News you won't see in controlled mainstream media.

Thanks, Bex, for a very interesting look at human evolution. It's something that certainly catches my interest because we're examining our roots and where we came from. I like to speculate as much as anyone else about what these hominids were like, and I wonder how "human" they were. I think most of us wonder about that. As always, it's the evidence that's going to tell us, and we learn more all the time as more comes to light.



I saw pictures of skulls and discussed what Yahya was saying about the fossils. What's wrong with being 40% complete for Lucy? She is not the only existing australopithecine fossil. Sure it would be nice to have more of the skeleton, but bearing in mind that humans are symmetrical, there's quite a lot we can learn from the 40%, especially when we compare it with other fossils. Or are you saying you will not look at any fossil which is not 100% complete because you don't believe anything can be learned from anything less?



The situation is more complex than this. None of the hominid fossils are "obviously" human or ape and if you looked at any of the links I provided, they will explain to you how they are both similar and different to apes and humans. That is what makes them transitional between humans and an apelike ancestor. Paleoanthropoligists are not just "convinced by sight" and they do not make their decisions about fossils from a cursory glance. We can take a case in point with Turkana Boy, which you discuss a little later.



Can you explain this please? How does extinction automatically disqualify anything from being a transitional fossil? Or is this the "were you there" argument again, claiming that nothing can be learned from the past? Again, if you took a moment to look on Wikipedia at some of the homind fossils discussed earlier, or Talkorigins, you will find information about how those fossils are transitional between an apelike ancestor and humans. Earlier, CTD and I were discussing an article about foot morphology and fossil feet, which showed in detail the transitional characteristics of these: transitional meaning intermediate between the two. Almost every post you write seems to contain the statement that there are no transitional forms of anything, anywhere, while the actual evidence of their existence is ignored.

From here you move on to discussing Turkana Boy. Indeed he shows some characteristics of modern humans. You then seem to be claiming that scientists are making up the bits about him that are not like us. Yet it is these "bits" which show him to be different from us -- and different enough that some scientists have proposed that some fossils which appear to be intermediate between Turkana Boy (homo erectus) and us should themselves be classed as a species in their own right, homo heidelbergensis. The classification of these kinds of fossils is tricky for the very reason that there are so many transitionals between homo erectus and us. This really appears to be a case of constant gradual change where the differences at either end are obvious, but graded so finely that it's hard to draw a line.

Back to Turkana Boy, there are small but significant differences which nonetheless delineate the skeleton as being homo erectus and not modern.

source


The skull is very similar to that of Java Man, which many creationists consider to be an ape. However, it is interesting to compare both of these to the skull of a modern human. While the Java Man skull cap is an extraordinary match for that of Turkana Boy, the differences between these and the modern skull are readily apparent. What's more, remember that the cranial capacity of Turkana Boy is equal to less than 1% of the modern population of any race or sex. If you looked at the link I provided to brain sizes, you will also see that it is relative to body size, so it is not an absolute measurement. Turkana Boy's cranial capacity is consistent with that of other homo erectus skulls of the time period. And neandertals, while possessing slightly larger brains than modern humans, were also much more robust.

You said:


This is the first time I've heard this assertion. What is your source please?

As far as discussing characteristics that we consider "human," such as speech and clothing and so on, I don't see it as a problem that homo erectus might have been capable of rudimentary speech, nor that neandertals might have talked. This capacity developed at some point so why not with these species? I think creationists want to characterise evolutionists as insisting that early humans had to be primitive apes; maybe this ups the horror-factor for those who don't want to think that we're related to apes. I enjoy learning about the possible human characteristics of our predecessors and I certainly have no burning desire to demote them to savages in every regard. This may have been a prevalent attitude in the past, when racist attitudes were more common and sometimes people wanted to believe that certain races were "less evolved" or more savage, but we've moved on from this and someone who still believes this is going to find themselves marginalised. Again, it's about looking at the evidence. Instead of saying that races like Australian aborigines must necessarily be more "primitive," what we find on the whole is that these people have tooth sizes more typical of archaic (early) homo sapiens, and that the smallest tooth sizes are found in areas of the world where food-processing techniques have been used for the longest time. Our mesolithic ancestors (10,000) years ago were also about 10% more robust than we are now, and 30,000 years ago they were 30% more robust. We're in transition even now.

You said:


Yet if you look at the skulls, you will notice small differences between them that amount to big differences when you look at the first, the middle, and the last. These cannot be explained by simple racial differences; there are no races alive today with completely absent chins, jaws that thrust to such an extent, or brow ridges so heavy. What's more, the cranial capacity can be seen to grow from the size of an ape's to the size of a modern human's. Why do you need to see the rest of the skeleton when looking at differences between these skulls? And again, taking them as a series, where do you draw the line and say this one is an ape, but the one next to it is a human?

