I know and I dont think we have respirators for them if they catch covid
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Counting from one to six does, and the ‘days’, however else they may be interpreted, denote time.
Did I say the triads have no meaning? In fact, by recognizing that they are there implicitly says that I am recognizing that they have meaning. Duh. Lookee here, O brilliant and tiresome one.
Have a nice day.
In post 88 above I showed what the small brained H. floresiensis did with his small brain. I just ran into an article that supports what I have been saying about Neanderthal since the mid 1990s. He was no different from us technologically. From Eurekalert my bolding:
*** Neanderthal cord weave
Contrary to popular belief, Neanderthals were no less technologically advanced than Homo sapiens** . An international team, including researchers from the CNRS, have discovered the first evidence of cord making, dating back more than 40,000 years (1), on a flint fragment from the prehistoric site of Abri du Maras in the south of France (2). Microscopic analysis showed that these remains had been intertwined, proof of their modification by humans. Photographs revealed three bundles of twisted fibres, plied together to create one cord. In addition, spectroscopic analysis revealed that these strands were made of cellulose, probably from coniferous trees. This discovery highlights unexpected cognitive abilities on the part of Neanderthals, who not only had a good understanding of the mathematics involved in winding the fibres, but also a thorough knowledge of tree growth. These results, published on 9 April 2020 in Scientific Reports , represent the oldest known proof of textile and cord technology to date.*The following laboratories contributed to this work: Histoire naturelle de l’Homme préhistorique (CNRS/Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle/Université de Perpignan Via Domitia), De la molécule aux nano-objets : réactivité, interactions et spectroscopies (CNRS/Sorbonne Université), along with the Centre de recherche et de restauration des musées de France (ministère de la Culture).
*The excavations at the Abri du Maras have in particular benefited from funding from the French Ministry of Culture and the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Regional Archaeology Service.*https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-04/c-ncw040720.php
Anthropology has seriously underestimated the abilities of ancient man at every single step along the way. This is because they don’t really consider what the image of God is.
I think I want to put one thing out here about my view of the Flood. It has received at least this serious treatment by John Walton in his NIV Application Commentary for Genesis. No, I don’t think he liked my idea back in 2001 when he published, but I just checked by buying a copy on Logos and the passage is still there:
"Oceanography theories. Scientists have identified a number of different occasions during which massive flooding in the Near East occurred. These include a flooding of the Mediterranean and one of the Black Sea. In a theory proposed by Glenn Morton, a variety of geological data show that until 5.5 million years ago the Mediterranean was not a sea at all. The water was dammed up at Gibraltar. Morton’s evidence suggests a fairly sudden collapse, causing a break more than three thousand feet deep and fifteen miles wide filling the Mediterranean basin in less than nine months.
" As the water rushed in, the first phenomenon which would occur is that the air would begin to rise as it was replaced by the fluid filling the basin. The air would pick up the moisture via evaporation from the flood water as it continued to pour into the Mediterranean. As the air rose, adiabatic cooling would take place. Adiabatic cooling is the cooling that occurs in a rising body of air which cools at 10º C per kilometer. As the air cools, the moisture contained in the air condenses to form clouds which eventually will produce rain. Since the air over an area of 964,000 square miles was moving upwards simultaneously, the rains from this mechanism would be torrential! The modern world has never seen such a convection cell. Forty days of rain is easy to account for."*
If the reader finds it difficult to put the Flood 5.5 million years ago, the Black Sea theory may be more palatable. In the mid-1990s geologists and oceanographers began investigating a huge, catastrophic flood in the region of the Black Sea. Their findings indicate that in about 5500 B.C. there was a sudden rise in water level in the Mediterranean, which brought a thunderous waterfall through the Bosporous and into the Black Sea." Walton, J. H. (2001). Genesis (p. 330). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan."* In Walton, J. H. (2001). Genesis (pp. 329–330). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. page 329-330
Except now, my flood is still standing up to the test of time while the Black Sea flood he offers as consolation prize for my theory, has been disproven by new data. It has been shown that a delta was forming from water flowing OUT of the Black Sea towards into the Mediterranean at the time the Black Sea flood was supposed to have taken place. That means, the Black Sea was full of water at that time. It wasn’t a good match to Noah’s account anyway as there are no high mountains to cover and filling as gradually as Ryan and Pitman suggest, it would more than likely have been called the Great March as that basin would only have filled at maybe a foot a day–which one could easily outrun. The Black Sea was never dry at the time when Ryan and Pitman say it was.
“And south of the Bosporus, they found a delta built by outflowing waters 10,000 years ago, when Ryan’s scenario would have the Black Sea totally cut off.”" Richard A. Kerr, “Support Is Drying Up for Noah’s Flood Filling the Black Sea” Science, Aug 17, 2007, p. 886
So, while I don’t think Walton liked my idea, at least he did give me some credit by mentioning it–something few others have bothered to do. Mine and Ryan and Pitman’s Black Sea floods are the only two ‘oceanographic’ flood theories he offers. I do thank Walton for mentioning mine.
My book is quoted on page 323 of Walton’s book.
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Another reason to move Adam far back in time.
A lot of Christians who believe in evolution depend on the recent mitochondrial Eve (200kyr) and or y-chromosome Adam upon which to place Adam and Eve in time. If they don’t have a Neolithic Adam and Eve, they often move them to this time frame because anthropologists say that is when H. sapiens first arose. Except, that that view is now falling apart.
In the 1980s genetics began to have an impact on anthropology and it was learned that the diversity of mtDNA was not so great as expected and this led to ideas that all of humanity were descended from a recent population of hominids. In 1988 Stringer and Andrews published Genetic and fossil evidence for the origin of modern humans. This view was absolutist in its declaration that there was no interbreeding between other archaic populations and modern humans at all. The view was that the modern humans came out of Africa and replaced every single archaic from H. erectus to Neanderthal. Milford Wolpoff dubbed this the Pleistocene Holocaust. Throughout the 1990s, Chris Stringer held fast to the idea that even if mating did occur, not a single viable fetus was bred between modern humans and the archaics.
