idea, despite its imposing name. It is any rate clear that unconventional factors must come into play to generate and guide evolutionary change. This has been recognized by various evolutionists. For instance, in the 19th century, Alfred Russell Wallace, the codeveloper of the theory of natural selection, argued that humans could not have evolved without the intervention of higher intelligences. In the 20th century, palaeoanthropologist Franz Weidenreich accepted the principle of orthogenesis ? the idea that evolution is directed by an inner drive towards a particular goal. Anthropologist Robert Broom believed that evolution was guided and controlled by a variety of spiritual and psychic agencies, some of them being benevolent and some malignant.^4 All three scientists nevertheless believed that man had descended from the apes. Modern darwinists have assigned a major role to ?regulatory genes? in order to explain why we so often find innovations appearing abruptly in the fossil record, rather than being slowly fine-tuned over the ages by natural selection. Regulatory genes control major developmental patterns, and seemingly minor changes in these genes can apparently have major consequences for the individuals and populations carrying them. Each individual possesses 2 copies of each gene, which may be the same or different. If they are different, one copy will be dominant and the other recessive or unexpressed. Nonlethal genetic mutations are usually recessive to start with. It is thought that at some point, regulatory genes, ?by a mechanism that remains unclear?, activate the recessive mutated genes and deactivate certain other genes, leading to the abrupt appearance of a new organ, or perhaps a new species.^5 In other words, just the right genes mutate /randomly/ in just the right way, and then at just the right time exactly the right genes are /randomly/ switched on or off to produce an evolutionary novelty! Yet darwinists insist that they don?t believe in miracles! Furthermore, contrary to the impression darwinists like to give, genes do not carry the ?blueprint? for the construction of an organism; they merely code for the production of proteins. The proteins specified by structural genes provide the raw materials used in building the body, while the proteins specified by regulatory genes can carry signals that turn other genes on or off. But no genes are known to carry instructions for moulding proteins into tissues, organs, and complex living organisms, nor do they explain instinctual and learned behaviour, and the workings of the mind. Great chunks of reality are therefore missing from the materialistic darwinist theory. For new species to arise through a series of rapid genetic changes, those changes would have to be /directed/ and /coordinated/ in some way. Even then, the belief that humans descended from australopithecines and ultimately from some Miocene ape remains no more than an unproven hypothesis. Theosophy argues that it is actually the apes which are partially descended from man (see section 6). Some scientists have recognized that even the earliest apelike creatures had anatomical specializations that make them unlikely ancestors of humans, who have a simpler, more generalized anatomy (see section 5). As already explained, a few scientists argue that far from being our ancestors, the australopithecines descended from a /bipedal/ hominid and were evolving towards /quadrupedalism/. However, many evolutionists take the view that there is no objection to anatomical specializations being gained and later lost in the course of evolution ? if this is what it takes to save the ape-ancestry theory from collapse! It is often said that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. The idea that humans, with their unique mental powers, developed from an ape through random mutations and natural selection certainly ranks as an extraordinary claim. But the only extraordinary thing about the ?evidence? cited in support of the theory is its /extraordinary weakness/! What would really demolish the present claims that /Homo/ evolved from /Australopithecus/ would be if fossils or other evidence of humans similar to ourselves were found in strata more than one or two million years old. Although conspicuously absent from modern textbooks, such evidence has in fact been found and will be reviewed in section 3. References 1. Quoted in Michael A. Cremo and Richard L. Thompson, /Forbidden Archeology/, San Diego: CA: Bhaktivedanta Institute, 1993, p. 690. 