Liechtenstein’s Daily Bellfeatures Vedic (Hindu) creationist Michael Cremo on “Forbidden Archeology, Our Billion-Year-Old Human History and the Spiritual Satisfaction of the Vedas” (Sunday, May 22, 2011 – with Anthony Wile):
Daily Bell: Tell us about your book, Forbidden Archeology , and why it is so controversial in the West. Give us its main thesis.[ … ]
Michael Cremo:In the 1970s, American archeologists led by Cynthia Irwin Williams discovered stones tools at Hueyatlaco, near Puebla, Mexico. The stone tools were of an advanced type, made only by humans like us. A team of geologists, from the United States Geological Survey and universities in the United States, came to Hueyatlaco to date the site.
The author of a new study claims that humans learned to walk upright primarily to beat each other:
“The results of this study are consistent with the hypothesis that our ancestors adopted bipedal posture so that males would be better at beating and killing each other when competing for females,” says David Carrier, a biology professor who conducted the study. “Standing up on their hind legs allowed our ancestors to fight with the strength of their forelimbs, making punching much more dangerous.”
That also explains, Carrier says, why women find tall men attractive.
Carrier says many scientists are reluctant to consider an idea that paints our ancestors as violent.”Among academics there often is resistance to the reality that humans are a violent species. It’s an intrinsic desire to have us be more peaceful than we are,” he says.
In the age of Evilicious, few others have noted this trend among academics. The study demonstrates that men hit harder in an upright position. Read More ›
Charles C. Mann reports at National Geographic (June 2011):
We used to think agriculture gave rise to cities and later to writing, art, and religion. Now the world’s oldest temple suggests the urge to worship sparked civilization.
He is referring to Gobekli Tepe,
Before them are dozens of massive stone pillars arranged into a set of rings, one mashed up against the next. Known as Göbekli Tepe (pronounced Guh-behk-LEE TEH-peh), the site is vaguely reminiscent of Stonehenge, except that Göbekli Tepe was built much earlier and is made not from roughly hewn blocks but from cleanly carved limestone pillars splashed with bas-reliefs of animals—a cavalcade of gazelles, snakes, foxes, scorpions, and ferocious wild boars. The assemblage was built some 11,600 years ago, seven millennia before the Great Pyramid of Giza. It contains the oldest known temple. Indeed, Göbekli Tepe is the oldest known example of monumental architecture—the first structure human beings put together that was bigger and more complicated than a hut. When these pillars were erected, so far as we know, nothing of comparable scale existed in the world.
This site, older than Stonehenge, was constructed, archaeologists think, before writing, metal, pottery, or wheels, and – along with other recent finds – has changed the way archaeologists see prehistoric peoples.
Briefly, Mann says that the site has dealt a heavy blow to the reigning theory that sees agriculture as the organizing principle of prehistoric society, because the massive structures point so clearly to religion. The level of organization required is much greater than that required for village-level subsistence agriculture, and the consensus is that concern about a greater reality is the only plausible reason people fell led to bother. Incidentally, the site appears to have been purely ceremonial; no town grew up in its midst.
Recently, as some may recall, the pastor wrote to E. O.Wilson:
Gr8 you got it str8 about humans vs. ants. Keep on keeping on. – Yr Pastor
Seems the pastor didn’t believe in Wilson’s sociobiology theories and lots of other tenets of materialist faith. Now Wilson doesn’t either.
Skinny:
Earlier this year, sociobiologist E. O. “Dear Pastor” Wilson disowned his “inclusive fitness” (kin selection) theory, developed from his study of ants and bees. According to his theory, among life forms that live in groups, many members may give up the chance of reproducing their selfish genes so that the group as a whole is more fit. The problem is that it’s not clear how this situation could arise.
What’s very clear is that hundreds of cast members of the long-running Evolutionary Psychology Show ( everyone from the evolutionary agony aunt to the big bazooms boys) sense their jobs at risk. Hence viper mode!
In “Biologists Team Up to Quash New View of Cooperation”, Thomas Bartlett profiles Wilson’s co-author Martin Nowak, a Harvard math and biology prof for Chronicle of Higher Education, outlining that Nowak may have “an enviable resume, with tens of millions in grants and hundreds of publications,” but he also has a red bulls-eye on his back.
In this latest episode of history’s longest running soap, human evolution, we learn that remains of Mousterian (Neanderthal) culture have been found in Polar Urals in northern Russia, dated at over 28,500 years old (more than 8,000 years later than Neanderthals are thought to have died out), challenging previous theories.