"While most researchers now agree that the fossil record shows no evidence of evolution from Neanderthals to modern humans, and only hotly disputed evidence of interbreeding between them, it does seem that the supposed behavioural gap between ‘them’ and ‘us’ has narrowed. "Chris Stringer, “Foreward,” in Douglas Palmer, Neanderthal, (London: Channel 4 Books, 2000), p. 7
“If we are looking for the ancestry of modern people, where people alive today came from, where their genes came from – if there was such hybridization it is negligible. It is impossible to find today,” Chris Stringer, head of human origins at London’s Natural History Museum and an architect of the out-of-Africa theory, told Britain’s Guardian newspaper.
http://www.cnn.com/2001/NATURE/01/15/neanderthal.humans.reut/index.html
accessed 1/19/01 page no longer there.
Since about 2007, this view has kind of fallen apart. And the reason it has fallen apart is the reason that anyone who tries to peg too early a date for Adam and Eve is almost certainly doomed ultimately to be wrong. Anthropology is not static. Year by year anthropologissts find new reasons to push humanity farther and father back into the past. And now, the consensus/group-think is settling on the idea that modern humans, at least behaviorally modern humans were around as long ago as 300 kyr ago.
Human behavior noted decades ago has suddenly been noticed. At Olorgesailie, Kenya, hominines were making pigments for ritual purposes. and for the first time using prepared cores, from which flakes could be continuously struck off the core with one blow. This made for better use of the flint and finer tools. To conceive of this is a major mental and technological advance. This has been known for decades, but just ignored.
"The site also reveals clear signs of iron-rich rocks being processed into red and black pigments, presumably for artistic purposes, another indication of behavioural and cultural sophistication. It looks as though the transition to modern cognition happened right at the start of the H. sapiens journey, or maybe even before it. So much for the out-of-Africa mainstay, that humanity became physically modern first, but behavioural modernity didn’t evolve until much later. “I think the two-step model is dead,” says Foley." Graham Lawton, “Becoming Human”, New Scientist, April 3, 2019, p.37
They call this new model Africa multiregionalism. New discoveries show that these humans lived all over Africa, not just in east Africa and that they left Africa in waves, and we know from genetics that they interbred with Neanderthals, Denisovians, and Ancestor X, a group for which no fossils have been found. Their genetic signal has been found in African populations.
So let’s look at the published ages for mtDNA Eve which is often used as the marker for where Adam and Eve were by many Christians. People are totally unaware of how the estimates for when the last common ancestor was has varied extremely widely.
1987 140-200kyr Mitochondrial DNA and human evolution | Nature
1989 50-500kyr Stoneking and Cann, “African Origin of Human Mitochronrial DNA,”
1991 166-249kyr Vigilant https://fire.biol.wwu.edu//cmoyer/zztemp_fire/biol445D_W00/homo.pdf
1992 133-137kyr https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rstb.1992.0094
1993 504-760 kyr Long, “Human Molecular Phylogenetics”,
1997 Templeton points out that mtDNA is haploid and thus coalesces faster than nuclear DNA, which means that the original human is 4-9 times older than the mtDNA coalescence.
" If the coalescence time of mtDNA is truly about 200,000 years ago, then the expected coalescence time of almost all nuclear genes are going to be commonly greater than one or two million years. This places the expected coalescence times of much nuclear DNA into a period in which all humans probably lived in Africa. Hence, studies on nuclear DNA are expected to have an African root under all hypotheses of modern human evolution." ~ Alan R. Templeton, “Testing the Out of Africa Replacement Hypothesis with Mitochondrial DNA Data,” in G. A. Clark and C. M. Willermet, ed., Conceptual Issues in Modern Human Origins Research, (New York: Aldine de Gryuter, 1997), pp. 329-360, p. 353
After 2000, everyone just cited the 200,000 age for Eve or something close to it. The variation was forgotton.
Y chromosome Adam started at 270kyr ago but thanks to a man in South Carolina, whose y-chromosome was so different from all modern humans, y-chromosome Adam low lies about 400kyr ago. Will we find another outlier? I wouldn’t bet against it. Go read Wiki history of estimates on how this date has bounced around.
Here is the problem. Today we have behavioral modernity around 3-400kyr ago. In a few years, it will move backward in time. That is the way Anthropology works. I think I see quite human behavior even further back in time. Genetically humanity doesn’t coalesce until the oldest gene in our population coalesces, and that means 5 myr ago. Adam is old and frankly getting older.
I know some on this forum believe Adam is around 700K years ago which is fine, but that date will eventually be overturned. Biologically already it is sounding mighty risky. We are descendants of Neanderthals and for a long time it was thought that the hominids at Atapuerca were H. heidelbergensis, the believed ancestor of both Neanderthals and modern humans. But in 2016 we found out differently.