2. Stephen Jay Gould, /The Panda?s Thumb/, London: Penguin Books, 1990, p. 106. 3. Duane T. Gish, /Evolution: The fossils still say no!/, El Cajon, CA: Institute for Creation Research, 1995, p. 328. 4. http://www.evolutionfairytale.com/nebraska_man2.htm. 5. James M. Foard, ?The Darwin papers?, www.thedarwinpapers.com/oldsite/number10/Darwin10.htm. 6. /Evolution: The fossils still say no!/, p. 330. */Primates and hominoids/* 1. /Evolution: The fossils still say no!/, pp. 213-9. 2. See ?*Geochronology: science and theosophy* ? and ?*The age of earth* ?, http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/dp5. 3. /Evolution: The fossils still say no!/, pp. 223-4. 4. Quoted in Foard, ?The Darwin papers?. 5. Donald Johanson and Blake Edgar, /From Lucy to Language/, London: Cassell, 2001, pp. 30-1. 6. Quoted in Ian Tattersall, /The Fossil Trail: How we know what we think we know about human evolution/, New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 125. *Australopithecus /and other ?ancestors? /* 1. /From Lucy to Language/, p. 18. 2. Bruce Bower, ?Evolution?s surprise; fossil find uproots our early ancestors?, 13 July 2002, www.sciencenews.org; ? ?Oldest? skull causing headaches?, 9 Oct 2002, www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/10/09/tech/main525004.shtml. 3. Bernard Wood, ?Who are we??, /New Scientist/, 26 Oct 2002, pp. 44-7. 4. C. David Kreger, Modern Human Origins, www.modernhumanorigins.com. 5. Ian Tattersall and Jeffrey Schwartz, /Extinct Humans/, New York: Nevraumont, 2001, p. 98. 6. Michael A. Cremo, /Human Devolution: A Vedic alternative to Darwin?s theory/, Los Angeles, CA: Bhaktivedanta Book Publishing, 2003, pp. 13-4. 7. http://anthro.palomar.edu/hominid/australo_1.htm, /australo_2.htm. 8. http://anthro.palomar.edu/hominid/australo_2.htm. 9. /Evolution: The fossils still say no!/, p. 238. 10. ?Human evolution?, /Encyclopaedia Britannica/, CD-ROM 2004. 11. /Forbidden Archeology/, pp. 710-22, 728-39. 12. /Extinct Humans/, pp. 74, 90-1. 13. ?First upright apes may have walked in 15 million BC?, www.trussel.com/prehist/news114.htm; ?Lucy trahie par ses pieds?, www.cybersciences.com. 14. http://www.ivry.cnrs.fr/deh/deloison/deloison.htm. 15. ?Human evolution?, /Encyclopaedia Britannica/. 16. Michael Brass, /The Antiquity of Man/, Baltimore, MD: AmErica House, 2002, pp. 65-6, 78. 17. Yvette Deloison, ?L?homme ne descend pas d?un primate arboricole! Une évidence méconnue?, /Biométrie Humaine et Anthropologie/, v. 17, 1999, pp. 147-50; Yvette Deloison, ?New hypothesis on hominoid bipedalism?, /American Journal of Physical Anthropology/, Supplement 30, 2000, p. 137. 18. /Human Devolution/, pp. 11-2. 19. Quoted in /Forbidden Archeology/, p. 749. */The rise of/ Homo* 1. /From Lucy to Language/, pp. 38, 164. 2. Ibid., pp. 37-8; /Extinct Humans/, p. 244. 3. /Forbidden Archeology/, p. 700. 4. A.W. Mehlert, ?The rise and fall of skull KNM-ER 1470?, 1999, www.trueorigin.org/skull1470.asp. 5. /The Fossil Trail/, p. 168. 6. http://id-archserve.ucsb.edu/Anth3/Courseware/Hominids/13_Homo_erectus_drawing.html. 7. Roger Lewin, ?Ancient humans found refuge in Java?, /New Scientist/, 21/28 Dec 1996, p. 16. 8. Roger Lewin, ?Human origins: the challenge of Java?s skulls?, /New Scientist/, 7 May 1994, pp. 36-40. 9. R. Ciochon and R. Larick, ?Early /Homo erectus/ tools in China?, /Archaeology/, v. 53, Jan/Feb 2000, pp. 14-5. 10. Milford Wolpoff and Rachel Caspari, /Race and Human Evolution/, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997, pp. 250-6. 11. /New Scientist/, 14 June 2003, pp. 4-5. 12. William R. Corliss (comp.), /Biological Anomalies: Humans III/, Glen Arm, MD: Sourcebook Project, 1994, pp. 20-1. 13. Peter Lemesurier, /The Great Pyramid Decoded/, Shaftesbury, Dorset: Element Books, 1990, pp. 277-80; Gregory L. Little, John Van Auken and Lora Little, /Mound Builders: Edgar Cayce?s forgotten record of ancient America/, Memphis, TN: Eagle Wing Books, 2001, pp. 60-8, 148-9; Blair A. Moffett, ?A world had passed?, parts 1 and 2, /Sunrise/, April 1980, pp. 230-7, and May 1980, pp. 277-84. */Evolutionary interpretations/* 1. Quoted in Walter J. ReMine, /The Biotic Message: Evolution versus message theory/, Saint Paul, MN: St. Paul Science, 1993, p. 323. 2. Ibid., pp. 208-36. 3. Fred Williams, ?Monkey-man hypothesis thwarted by mutation rates?, 2002, www.evolutionfairytale.com/articles_debates/mutation_rate.htm. 4. R. Broom, /The Coming of Man/, London: H.F. & G. Witherby, 1933, pp. 11-2, 196-8, 220-5. 