PART IV: ORIGINS
by Anthony Forwood (2011)
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26: The Evolution of Early Man
Our conception of the physical
evolution of the human species is based primarily on the evidence of fossilized bones. Through similarities and differences in
morphology, and by estimating their
ages through various scientific dating methods based on the geological evidence surrounding the finds, scientists have been able to construct a picture of the
evolutionary development from ape to man that fits the Darwinian principles of evolution.
Darwin wasn’t thinking about humans when he wrote Origin
of Species, living
in a time when the beliefs of the Church still had a large influence on how people saw the human species in relation to the physical world. It was
still believed that a purely divine force created humans in an already fully
evolved state and not so far in the past, and so Darwin was only thinking about
the other lesser species of our planet. It was only after his book was
published that others of a more scientific mind began to apply his theory to the human species as well. This is when the
sciences of archeology and geology were just beginning to develop, and a new
scientifically objective outlook on the world was awakening intelligent minds
to a new perception of reality to replace the stale and patchwork understanding
that was being promoted through the beliefs of the Church. The many odd finds
of fossilized bones and other artifacts that had been made over the years and which
were sought out and collected by wealthy antiquarians for their own interest and amusement were
suddenly being reconsidered in light of Darwin’s theory. Through these treasures and the many others that have been found
since, a story of the evolutionary and cultural development of the human
species has been pieced together, using Darwin’s theory of evolution as a blueprint.
Apart from the bones and fossils that have been found and are used as the primary
physical evidence of our human evolution, there are also the
artifacts – man-made objects – that are used to reflect
the level of our intelligence and cultural development. It has been commonly
assumed that because these bones and artifacts can be shown to generally follow
a chain of development that reflects the intellectual and cultural
primitiveness of early man slowly progressing into the complex society we’re
familiar with today, that this must be an accurate reflection of the
development of our human form and intellect as a species. In some ways it might
be, but this doesn’t mean that we were really as primitive as we currently
think, and that we’ve only recently been able rise up above a primitive
animalistic nature to use our minds so much more productively than just for our
daily survival. The publication of Origin of Species was an immediate sensation and
had a heavy influence on the thinking of scientists who sought to find an explanation of our
origins that made sense in context with the various
fields of science that were developing. Other possible theories have been
completely ignored or unfairly disregarded, and any physical evidence that
suggests anything different than the established theory has been suppressed or misidentified.
It may even be that at certain
points in our past there were influences from outside sources that both guided
and limited our beliefs in this area.
Let’s take a look at the
evolutionary development of the human species as defined by the scientific establishment, to see
the chain of anatomical evolution as it’s currently understood by the scientific
establishment.
Homo Afarensis
Our earliest known hominid ancestor was Australopithecus Afarensis, the
first hominid to walk upright. This species arrived in Africa at about 4,000,000 BC. His brain was no larger
than that of a chimpanzee (300 to 600 cc), and he had the distinct
ape-like arms and legs that characterize the great apes of today. He was incapable of speech and could
only have used gestures and calls to communicate. This early hominid only stood
three to four feet tall when fully erect. He subsisted mostly on nuts and
fruit, but occasionally ate meat. This species had a life span of about fifty
years.
Homo Habilis
A number of hominid species evolved from Homo Afarensis and co-existed together on the
African continent for a time. Of these, Homo
Habilis, who
stood about four feet tall, arrived at about 2,000,000 BC. He is believed to be
our direct ancestor because he had the unique hand dexterity that we humans
also possess. He also had larger frontal lobes than previous hominids, which gave him the
ability to plan and to solve problems. However, it appears from studying the
fossilized brains of these creatures that Habilis gained
his greater brain-power because of a change in the brain’s structure, and not
just because of its increased size (600 to 750 cc). Homo Habilis was a
meat eater, although he only ever scavenged it, rather than hunting and killing
it himself. He was also the first hominid to use the simplest stone tools, thus showing the first
signs of conscious thought.
Homo Ergaster and Homo Erectus
After Homo Habilis had been around for a few hundred
thousand years, Homo Ergaster and his immediate descendent Homo
Erectus arrived, no later than about 1,500,000 BC. Ergaster
stood over six feet tall, and appeared very much like modern humans in his
anatomy and posture, although he had a heavy jaw, flattened nose, and thick
brow-ridge. Ergaster had much less body hair than his ancestors, and had
developed sweat glands to further reduce his body heat in the increasing
dryness of the African savannah. He was the first hominid to develop a protruding nose, whereas all
previous ancestors had nostrils that were flat with the surface of the face.