"More consequentially, the date of this split has been pushed way back. The latest estimate comes from a remarkable cache of fossils called the Sima hominins, the remains of at least 28 ancient humans found in a cave called Sima de los Huesos (pit of bones) in the Atapuerca mountains of northern Spain. They are 430,000 years old and were long believed to be H. heidelbergensis. But in 2016 their DNA – the oldest ancient human DNA ever sequenced – revealed that they were actually Neanderthals, and pushed the split between modern humans and Neanderthals/Denisovans back to between 550,000 and 765,000 years ago. That all but rules out H. heidelbergensis and points the finger at an earlier species. “For about 35 years, I’ve argued that Homo heidelbergensis represents the most reasonable last common ancestor for Neanderthals and modern humans,” says Stringer. “I don’t believe that any more.” Graham Lawton, “Becoming Human”, New Scientist, April 3, 2019, p.40-41
But no one knows who the parent species of Neanderthals and humans is. With this date and the question of what species gave rise to us and the Neanderthals, 735,000 might very well be overturned soon. Furthermore, one must realize that we have a continuous ancestry back to this unknown species, each generation back was just as human as us. Where we cut the lineage and say “here is Adam at this time” becomes purely arbitrary and ad hoc. If we consider Neanderthals human, Then the common ancestor of Neanderthals and humans had to also be human. The Neanderthals certainly behaved as humans, made art(currently the oldest art in the world was made by Neanderthals), cordwained cords, made jewelry, constructed an altar deep in a cave upon which to sacrifice and burn bears 176,000 years ago, showing they were religious and likely part of the bear cult some anthropologists have surmised is the oldest continuing religion in the world. While you will find many people poo pooing the bear cult idea, these nay-sayers rarely mention Bruniquel with these burnt bear bones.
Barnouw notes:
“There are other implications of religious beliefs held by Neanderthals in the collections of bear skulls found in their caves. The mere preservation of skulls need not suggest anything religious, but in some cases special attention was given to their placement. In one cave, five bear skulls were found in niches in the cave wall. The skulls of several cave bears in a group have been found surrounded by built-up stone walls, with some skulls having little stones placed around them, while others were set out on slabs.
"All this suggests some kind of bear cult, like that practiced until quite recently by the Chippewa and other North American Indians. After a Chippewa hunter had killed a bear, he would cut off the head, which was then decorated with beads and ribbons (in the period after contact with Europeans). Some tobacco was placed before its nose. The hunter would then make a little speech, apologizing to the bear for having had to kill it. Bear skulls were preserved and hung up on trees so that dogs and wolves could not get at them. Bear ceremonialism of this and related kinds had a wide circumpolar distribution–from the Great Lakes to the Ainu of northern Japan through various Siberian tribes, such as the Ostyaks and the Orochi, to the Finns and Lapps of Scandinavia. So wide a distribution of this trait, associated as it was with other apparently very early circumpolar traits, suggests great age. It is possible, therefore, that some aspects of this bear ceremonialism go back to Middle Paleolithic times.” ~ Victor Barnouw, An Introduction to Anthropology: Physical Anthropology and Archaeology, Vol. 1, (Homewood, Illinois: The Dorsey Press, 1982) p. 156-157
Again, if Neanderthal is ‘human’ in a theological sense, then the common ancestor of humans and Neanderthals also must be human. Adam must be very old. I think he must be 5.3 myr old.
Yesterday I mentioned that anthropology always moves things back in time and to set an Adam at a time which can easily be disprovable is not smart. Well I just learned that it has happened again. But first, Hugh Ross used to say that Neanderthal was not human because he had no art. Now it is Neanderthal art which is the oldest art in the world. But then, Hugh’s donors define what he can and cant say about particular pieces of data. I have had the freedom to think what I want to about anthropology.
This morning I found out that a new H. erectus skull has been found moving H. erectus back 200 kyr. Here is the abstract from Sciecnce:
"The DNH 134 cranium shares clear affinities with Homo erectus, whereas the DNH 152 cranium represents P. robustus. Stratigraphic analysis of the Drimolen Main Quarry deposits indicates that unlike many other South African sites, there was only one major phase of relatively short deposition between ~2.04 million years ago and ~1.95 million years ago. This age has been constrained by the identification of the ~1.95-million-year-old magnetic field reversal at the base of the Olduvai SubChron within the sediments and by the direct uranium-lead dating of a flowstone that formed during the reversal. This has been augmented by direct dating on fossils by means of US-ESR that suggests that the DNH 134 and DNH 152 crania were deposited just before this reversal, with the DNH 134 crania deposited at ~2.04 million years ago. The DNH 134 cranium shares affinities with H. erectus and predates all known specimens in that species. The age range of Drimolen Main Quarry overlaps with that of Australopithecus sediba from the nearby site of Malapa and indicates that Homo, Paranthropus, and Australopithecus were contemporaneous in South Africa between 2.04 million and 1.95 million years ago. It is the first time that dating has conclusively demonstrated that these three taxa shared the same landscape during the same time range, making it less likely that a population of A. sediba is ancestral to Homo, as has been previously suggested. Analysis of fauna preserved at Drimolen documents a period of ecological change, with earlier South African species going extinct and new species moving into the region from other parts of Africa, including early representatives of H. erectus. Andy I. R. Herries, et al,** Contemporaneity of Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and early Homo erectus in South Africa **, Science April 3, 2020, p. 368
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6486/eaaw7293
In March, H. erectus was 1.8 myr old, now, it is 2 myr. Have we found the very oldest H. erectus that will ever be found? I don’t think so, although it might be a while before he next one is found.
I would suggest a definition of human as those who show the traits of God’s curse in Eden–H. erectus and H. habilis both show that their women had pain in childbirth–the curse of a big head.
I guess no one is paying attention to this thread anymore but I am going to use this as a second repository of my views for when I am gone. Thus, here is another reason not to place Adam and Noah into the Neolithic. Only bias leads to the translation of Noah as Husbandman.
Was Noah a Farmer?
Glenn R. Morton April 14, 2020
Genesis 9:20 says: " And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard : "1
The Hebrew words mis-translated as ‘husbandman’ are ish ha Adawmah. Ish is “man”. Adawmah is translated as ‘land’ 125 times, as ‘earth’ 53 times, as ground ‘43’ times, as ‘country’ once, as ‘husbandman’ twice, and as ‘husbandry’ once.