5. /Extinct Humans/, pp. 46-9. *2. Genetic tales: Adam and Eve* */ Human-ape similarities/* For years, the genetic similarity between humans and chimpanzees was put at 98.5%. The figure was then revised down to less than 95%. The latest figure is 99.4%, suggesting that chimps are closer to humans than they are to gorillas.^1 Some scientists have argued that chimps should therefore have the same legal rights as humans! The different figures derive from different ways of comparing DNA. The 95% figure was obtained by searching corresponding human and chimp chromosomes for ?missing? or ?extra? pieces of DNA, whereas the latest figure is based on searching corresponding genes for single-letter DNA base changes. The 98.5% figure was derived from the DNA hybridization technique, which is widely considered to be crude and unreliable. Strands of DNA from the 2 species being compared are allowed to combine (or hybridize), and are then heated; the higher the temperature required to force them apart the more related the 2 species are assumed to be. The human genome has only recently been sequenced, revealing the order of the 3 billion or so nucleotide bases in the DNA molecules. This is like knowing the sequence of letters in a book without knowing anything about how they combine into meaningful words and sentences. Moreover, 97% of the bases in the human genome are currently believed not to make up genes and are labelled ?pseudogenes? or ?junk? DNA; sorting out the sequences that represent actual genes could take decades. Since the chimp genome has not even been sequenced, no one knows how similar humans and chimps really are on the genetic level. The claim that humans and chimpanzees are genetically 99.4% alike does seem hard to believe given that the chimp genome is 10% larger than a human?s, and humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes compared to 24 for the chimps (a difference of over 4%). Other discrepancies are that chromosomes 4, 9, and 12 are markedly different in humans and chimps, and human and chimp Y chromosomes are of different sizes with many markers that do not line up at all.^2 To explain why chimps and humans have different numbers of chromosomes, darwinists argue that chimp chromosomes 12 and 13 have combined into human chromosome 2. But François de Sarre, for example, who rejects the ape-ancestry theory, argues that the /exact opposite/ has occurred: human chromosome 2 has /split/ into chimp chromosomes 12 and 13; chromosome 13 has also acquired additional genetic material.^3 This is consistent with the theosophical position that apes have partially descended from humans and have developed a more specialized anatomy. Although the chimp-human connection receives by far the most publicity, different kinds of genetic studies yield conflicting results regarding the evolutionary relationship between humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas. In the case of nuclear DNA, the Y chromosome evidence makes chimps closest to humans, but the X chromosome evidence makes chimps closest to gorillas, as does involucrin-gene analysis and chromosome banding analysis. Some studies of mitochondrial DNA suggest that humans, chimps, and gorillas are equally close to each other. But one analysis indicated that human mitochondria seem to represent a radical departure from previously examined organisms, and do not originate from recognizable relatives of present-day organisms.^4 Jeffrey Schwartz points out that of 26 unique traits that humans share with the living hominoids, they share all 26 with the orangutan, only 9 with the chimpanzee and gorilla, and only 5 with the gibbon. He therefore maintains that man is more closely related to the orangutan than he is to the African apes and challenges the use of molecular and biochemical data to establish evolutionary relationships between man and apes.^5 Jonathan Marks says that, as far as skeletal evidence is concerned, the cranium links humans and chimps, but the rest of the skeleton links chimps and gorillas. Like Schwartz, he questions the prevailing belief that genetic evidence is superior to other kinds of evidence, saying it has been used to make ?rash generalizations? and draw ?belligerent conclusions? on the basis of questionable assumptions.