The quote mine you discuss is quite honest in saying that we would like to see more fossils, because the hominid fossil record is incomplete. It is complete enough, as can be seen in the above link, for us to learn a great deal; but there is much more to find out, and no doubt ideas which will have to be revised in the light of new evidence. This is also why artists' depictions change, as we learn more and they can make their depictions more accurate. I find it odd that someone is laughing at science making progress in the light of new evidence: this is exactly what should happen if we're going to be open to learning more about the world.
What's more, as RAZD pointed out, intermediaries between apes and humans are going to have characteristics of both, and that's what the artists depict. What else do you expect to see?

One last point on this: Hooten's quote is from 1931. Creationists give quotes that are decades old and seem to think that nothing has moved on since then. If you want to find out about modern facial reconstruction techniques, here is an interesting site about Otzi the Iceman, the 5000 year old mummy which was found in the Alps. It talks about the meticulous techniques, including CAT scans, which were used to reconstruct his face. CAT scans didn't exist in the 1930s. Though again, I don't see the significance of the discussion here of artists' depictions. They become more accurate as we learn more. But with transitional hominids, you're always going to get the ape/human mix depicted because that is what we actually see in the fossils. What's more, they are not based on individual fossils, but on what we know from existing groups of fossils.

By the way, a niggling point but I'm typing on a forum and I occasionally make typos. If someone is running a website which purports to be scientific, then I expect them to spell their sources' names correctly. What I found was that Hooten's name is spelled in the same incorrect way on quite a few creationist sites, which indicates that Yahya did the usual creationist thing by borrowing off someone else rather than trying to verify the information himself. It's how quote mines tend to get passed around, without anyone ever being interested in establishing their original provenance or indeed their contemporary relevance.

The last thing I'd like to say about Piltdown Man is that if the proper tests were done on it in the first place, it would have been shown very quickly to be a fraud. You can find a timeline at the BBC site which states:



These kinds of tests would be routinely done today. What's more, there is enough knnowledge of the fossil record now for a forgery like this to show up as a glaring anomaly which would be immediately suspect. Piltdown Man has an interesting history and it serves as a reminder to always be thorough in investigating evidence, but it does not do what creationists wish for it to do, which is indicate that every single fossil should somehow be suspect and that all scientists are prone to being fooled by this. Nebraska Man is a similar minor case, though it never gained the sort of acceptance that Piltdown Man did. It has been built up by creationists looking for evidence of frauds so that they can say that fossils are hoaxes and scientists are liars.

If you would like more clarification about the terminology "hominid" or "hominin," then you are welcome to read here. Perhaps I should be using "hominin" here, as I am using the definition from Talk Origins which you provided. I learned the word "hominid" and it stuck in my mind.



We've spoken about this before. No serious scientist claims that they are 100% certain about anything. We can be nearly completely certain about some things maybe, but we're not doing science if our minds are completely closed. And as we would like to see many more transitional hominid fossils in order to clarify our own ancestral tree, then it would be obviously silly to claim that we're in no doubt about any of it -- the cladograms I linked to earlier show where some of these uncertainties lie. This is why people become scientists: because there are things to learn, discoveries to be made. You seem to want scientists to be as closed-minded and dogmatic about their positions as creationists are about theirs. Creationists don't appear to accept new evidence; they stick to trying to prove that the Bible is literal and therefore evolution must be wrong -- or do you disagree with this?

If you've got a clickable link to real information about this 1.7 million year old hut discovered by Leakey, can I have it please? When I attempt to Google this I get a slew of creationist websites. I would still like to establish the provenance of the claims being made here about this hut -- what it is exactly, and what Leakey says about it. I explained that I'm skeptical of it as Yahya portrays it because nothing like this is found in Britain; you get some post holes which are 10,000 years old and these are major finds.

So you really want to paint modern evolutionists as being complicit in racist ideas and occurrences of 100 years ago? This is desperation really. We're talking here about fossil evidence, which is as it should be. We can leave the racial slurs, conspiracy theories, and assertions that evolution is responsible for all the evils of the world to CTD in his designated thread; they have nothing to do with analysing the physical evidence for hominid evolution.



What I do is cite my source for the information I am giving so that you can see I'm not making it up. I expect anyone I talk with here to do the same, and I do visit the links they post. I don't consider this to be the same thing as taking a video or a chunk from someone's website, pasting it here, and expecting it to be refuted. I gave an example of how we could constructively narrow the field to something like a discussion of Lucy. Why do you think I ask my students to write things in their own words, rather than handing in printouts of web pages as homework? I want to see that they have digested that information themselves and that they can articulate it to me, which includes what they understood from it.

Again, please let me know if there's anything you feel is important that I've missed out. These posts are very time-consuming and you're going to end up getting me there: I can't spend hours every day on this. I suggest that your time would be better spent by looking up homind fossils on Wikipedia and learning something about what they can tell us.