Clearly the normal meaning of this word is not husbandman. That is an interpretation of the translator. Let’s translate this verse as:
“And Noah began to be a man of the ground, and he planted a vineyard;” 1
Does this make him a farmer? Not necessarily. I once owned a 100 ac ranch in east Texas and miss it greatly but my health made it impossible for me to take care of it anymore. But a wild grape vine was intentionally planted next to the house. That grape vine would give me two the three buckets of grapes each year, enough to make 1-3 bottles of wine or about 30 jars of jelly. I made the jelly. But if that was all I had, did that make me a farmer? No. Merely planting a couple of vines does not make one a farmer. The nice thing about this wild grape was that I didn’t have to spend time ‘tending the branches,’ nor did I have to worry about birds eating the grapes. The skins were quite sour, so the birds turned up their beaks at these grapes. On the inside of the grape was an extremely sweet pulp. The blended mash, produced a flavorable juice that made excellent jelly. But I wasn’t running a vineyard. I didn’t have to.
Loads of hunter-gatherers plant plants they want more of, but they too are not farmers. But they are people of the ground.
With only 8 people initially, hunting and gathering would be on Noah’s to-do list. They couldn’t wait 3 months or more for the harvest. Thus they could not have been classical farmers. But planting a few plants for fun certainly isn’t out of the question for a hunter-gatherer.
" Studies of modern hunter-gatherers show that there is a correlation between population density and the specialised use of particular foods. Examples include the systematic exploitation ( in some cases even involving the sowing ) of wild grasses and other herbaceous plants for their seeds, and the replanting of wild yams and other tubers to ensure continuity of supply ." 2
" The closest parallel to planting practice in Aboriginal gathering pertains to the Dioscorea yam in subtropical and tropical Australia. Observations of replanting, describedin detail for Arnhem Land by Jones 1975) and Jones & Meehan , for the easter Cape York Peninsula by Harris, and deduced on historical evidence for Western Australia, entail a rather casual replacement of the stem-attached top of the tuber at harvest, and are identical both to the informal procedures of the Tasaday oragers of the Philippines. " 3
Reference
1 The Holy Bible: King James Version. (2009). (Electronic Edition of the 1900 Authorized Version., Ge 9:20). Bellingham, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc.
2 D. R. Harris, “Human Diet and Subsistence,” in S. Jones et al, editors, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 72-73
3 D. E. Yen, Agronomy of Asutralian Hunter-Gatherers,", in David R. Harris, Gordon C. HIllman, Foraging and Farming: The evolution of Plant Exploitation, Routledge, 2014, p. 59.
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Thanks for posting. I am following but not not deeply invested, pulse other events keep me busy. There is so many wrong posts on the internet to correct! Alas, it seems people are not so happy to learn the truth, so maybe I should spend more time lurking around here.
The idea of big heads being the curse of sin is intriguing, but not sure how it merges with things. Would H. erectus have moral capacity? In any case, interesting to consider.
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Hi Phil, Erectus built an altar at Bilzingsleben Germany, which, if you walked into a modern village described as Bilzingsleben is described, you would turn tail and run like crazy. Here is the description of that site. To me, If you are engaging in human sacrifice, you have moral values. The Canaanites with the baby eating god, engaged in human sacrifice but yet, had to be capable of moral judgement because they are H. sapiens.
"But Mania’s most intriguing find lies under a protective shed. As he opens the door sunlight illuminates a cluster of smooth stones and pieces of bone that he believes were arranged by humans to pave a 27-foot-wide circle.
“‘They intentionally paved this area for cultural activities,’ says Mania. 'We found here a large anvil of quartzite set between the horns of a huge bison, near it were fractured human skulls.’” ~ Rick Gore, “The First Europeans,” National Geographic, July, 1997, p. 110
While I am not sure the natives were friendly, I am sure they were engaging in religion which requires morality of some sort–not necessarily our kind of morality
Religion among the Erectines
One of the things that has been asked about my views is can small brained individuals have technology and religion. H. Floresiensis , the tiny brained hominid on Flores Island, has thoruoughly answered the technology question. They made stone tools, used fire and hunted pygmy elephants, all with a brain size of 380 cc.
Daniel Lyons is the human with the smallest known brain. H. floresiensis has a brain the size of a grapefruit, yet he had a technological life equivalent to those of the larger erectines.
I point this technological capability out because one criticism of my view is that small brained people couldn’t have built any kind of ark. That might be an erroneous assumption given what floresiensis did.
Now the question is, is there a brain size below which religion can’t occur? That is an unknowable question since we can’t interview any of these small brained people. And even if they did exist, we have the subjectivity issue. Just looking at you, I can’t tell if ou have a religion or not. I can’t tell what it is unless you are wearing specific religious clothing. Similarly, looking at a cranium tells us nothing about the thoughts that went through that beings brain during his life. All we can do is look at the objects left behind. Unfortunately that means only stone objects left behind. All wood and fibre objects have long ago rotted away. If a hominid carved an idol out of a pumpkin, we would never know it. I do want to say that for every opinion in anthropology there is someone who disagrees. Again, all anyone can do in anthro is cite the actual data and let people know the interpretation of that data that has been put forward. The reader has to decide if he believes it or not.
The best we can do is look at the stone objects left behind. I have mentioned Bilzingsleben, the erectine site in Germany dated between 300-400kyr ago. Here are two descriptions of what I feel is a defendable case of religion among the erectines.
" But Mania’s most intriguing find lies under a protective shed. As he opens the door sunlight illuminates a cluster of smooth stones and pieces of bone that he believes were arranged by humans to pave a 27-foot-wide circle.
"‘They intentionally paved this area for cultural activities,’ says Mania. 'We found here a large anvil of quartzite set between the horns of a huge bison, near it were fractured human skulls. '" ~ Rick Gore, “The First Europeans,” National Geographic, July, 1997, p. 110
We now know that fire was involved in what they were doing at the anvil.