^6 As already noted, genes are vastly overrated by materialistic biologists. Genes merely specify what amino acids should be strung together to form protein molecules, and it is hardly surprising that the bodies of humans and apes are composed of similar molecular ingredients. The real problem is the arrangement of those ingredients into complex structures. It seems that there must be other factors which explain why the average human brain is three times the size of the ape brain and why humans have selfconscious minds whereas all the apes do not. */African Eve/* According to the overhyped ?African Eve? hypothesis, all living humans can trace part of their genetic inheritance to a female who lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago. This theory is based on studies of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which we inherit only from our mothers. It is assumed that the only changes that mtDNA undergoes are those that accumulate by random mutations, and that by working out the rate of mutation mtDNA can be used as a kind of clock. On the basis of mtDNA data from different human populations, computer programs identify which population group has the most variation (i.e. the most mutations) in its mtDNA; this group is assumed to be the oldest group and therefore the parent group. It is also computed how far back in time we have to go for the observed mtDNA diversity in today?s human populations to coalesce into a single past mtDNA sequence, and this is assumed to provide the date of the last common ancestor. All the assumptions underlying this method are false.^1 Mitochondrial DNA supposedly undergoes random mutations at a fixed rate and is not subject to natural selection. However, the rate of mutation is actually stochastic, or probabilistic, which renders perfect calibration of the molecular clock impossible. Moreover, there is increasing evidence that natural selection does in fact affect mtDNA, which means that the molecular clock will run at different rates in different populations. For example, if in one population natural selection is eliminating some of the mutations, this will make that population appear younger than it really is. Some scientists have also challenged the belief that mtDNA is inherited solely from the mother and does not randomly recombine with male DNA during sexual reproduction. The fact that African populations may show a higher level of mtDNA diversity than Asian and European populations does not necessarily mean that African populations are the oldest. If the population increases more rapidly in one region than in another, this can cause greater diversity in that population. Conversely, population bottlenecks (where the population dwindles to just a few mating couples) lead to a loss of variation. Genetic variation within and among groups can also arise from low but consistent levels of interbreeding combined with buildup in regional groups of random genetic changes. As geneticist Alan Templeton says: ?The diversity in a region does not necessarily reflect the age of the regional population but rather could reflect the age since the last favourable mutation arose in the population, the demographic history of population size expansion, the extent of gene flow with other populations, and so on.?^2 Our last common ancestor is frequently said to have lived 200,000 years ago, but different mtDNA studies have in fact produced widely divergent dates. A 1986 study, using intraspecific calculations to calibrate the molecular clock (i.e. rates of mutation in human populations only), obtained an age range for Eve of 140,000 to 290,000 years. However, Templeton calculated that, taking account of probabilistic effects and of the mtDNA divergence level of 1.4 to 9.3% found by some researchers, the date for Eve would range from 33,000 years to 675,000 years.^3 It has recently been found that mtDNA appears to be mutating much faster than expected, and if this were also true in the past, ?mitochondrial Eve? would be a mere 6000 years old!^4 A 1991 study obtained an age range of 166,000 to 249,000 years, by using interspecific calculations to calibrate the mutation rate; it assumed that humans diverged from the chimpanzees either 4 or 6 million years ago. However, P. Gingerich estimated that the human-chimp split took place 9.2 million years ago, which gives a date for Eve of 554,000 years. Moreover, Lovejoy et al. found that the researchers had made a mathematical error, which when corrected gives an age for Eve of at least 1.3 million years!