The distinguishing feature of Mousterian culture, which developed during the Middle Palaeolithic (-300,000 to -33,000 years), is the use of a very wide range of flint tools, mainly by Neanderthal Man in Eurasia, but also by Homo sapiens in the Near East. – “Last Neanderthals Near the Arctic Circle?” (May 13, 2011)
… just so some tenured airhead can prove common ancestry of humans with apes? What did I ever do to you folks anyway?” Here Casey Luskin summarizes the growing recognition that Neanderthals were just us, with nutcracker jaws: In fact, Neanderthals buried their dead, and they had an average brain size which was slightly larger than that of modern humans. Perhaps it’s time to stop seeing Neanderthals as a primitive species–a popular icon of evolution–but rather as a sub-race of our own species. To Giberson and Collins’s credit, they recognize this point. But they do not recognize that it therefore prevents Neanderthals from demonstrating that humans share ancestry with something that isn’t human.If Giberson and Collins want to make the Read More ›
[Contest now judged. here. “Impress your friends with a piece of Mars is open until Saturday, May 28, 2011. The “Why do people refuse to read books they are attacking?” contest is open till Saturday June 4.] In this version of the very long-running human evolution soap opera (Ewen Callaway, Nature News, 9 May 2011), we didn’t kill the Neanderthals; they died before we got there. (Episode 4440). In a different episode, they were our squeezes and in-laws – which is probably why we killed them. Anyway, they weren’t as stupid as they pretended, either. Some folk, looking at all this, say “Science, unlike religion, changes its mind in the light of new evidence.” That may be so (the evidence Read More ›
In this episode, “Were Neandertals and Modern Humans Just Ships in the Night?”, Michael Balter (Science 9 May 2011) adds to the legends of the state of the, er, relationship between modern humans and Neanderthals: Read More ›
Turns up as Heidelberg man. At MSNBC, Jennifer Viegas reports that (5/4/2011) “Heidelberg Man links humans, Neanderthals:
Study of 400,000-year-old fossil may shed light on what species looked like”:
The determination is based on the remains of a single Heidelberg Man (Homo heidelbergensis) known as “Ceprano,” named after the town near Rome, Italy, where his fossil — a partial cranium — was found.Previously, this 400,000-year-old fossil was thought to represent a new species of human, Homo cepranensis. The latest study, however, identifies Ceprano as being an archaic member of Homo heidelbergensis.
Down one species then.
The finding may shed light on what the species that gave rise to both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens looked like.
Because they were right-handed! Or so says this MSNBCstory on handedness and language:
Frayer and his colleagues looked at these markings on the teeth of Neanderthals (from around 100,000 years ago) and their ancestors from 500,000 years ago. In both groups, most of the teeth showed more right handed scratches than left.
[ … ]
No animals other than humans show such a bias toward right-handedness. In some primates, such as chimps and gorillas, a small 5 percent shift toward the right can be seen in some studies. This is an example of brain asymmetry, where one side of the brain takes on functions that the other side doesn’t. Read More ›
This one’s for DNA buffs: Enter the world of ancient Egyptian DNA and you are asked to choose between two alternate realities: one in which DNA analysis is routine, and the other in which it is impossible. “The ancient-DNA field is split absolutely in half,” says Tom Gilbert, who heads two research groups at the Center for GeoGenetics in Copenhagen, one of the world’s foremost ancient-DNA labs.Unable to resolve their differences, the two sides publish in different journals, attend different conferences and refer to each other as ‘believers’ and ‘sceptics’ — when, that is, they’re not simply ignoring each other. The Tutankhamun study reignited long-standing tensions between the two camps, with sceptics claiming that in this study, as in most Read More ›
An apparently reasonable thesis re the origin of human societies is offer by an archaeology team that argues (Science 22 April 2011), Early Farmers Went Heavy on the StarchRecent evidence shows that agriculture began in fits and starts in the Near East, more than 10,000 years ago. Now a U.S.-German team is gathering the first comprehensive evidence that the earliest farmers in the Levant ate a wide variety of plants, including starchy tubers, which may have allowed them to experiment with grain cultivation without fear of starvation, the team reported at the Society for American Archaeology meeting. Their interpretation dovetails with the observation that hunter-gatherer societies do not, as a rule, innovate much over millennia. Innovation happened rapidly, by comparison, in Read More ›
In “The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science” (Mother Jones, April 18, 2011), Chris Mooney offers to explain “How our brains fool us on climate, creationism, and the vaccine-autism link.” For example, Consider a person who has heard about a scientific discovery that deeply challenges her belief in divine creation—a new hominid, say, that confirms our evolutionary origins. What happens next, explains political scientist Charles Taber of Stony Brook University, is a subconscious negative response to the new information—and that response, in turn, guides the type of memories and associations formed in the conscious mind. “They retrieve thoughts that are consistent with their previous beliefs,” says Taber, “and that will lead them to build an argument and challenge what Read More ›
In Scientific American, we learn “ThNeuroscience of the Gut: Strange but true: the brain is shaped by bacteria in the digestive tract” (Robert Martone, April 19, 2011): We human beings may think of ourselves as a highly evolved species of conscious individuals, but we are all far less human than most of us appreciate. Scientists have long recognized that the bacterial cells inhabiting our skin and gut outnumber human cells by ten-to-one. Indeed, Princeton University scientist Bonnie Bassler compared the approximately 30,000 human genes found in the average human to the more than 3 million bacterial genes inhabiting us, concluding that we are at most one percent human. We are only beginning to understand the sort of impact our bacterial Read More ›
Latest news from Loughborough University in Leistershire, UK (18 April 2011): “Sweat research sparks evolution speculation”: Research at Loughborough University to find out where athletes sweat the most has revealed surprising results (the cntral and lower back, near the spine). [ … ] Discussions with colleagues with expertise in evolutionary biology raised a speculative explanation. Prof Havenith said: “Our research records scientific data but asking ‘why’ raises an interesting question. “If this pattern that we observe is a remnant from when we moved on all fours, before we walked upright, then sweating on the back would make sense. One biologit commented, “Does this imply that human ancestors lost body hair (and started sweating) before we became bipedal? This would go Read More ›