"This is of no concern here, but the use of space at the site may be. Whatever their specific nature, each ring-like structure at Bilzingsleben appears to have been associated with an area of burning, and an activity area usually consisting of elephant bones and a large travertine block interpreted as an ‘anvil’. Of particular interest is Zone V, which consists of a sub-circular ‘pavement’ formed from a single layer of flat stones trodden into the soft sediments of the lake edge. An area of burning was located towards its centre, a large travertine block severely affected by heat at its eastern periphery, and a quartzite ‘anvil’. in its western periphery next to a large bovid skull retaining its horn cores. The lack of splintered bone, hammerstones, or other tools on the pavement contrasts markedly with the rest of the settlement area, and Mania and Mania have suggested that the area around the anvil and bovid skull was intentionally cleaned. The two refitting cranial fragments of Hominin 2 were recovered over 3 m apart on this pavement’, in close proximity to the anvil/skull, and in ‘smashed and macerated condition’, in addition to the juvenile mandible. Small fragments of bone preserved in the natural crevices of the quartzite ‘anvil’ show that bones were smashed upon it, but rather than forward a prosaic interpretation (marrow acquisition, for example) the excavators suggest that this was an area of ‘special cultural activities which probably played a role in some kind of ritual behaviour’, further evidenced by a ‘linear structure of large pebbles, which seem to run towards the circular area and which ends appear to have been marked by …elephant tusks.’ Recovery of engraved marks on four large mammal bones from the site might also indicate further forms of symbolic activity, as noted above ." Paul Pettitt, Religion and Ritual in the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic, in The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Ritual and Religion. edited by Timothy Insoll, (OUP Oxford, 2011), p.336-337
If one walked into a village somewhere and saw this, one immediately think of Indiana Jones, and then would immediately think it was a religion involving human sacrifice. the only reason we claim it can’t have been a religious site is because it was involving late H. erectus. That would seem to be a weak reason to reject the symbolism in this anvil, horns, fire and smashed skulls that we understand.
Symbolic thinking is a prerequisite for religion and I want to start with the earliest symbolic thinking I know of. It is the Makapansgat pebble dating to 3 million years ago. A small brained australopithicus recognized a face in the banded iron pebble and carried it 5 km to his limestone cave.
" Possibly the oldest known piece of evidence bearing on the predilections of the Late Pliocene hominids is the reddish cobble, with presumably weathered-out features making it resemble a humanoid face, that was found in 1925 by W. I. Eitzman at the site that became known as the Limeworks Quarry, Makapansgat, in the Transvaal. It was recovered from a pink stony breccia, later identified by T. C. Partridge as member 4 in his terminology, overlying the main level with Australopithecus remains (the grey breccia, member 3), and dated on the basis of palaeomagnetic readings at 3 Ma B.P. The cobble weighs ca. 260 g. It is jasperite, or banded ironstone of Precambrian age. The banded character reflects varying proportions of iron and silica in the make-up of the rock. The more deeply weathered layers are probably relatively rich in iron, while the more indurated ones are richer in silica. Banded ironstones outcropping about 3 miles (4.8 km) NNE of the limeworks were the probable source of the rock fragment that was eroded to form this large pebble or cobble. It is obviously very water-worn, as though subjected to fluviatile action, and may first have come to rest in the gravel of a river bed."
“The means by which it was eventually transported from, say, a river bed to a cave breccia is a matter for speculation. On the principle of Occam’s razor, it seems reasonable to accept Dart’s hypothesis (see below), based on the remarkable fact that this reddish cobble was unique, quite foreign to the layer of pink stony breccia in which it was found. J.W. Kitching recalls that when he first saw the specimen it still had some of the pink breccia adhering to it. Dart suggests that one of the australopithecine hominids noticed this reddish head-like cobble (I say, perhaps at a river margin), picked it up and carried it as a treasured object to their temporary dwelling place in one of the Makapansgat rock shelters. To my mind, the colour of the cobble was a very significant aspect. According to Sir James Fraser, in a number of creation myths the first men were modeled out of red clay or earth. Red is the colour most attractive to the Hominoidea, i.e. apes and men. Anyone who doubts this should try offering a tray of boiled sweets, each of a single colour, to a group of children, and the marked preference in favor of selecting the red ones will soon become evident.” ~ K. P. Oakley, “Emergence of Higher Thought 3.0-0.2 Ma B.P.”, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B, 292, 205-211 (1981), p. 205-206
Dart didn’t report on this item for forty years because he didn’t quite get its importance. He tells us of this in a 1964 paper:
" Thus, ultimately with the aforesaid australipithecine reconstructional background I had come finally to realise, if tardily, that it was necessary to study the pebble from an ‘australopithecine’ point of view. In that process i was turning the stone around until it was updise down. then instantly the cause of those inhibitions of antagonisms that had prevented me from looking at it seriously during the previous forty years and more became apparent."
"A complete perceptual transformation had taken place. The two little rounded ‘eyes’ retained their visual status though their contours looked more square and adult. The huge ‘brain’ and ridiculously pinched infantile ‘mouth’ that had involuntarily prevented us sapient observers from orientating it otherwise, were now replaced by a dwarfed, flattened, and indented ‘skull-cap’, above a broadly-grinning, robust and typical australopithecine ‘face’. Its broad ‘cheeks’ and gaping ‘mouth’ have become so wide that even the total absence of nostril openings would have been incapable of preventing any perceptive Australopithecus from recognizing it as anything other than a caricature of one or another of his extremely flat-faced male or female relatives in a positively hilarious mood.