^5 Some mtDNA studies have contradicted the African Eve hypothesis and suggest that modern humans have Asian or African-Asian roots. In terms of anatomy, Asians and Europeans are more closely related to one another than either are to Africans.^6 If Africa is the home of modern humans, it is hard to explain why human chromosomes lack a protective gene sequence called the ?baboon marker?; all nonhuman primates known to carry this gene sequence are African, such as the gorilla and chimpanzee.^7 */African Adam/* The male counterpart of mtDNA is the Y chromosome, which is inherited only from the father. Many scientists believe that just as we can trace our mtDNA back to an African Eve, so we can trace our Y chromosomes back to an African Adam, or ?Y-guy?, though other researchers view him as ?a statistical apparition generated by dubious evolutionary assumptions?.^1 As in the case of mtDNA, various factors interfere with the Y-chromosome molecular clock: the greater diversity in Y chromosomes among Africa populations could be because Africa was more heavily populated; and the diversity outside Africa could have been reduced by the spreading of particularly favourable genes through those populations. In other words, humans could be millions of years old, and the genetic diversity we see today could simply reflect recent genetic events in that long history. A study published in 1995 concluded that humans had a common ancestor 270,000 years ago. But the researchers acknowledged that this conclusion is based on many background assumptions ? e.g. that the human line separated from the chimp line about 5 million years ago ? and that the findings are open to other interpretations. A 1995 issue of /Nature/ contained 2 articles on the time of origin of extant Y chromosomes. One of them gave an age of 37,000 to 49,000 years, while the other gave an estimate of 188,000 years, with a possible range of 51,000 to 411,000 years. A later study gave a date of 150,000 years, and found that the root of the statistical tree was in Africa but that, in addition to a movement out of Africa into the Old World, there might have been a movement back into Africa from Asia.^2 A 2001 study concluded that 3 mutations in the Y chromosomes among populations from East Africa can be traced to a mutation that arose in Africa between 35,000 and 89,000 years ago. The authors admitted that archaic Y chromosomes of modern humans could be erased by natural selection (?selection sweep?) and also by random processes such as genetic drift. They noted that the age of a common ancestor estimated using autosome (nonsex chromosome)/X chromosome genes ranged from 535,000 to 1,860,000 years ? much older than the favoured mtDNA and Y-chromosome dates. To explain this, they speculated that in the course of population ?bottlenecks? during a supposed migration out of Africa, there may have been 3 or 4 times as many men as women, leading to greater diversity in the autosome/X chromosome DNA.^3 This demonstrates how auxiliary hypotheses can always be wheeled in to bring ?anomalous? results more into line with current orthodoxy. Studies of nuclear DNA (nDNA) have also led to divergent findings regarding our human ancestors. In a study that supported the African Eve hypothesis, the 2 gene markers examined suggested that the human race is split into 3 distinct populations: Subsaharan Africans, northeastern Africans, and everyone else in the world! Another study indicated that Africans and Eurasians are separated by a large genetic distance, thereby contradicting the out-of-Africa theory.^4 A 1990 study concluded that Caucasoid populations (located from North Africa to India), rather than sub-Saharan Africans, were closest to the ancestral genetic stock. An analysis of alleles (different forms of the same gene) that code for the globin molecule pointed to an age much greater than 200,000 years for modern human populations ? and possibly as old as 3 million years.^5 */Genetics and archaeology/* The latest version of the multiregional theory agrees with the out-of-Africa theory that modern /Homo sapiens/ probably originated in Africa around 200,000 years ago, but differs in suggesting that, after they left Africa, significant interbreeding took place with pre-/sapiens/ hominids in other parts of the world, such as Neanderthals in Europe and /erectus/ in Asia, leading to the evolution of modern humans. There is abundant fossil and archaeological evidence pointing to interbreeding between different human populations,^1 and genetic evidence does not rule it out. The point at issue is exactly what degree of interbreeding has taken place. As the /New Scientist / commented: ?Some disputes seem to end up being arguments over almost nothing.?