“The ‘facial proportions’ from this new aspect are thus in excellent general agreement with those that reconstructional efforts have caused each modern artist, with minor variations, to produce for Australopithecus. This concordance of itself is sufficient justification of the inference that conceptual processes of a similar nature caused an australopithecine to transport the pebble to the cave at Makapansgat. In addition, the curious and to some extent corroborative fact is that once one admits the possibility that an Australopithecus had the intellectual ability to detect the presence of a face on this alien natural stone, then the social responses that capacity evoked, follow. The pebble would have had no point without an ability on his associate’s part to comprehend and share the emotional reactions, the puzzlement and amusement, that the discoverer had had. And from this it may also be deduced that he and his fellows at the australopithecine phase of human evolution had already reached a humanoid level of self-realisation and self-awareness .” ~ R.A. Dart, “The Waterworn Australopithecine Pebble of Many Faces from Makapansgat,” South African Journal of Science, 70(June 1974), pp 167-169, p. 167-168
A comparison is shown below. The ability to recognize that this rock is a symbol for my my face means that even small brained Australopithecines were capable of symbolic thought–that is a sobering thought because symbolism is a pre-requisite for religion. Could they have had religion? Yes, but we are very unlikely to ever know if they did or not.
Given that Australopithecines were capable of symbolic thought, then how can we deny symbolic thought to the larger brained erectines? Indeed, there are other evidences that the erectines engaged in religion. One might even wonder if this is where the mother goddess religions started. First there is the Berekhat Ram figurine. Below are various Venus figurines. The really good ones are from the upper Paleolithic, but then they had better technology with which to cut stone. I think this is an important point. Without fine rock carving tools, one’s artistic abilities can’t produce much of value. Thus Chris Stringer made a chart showing how humans have improved on getting cutting surface out of flint.
" 25. The transition from Lower Palaeolithic (Abbevillean) hand axes, through Middle Palaeolithic (Mousterian) scrapers, to Upper Palaeolithic (Magdalenian) blades. This diagram presents a very progressive view of technology, indicating the increasing efficiency of Palaeolithic tool makers ." ~ Chris Stringer and Clive Gamble, In Search of the Neanderthals, (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1993), p. 55.
from a pound of flint
abbevillean obtained 2 inches of cutting surface --this is mostly Australopithicus
Acheulean obtained 8 inches of cutting surface----This is mostly H. erectus
Mousterian obtained 40 inches of cutting surface–This is mostly Neanderthal
Magdalenian obtained 40 feet of cutting surface–this is mostly H. sapiens.
Such control of the cutting process means one can cut finer and finer detail
Here are some of the Venus figurines. The really good ones coemf rom the Gravettian and Magdalenian from 30 kyr on.
"The Berekhat Ram figurine and possibly Acheulian petroglyphs at Bhimbetka, India, would tend to support a model of very early symbolic development, as would purely taphonomic and logical dialectic. " ~ Robert G. Bednarik, “Art Origins”, Anthropos, 89(1994):169-180, p. 170
In a 2011 paper on religion in anthropology, Paul Pettit mentions the earliest figurines, and provides the data which shows that these were modified either by carving or painting.
" Before considering further the emergence of a spatial element to ritual, it is necessary to consider what could be the earliest known archaeological manifestations of any kind of belief system; these are natural objects resembling the human body (or parts of it) which have received minor amounts of intentional modification in order to bring out the similarity further. three of these pierres figures are known, two from the Lower Palaeolithic and one from the Middle. A lower Palaeolithic assemblage at Berekhat Ram in Golan Heights, Israel, dominated by Levallois flakes and containing a handful of bifaces dated imprecisely to between 230,000 and 790,000 (most probably 340-4500,000 BP), yielded a small 3.5 cm in maximum dimensions) pebble of basaltic tuff containing scoria clasts resembling a human torso and head (Goren-Inbar and Pelts 1994). This has been the subject of optical and scanning electron microscope study by D’Errico and Nowell (2000, who concluded that, unlike other pieces of scoriae found at the locale, groves found on the neck and sides of the piece were consistent with those produced by flint points used experimentally and thus that the figurine was intentionally modified. Similarly the Middle Acheulian (~400,00 BP) deposits at Tan-Tan, on the banks of he River Draa in Morocco, yielded a quartzite cobble (5.8 cm in maximum dimension) again reminiscent of a human body and modified with eight grooves and with red pigment (Bednarik, 2003). " Paul Pettitt, Religion and Ritual in the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic, in The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Ritual and Religion. edited by Timothy Insoll, (OUP Oxford, 2011), p. 333-334
“The Berekhat Ram pebble is not the only Acheulian find from Israel which cannot be readily attributed to utilitarian activities. The polished wooden plank found at Gesher Benot Ya’aqov falls into the same category. Non-utilitarian objects of the Mousterian have also been found, but they, too, have not been published and I refrain from discussing any of the unpublished Israeli finds here .” ~ Robert G. Bednarik, “The Paleolithic Art of Asia,” in S. Goldsmith, S. Garvie,D. Selin, and J. Smint eds. _Ancient Images, Ancient Thought, "The Arcaeology of Ideology; pp 383_390, Proceedings of the 23rd Ann. Chacmool Conference,University of Calgary, p. 388
Why would they not publish other stuff they have found? Because of group think and attacks by anthropologists who don’t want there to be ‘human’ traits to the archaics. Consider this:
" While we are on the above subject: another recently discovered example of Middle Palaeolithic sophistication is the flint cortex plaque from Quneitra, Golan Heights, Israel. It was excavated a few years ago by Dr. Naama Goren-Inbar, of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She described the find briefly in 1990, and later confided to your editor that she ‘dreads finding more such controversial objects’ because her colleagues then tend to question her credibility. Your editor finds it disturbing that majority view in archaeology can be enforced in this way. It is not the only such example to come to his attention, the German archaeologist Dr. Dietrich Mania, of Bilzingsleben fame, also confided to him that he is unwilling to publish the rest of his cultural material from that site because of the hostile reception of his previous reports. A senior American archaeologists discovered that his peers rejoiced in the fact that during his entire working life, they had collectively been able to ‘keep him out of all the mainstream journals’ through the refereeing system . Are these isolated cases, or symptoms of a more widespread attitude?" Robert G. Bednarick, “Middle Palaeolithic Engraving,” The Artefact 1996, 19:104
So much for the idea that science is about data–it is about the current group think!
The fact that red pigment was found on the Tan-tan figurine is a sign that it was considered a special object because they modified it. As noted above, lots of creation stories have man created from red clay.
Maybe in a day or two I will speak of a more ghoulish evidence of spiritual beliefs–a topic many anthropologists pooh-pooh, but others adamantly defend.
The fact that the major pre-requisite for religion, symbolic thought, can be documented as far back as 3 myr ago, should cause apologists to pause before they proclaim that small brained hominids were incapable of metaphysical thoughts. No doubt, this will make no difference to what people believe, however, the data doesn’t support the claim that small brained hominids were incapable of doing anything described in the Bible.
A Ghoulish form of spirituality.
“And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it , and brake it , and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body. 27 And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it; 28 For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.” Matthew 26:26-28
No matter how one looks at this, this is a symbolic cannibalism and it lies at the center of Christian worship, one of two commandments of our Lord. The question is, why set such an important issue, Christ’s sacrifice for us, in such a ghoulish setting?
On the old ASA list I noted that cannibalism is considered a sign of advanced intelligence by most anthropologists. So is the preparation of a body for burial. Some societies engage in the mortuary practice of defleshing (letting the vultures eat the flesh of a relative, intentionally cutting off the flesh from the bones of a relative as was done with Christian ossuarys in the Middle Ages and other practices. Evidence of intentional defleshing of a Homo habilis which dates to 1.5-2.0 myr ago. An abstract in the 1999 Paleoanthropology Society meeting notes:
“Stone tool cut marks on Stw 53, a Plio-Pleistocene hominid partial cranium from Sterkfontein Member 5 (Gauteng, South Africa), constitute the earliest unambiguous evidence that hominids disarticulated the remains of one another. The cut marks occur on the inferolateral aspect of the zygomatic process of the right maxilla. The position of the cut marks-a pattern that has been observed on a wide range of butchered mammalian species-is consistent with incision of the masseter muscle, presumably to remove the mandible from the cranium. It is not possible to infer the reasons for the intentional removal of the mandible of Stw 53. This evidence extends deeper into prehistory a pattern of tool assisted, hominid-on-hominid carcass reduction that is also evident in more recent stages of human evolution.” Travis Rayne Pickering, Tim D. White, and Nicholas Toth, “Stone Tool Cut Marks on STW 53, an Early Hominid from Sterkfontein, South Africa,” Abstracts for the Paleoanthropology Society Meetings, Columbus, Ohio, U.S.A., April 27-28, 1999, p. A17
I would point out that White and Toth are world renown anthropologists. For them to throw their weight behind intentional removal of a habilis jaw, says something. I would consider this evidence of either religion or burial practices among the Homo habilis, who also shows the earliest cranial evidence of an ability to speak.
Here are some reasonings to support what I am saying:
“Although the reader may flinch at the suggestion that cannibalism indicates higher cognitive abilities, historical records indicate that cannibalism practiced by Homo sapiens in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries served ceremonial more than nutritive purposes.” ~ Dean Falk, Braindance,(New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1992), p. 181-182
" To gain courage and strength the Menado_Alfuren cook a bouillon made of their slain enemies’ heads; the Ife make a stew of man, antelope, and some medicine; As late as 1895 the Chames of Cochin_China drank brandy mixed with the gall of their dead opponents;… " ~ Hans Askenasy, Cannibalism from Sacrifice to Survival, (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1994), p. 111
" In 1986 Tim White, of the University of California at Berkeley, and one of Don Johanson’s collaborators on, for example, the ‘Lucy’ skeleton, published a detailed analysis of the scratch marks on the Bodo skull. He found marks around the orbital and nasal regions, on top of the brow ridges, and along the back of the preserved skull cap. White considered every possibility he could think of to account for the marks: natural weathering of the specimen, rodent or carnivore gnawing, even abrasion or trauma before the skull became buried in the ground. After ruling out all of these possibilities, White was left with the possibility that these scratches were, indeed, cut marks. And if , he reasoned, they were cut marks, it probably meant that the skull had been defleshed. In fact White found that the patterning and locations of these cut marks were virtually identical to cut marks taxidermists made while defleshing the chimpanzee and gorilla skulls housed in the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. White kept open the question of why the Bodo skull might have been defleshed, but it would certainly seem reasonable to assume that the defleshing had been done after the Bodo individual had dies. Furthermore, we are left with the very real possibility that, whatever species of hominid the Bodo skull represents, this species’ social behavior included some kind of mortuary practice.
“At present, the Bodo skull represents the oldest example of any hominid giving special treatment to the body or skeleton of a comrade. Even if this was not a widespread activity for this hominid, the Bodo skull and the Krapina and Shanidar Neandertal skeletons raise the possibility that two distinct, non-sapiens species of Homo had had rituals and cultural practices that we have assumed are only within the capacity of members of our own species.” ~ Jeffrey H. Schwartz, What the Bones Tell Us, (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), p. 19
However, now evidence for defleshing goes back to 1.5-2.0 million years ago. Habilis now makes it 3 species that gave special treatment to the body of a comrade. This is one more evidence of humanity being on earth longer ago than many want to beleive.
Most people don’t know that cannibalism was widespread in human past. It’s existence has been largely doubted and suppressed by anthropologists fearful of offending native groups. But genetics tells the tale.