^2 Both theories are probably wrong as the oldest modern human fossils are many millions of years old ? but nowadays this evidence has virtually no chance of receiving a fair hearing (see next section). Meanwhile, the current debate continues. Whereas most genetic analyses focus on just one DNA region, and produce widely varying results, Alan Templeton has carried out a study based on 10. On the assumption that humans and chimps diverged 6 million years ago, he concludes that, after /Homo erectus / left Africa 1.7 million years ago, there was a second major human migration 420,000 to 840,000 years ago, and a more recent one 80,000 to 150,000 years ago. He also sees signs of a more recent movement back into Africa from Asia, and huge amounts of genetic interchange between groups, thereby falsifying the hypothesis of complete replacement.^3 Mitochondrial DNA studies indicate that modern humans and Neanderthals had a common ancestor 450,000 to 850,000 years ago, and have been used to bolster the orthodox view that there has been virtually no interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans (implying that they are separate species). Sceptics point out that these studies are so plagued with practical and theoretical problems that their conclusions are highly dubious. Anthropologist Erik Trinkhaus says that there is a lot of subjectivity in judging what amount of difference in DNA amounts to a difference in species. He argues that fossil evidence shows signs of considerable interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans, and that genetic evidence for such interbreeding may have become so diluted as to escape detection by crude DNA hybridization techniques.^4 Moreover, mtDNA retrieved from a 62,000-year-old Australian /H. sapiens/ fossil differs more from the DNA of living people than does the mtDNA of Neanderthals. Therefore, even if Neanderthal DNA is quite different from modern human DNA, this does not necessarily mean that Neanderthals did not interbreed with anatomically modern humans.^5 The limitations and unreliability of genetic analysis are clearly exposed by the contradictory results produced by different studies. David Frayer comments: Unlike genetic data derived from living humans, fossils can be used to test predictions of theories about the past without relying on a long list of assumptions about the neutrality of genetic markers, mutational rates, or other requirements necessary to retrodict the past from current genetic variation ... [G]enetic information, at best, provides a theory of how modern human origins /might have happened/ if the assumptions used in interpreting the genetic data are correct. As Rosalind Harding says: ?There?s no clear genetic test. We?re going to have to let the fossil people answer this one.?^6 Theosophical literature indicates that surprisingly ancient human fossils could turn up in Central Asia, since that is where our own fifth humanity (or root-race) developed into a distinct human stock some one million years ago. The region is said to have been the home of a series of flourishing civilizations during the last 4 or 5 million years, since the midpoint of the Atlantean era.^7 * *4 to 5 million years ago on the theosophical timescale corresponds to about 26 to 34 million years ago on the scientific timescale, i.e. to the Oligocene epoch. Future archaeological discoveries are bound to bring many surprises ? and to meet with intense resistance. Since 1982, archaeologist Yuri Mochanov and his team have found several thousand extremely ancient stone tools at Diring Yuryakh and other sites along the Lena River in Siberia. Various dating techniques suggest that the strata in which the tools are found are between 1.8 and 3.2 million years old. Such a date is unacceptable to traditional anthropologists, who prefer a more conservative figure of about 300,000 years. Mochanov says that the discoveries force us to reexamine ?the forgotten concept that North and Central Asia was the original homeland of humanity?.^8 In the Pabbi Hills in northern Pakistan, 2-million-year-old artifacts have been dug up which ?bring into question the whole chronology of the evolution and dispersal of hominids both in Africa and Asia?. Most scientists consider the artifacts too old to have been made by /Homo erectus/, but the dating in this case is difficult to challenge.