" A research team led by Simon Mead of University College, London, recently looked at the genetics of Fore women aged over 50. All these survivors had attended many funeral feasts and presumably must have possessed some genetic protection against the disease. Mead’s team analyzed the DNA of their prion protein gene and found that more than 75% had a distinctive genetic signature. Every person in Britain infected with mad cow disease, on the other hand, had the opposite genetic signature. "
" Having identified this protective signature, Mead ’ s team then analyzed other populations around the world. They found that every ethnic group they looked at possessed the signature with the exception of the Japanese, who had a protective signature of their own at a different site in the gene ." Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn, (New York: The Penguin Press, 2006), p. 156
If someone thinks this is denigrating to any group, consider what Jared Diamond says about people in the Highlands of New Guinea.
" The signs of warfare-related cannibalism among the Anasazi are an interesting story in themselves. While everyone acknowledges that cannibalism may be practiced in emergencies by desperate people, such as the Donner Party trapped by snow at Donner Pass en route to California in the winter of 1846-47, or by starving Russians during the siege of Leningrad during World War II, the existence of non-emergency cannibalism is controversial. In fact, it was reported in hundreds of non-European societies at the times when they were first contacted by Europeans within recent centuries. The practice took two forms: eating either the bodies of enemies killed in war, or else eating one’s own relatives who had died of natural causes. New Guineans with whom I have worked over the past 40 years have matter-of-factly described their cannibalistic practices, have expressed disgust at our own Western burial customs of burying relatives without doing them the honor of eating them, and one of my best New Guinean workers quit his job with me in 1965 in order to partake in the consumption of his recently deceased prospective son-in-law . There have also been many archaeological finds of ancient human bones in contexts suggestive of cannibalism."
Nevetheless, many or most European and American anthropologists, brought up to regard cannibalism with horror in their own societies, are also horrified at the thought of it being practiced by peoples that they admire and study, and so they deny its occurrence and consider claims of it as racist slander. They dismiss all the descriptions of cannibalism by non-European peoples themselves or by early European explorers as unreliable hearsay… "Jared Diamond, Collapse, (New York: Viking, 2005), p151-152
The New Guineans view cannibalism as an honor, it is a spiritual thing for them. The Anasazi reports he mentions are confirmed by human coprolites containing chemicals from human bodies! Science News, Vol. 158, No. 11, Sept. 9, 2000, p. 164.
If cannibalism was widespread, and it was a spiritual event, a means of disposing of the dead, then religious symbolism may extend further back into the past than we normally think.
The fossils at Gran Dolina in Spain from 780,000 years ago were defleshed.
" The most recently proposed case for the early cannibalism
comes from Gran Dolina, Spain, where even more ancient remains of H. heidelbergensis, about 780,000 years old, have been recovered. The excavators noticed striations on a skull fragment of hominid temporal bone and later found similar markings on a pair of toe bones. An examination of casts of the striations under scanning electron microscope revealed the telltale V-shaped cross-section of stone tool cut marks like those observed on the Bodo specimen. The dozen cut marks on the temporal fragments occur on the mastoid crest, an attachment point for the sternocleidomastoid muscle, indicating that flesh had likely been removed from the bones. Other animal bones at Gran Dolina have identical defleshing and dismembering marks as well as impact fractures from hammerstones. In contrast, carnivore tooth marks occur on only a small percentage of bones from the cave, so it appears that hominids were mainly responsible for butcheringthese bones. " Donald Johanson and Blake Edgar, From Lucy to Language, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), p. 93
Recently DNA recovered from the Gran Dolina hominids show that they are Neanderthals, not H. Heidelbergensis. And that presents a different problem.
" More consequentially, the date of this split has been pushed way back. The latest estimate comes from a remarkable cache of fossils called the Sima hominins, the remains of at least 28 ancient humans found in a cave called Sima de los Huesos (pit of bones) in the Atapuerca mountains of northern Spain. They are 430,000 years old and were long believed to be H. heidelbergensis. But in 2016 their DNA – the oldest ancient human DNA ever sequenced – revealed that they were actually Neanderthals, and pushed the split between modern humans and Neanderthals/Denisovans back to between 550,000 and 765,000 years ago. That all but rules out H. heidelbergensis and points the finger at an earlier species. “For about 35 years, I’ve argued that Homo heidelbergensis represents the most reasonable last common ancestor for Neanderthals and modern humans,” says Stringer. “I don’t believe that any more.” Graham Lawton, “Becoming Human”, New Scientist, April 3, 2020, p.40-41
So, while these are Neanderthals, the split between us, the Neanderthals, and the Denisovians is now pushed way back and who the parent species was is up in the air.
Anyway, possible evidence of ritual cannibalism appears to be widespread among our species, and it is a religious event. One of the Andean soccer players describes his eating of human flesh for nutritional cannibalism. It too was a spiritual event.
"The sliver of meat, dried like a strip of jerky, had no flavor. It was tough and odorless, neutral to the senses.
Yet “I swallowed it with disgust,” writes Eduardo Strauch in his memoir “Out of the Silence” (Amazon Crossing), out now. “I felt my entire body rejecting that tiny bite … a taboo thousands of years old had been crushed in my mouth.”
It was his first taste of human flesh.
Strauch’s horrifying story of survival in the high Andes was the stuff of gruesome global headlines in 1972. The tale of modern cannibalism — the Donner Party of the late 20th century — spawned the bestselling book “Alive” and a Hollywood film.
But to Strauch, who kept silent about the ordeal for decades after he and 15 others endured 72 days stranded on a glacier, it was a spiritual experience.
“It united me with the universe and with other living beings in a profound way, ” the Uruguayan explains in his book, written in 2012 and now translated into English." Eduardo Strauch recalls eating friends after plane crash
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