^9 At the Renzidong fossil site in eastern China, animal bones showing signs of being butchered are mixed with stone tools dated as early as 2.25 million years. A jaw fragment with teeth resembling those of earliest /Homo/ in East Africa has also been found, and many Chinese scientists believe /H. erectus/ evolved independently in Asia.^10 An even older hominid date in Asia comes from Yenangyaung in central Myanmar (Burma), where, in the 1890s, simple flint artifacts and a human femur (thighbone) or humerus (upper arm bone) were found in strata 3 to 4 million years old.^11 The latter discovery seems to have long since been forgotten and, as the next section shows, this applies to a great many other paradigm-shattering finds. **Referen*c*es ** */Human-ape similarities/* 1. /New Scientist/, 24 May 2003, pp. 3, 15. 2. /Science Frontiers/, no. 150, Nov-Dec 2003, p. 2. 3. François de Sarre, ?Statut phylogenique des hominoïdes?, part 1, /Bipedia/, no. 5, Sep 1990, http://perso.wanadoo.fr/initial.bipedalism/5.htm. 4. William R. Corliss (comp.), /Biological Anomalies: Humans III/, Glen Arm, MD: Sourcebook Project, 1994, pp. 101-2, 105-6. 5. William R. Corliss (comp.), /Biological Anomalies: Humans I/, Glen Arm, MD: Sourcebook Project, 1992, pp. 28-30. 6. Jonathan Marks, ?Blood will tell (won?t it?): a century of molecular discourse in anthropological systematics?, /American Journal of Physical Anthropology/, v. 94, 1994, pp. 59-79. */African Eve/* 1. Alan R. Templeton, ?The ?Eve? hypotheses: a genetic critique and reanalysis?, /American Anthropologist/, v. 95, 1993, pp. 51-72; Jeannine Joy, ?Extant mtDNA applications to current theories of modern human origins?, www.uwyo.edu/bioanth/4020/Pages/HTML%20Abstracts/Joy-abs.html. 2. ?The ?Eve? hypotheses: a genetic critique and reanalysis?, p. 59; B. Bower, ?DNA?s evolutionary dilemma?, 6 Feb 1999, www.sciencenews.org. 3. ?The ?Eve? hypotheses: a genetic critique and reanalysis?, p. 58. 4. A. Gibbons, ?Calibrating the mitochondrial clock?, /Science/, v. 279, Jan 1998, pp. 28-9. 5. Michael A. Cremo, /Human Devolution: A Vedic alternative to Darwin?s theory/, Los Angeles, CA: Bhaktivedanta Book Publishing, 2003, pp. 85-6. 6. Ronald A. Fonda, ?Africa Eve, Eurasian Adam, the age and origin of the human species?, www.heretical.com/science/rafonda1.html. 7. /Biological Anomalies: Humans III/, pp. 78-9, 91-2. */African Adam/* 1. B. Bower, ? ?Y-guy? steps into human-evolution debate?, /Science News/, v. 158, 2000, p. 295. 2. /Nature/, v. 378, 1995, pp. 376-80; /Human Devolution/, p. 92. 3. /Human Devolution/, p. 94. 4. /Biological Anomalies: Humans III/, pp. 93, 104. 5. /Human Devolution/, p. 89. */Genetics and archaeology/* 1. Kate Wong, ?Is out of Africa going out the door??, 19 Aug 1999, www.sciam.com; B. Bower, ?Gene, fossil data back diverse human roots?, /Science News/, v. 159, 2001, p. 21; Milford Wolpoff and Rachel Caspari, /Race and Human Evolution/, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997, pp. 270-80. 2. /New Scientist/, 14 June 2003, p. 3. 3. Alan Templeton, ?Out of Africa again and again?, /Nature/, v. 416, 2002, pp. 45-51. 4. B. Bower, ?Gene test probes Neandertal origins?, /Science News/, v. 158, 2000, p. 21. 5. Bower, ?Gene, fossil data back diverse human roots?. 6. Quoted in /Human Devolution/, pp. 90, 95. 7. G. de Purucker, /Studies in Occult Philosophy/, Pasadena, CA: Theosophical University Press, 1973, pp. 19-22. 8. Patrick Huyghe, ?On human origins: out-of-Siberia. An interview with Yuri Mochanov?, /The Anomalist/, no. 2, spring 1995, pp. 28-47; Heather Hobden, ?Diring Yuryakh ? and the first Siberians?, http://homepage.ntlworld.com/heather.hobden1/Siberiahistory1.htm. 9. H. Rendell and R. Dennell, ?Asian axe 2 million years old?, /The Geographical Magazine/, v. 59, 1987, pp. 270-2; S. Bunney, ?First migrants will travel back in time?, /New Scientist/, 18 June 1987, p. 36. 10. R. Ciochon and R. Larick, ?Early /Homo erectus/ tools in China?, /Archaeology/, v. 53, Jan/Feb 2000, pp. 14-5. 11. William R. Corliss (comp.), /Archeological Anomalies: Small artifacts/, Glen Arm, MD: Sourcebook Project, 2003, pp. 189-90. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ *The Ape-Ancestry Myth: Part 2* *The Ape-Ancestry Myth: Contents * ------------------------------------------------------------------------ *Homepage*