His brain was almost as big as that of a modern human, at almost 1000 cc, but
it still took him half a million years before he learned to make and use a
hand-axe.
Ergaster was no great hunter, and although
he might eat almost anything that was edible if he was hungry enough, he
regularly scavenged meat for his diet, usually only ever attempting to take
down an animal himself if it was old or incapable of putting up much of a
struggle. Ergaster had the ability to make simple deductions about his
world, giving him greater adaptability than his ancestors. Although Ergaster
only had a very rudimentary form of speech that limited his thinking and
ability to communicate, he appears to have maintained complex social
relationships and lived in close, trusting families and small communities that
in certain seasons might have consisted of up to perhaps a hundred or so people.
Ergaster began to migrate out of Africa and into Europe about a million years ago.
Late Ergaster, also
known as Homo Erectus, began
to appear in the Middle East and on the edges of Europe and Asia no earlier than 1,800,000 BC, after having
spent about 200,000 years in Africa.[1]
Erectus was almost identical to Ergaster but had a thicker skull
and more prominent brow-ridge. He had a cranial capacity of between 700 and
1300 cc. He spread as far north as the Black Sea, and eastward past the
Red Sea, along the Iranian coast, across India, through the Himalayan foothills, into South-East Asia, until finally reaching
China. For some strange reason,
Erectus doesn’t seem to have ever developed the refined stone tools that his most recent ancestors from Africa had
developed and used, and instead continued to use primitive tools, never developing
anything better. In spite of this, Erectus outlived Ergaster and
thrived for almost one and a half million years with little evidence of further development until he died out less
than fifty thousand years ago.
At some point in the evolution of these two races of the human species, between about 1,400,000
BC and 500,000 BC, fire began to be harnessed and controlled. Early man used it
for warmth and protection from animals, and eventually came to use it for
cooking food as well.
Homo Heidelbergensis
At about 800,000 BC, Homo
Heidelbergensis arrived in Western Europe, the descendent of Homo
Ergaster.
Standing almost six feet tall, he was stronger, hardier, and smarter than his
ancestor. Although he still had the sloping forehead and heavy brow, his
cranium was larger, with a brain-size of about 1250 cc, but he lacked a
well-developed neocortex, which is necessary for
higher brain functioning. He used stone tools and wooden spears, and was a superb hunter of
larger animals and knew how to plan his kills and use strategy. At this point
in time, the variety of large animals living in this northern part of the globe
included the horse, giant deer, wolf, various big cats, the elephant, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus, so he had plenty of game
for his diet, but also had to work hard to get it.
Heidelbergensis was very adaptable, able to deal
with the changing weather patterns of the ice age period, and it appears that he was the first
hominid to build crude shelters. He arrived as far
north as England by 400,000 BC during one of the warmer
interglacial periods.
Heidelbergensis is believed to have used a
rudimentary language, with simple nouns and
verbs to symbolize the most common things in everyday life. Although his
thoughts were still firmly rooted in the present, and he had yet to develop a
conception of longer-term events, he nevertheless applied his mind well to
short-term daily tasks.
Heidelbergensis didn’t bury his dead as later
species would come to do, but would apparently just leave them for predators or
the elements, and this indicates that he had no spiritual understandings regarding life and death,
although he would probably have grieved for the loss when a loved one died, having
the emotional characteristics that distinguish all mammalian species.
Heidelbergensis eventually spread wide across the
northern lands and to every continent except the Americas and Australia. Within 150,000 years, he
began to evolve into two distinctly separate races, Homo Neanderthalensis and Homo Sapiens.
Homo Neanderthalensis
Neanderthal man arrived in Europe about 200,000 years after Homo
Heidelbergensis, or
about 400,000 BC, and lived there for at least 300,000 years, leaving us no
signs that he did any sort of trading or traveling. In spite of this, his
remains have been found all across Eurasia, but not in Africa or the Far East. Although shorter and
stockier than Heidelbergensis, he was well suited for the extreme
weather conditions and harsh living conditions of the
time. He had a brain that was larger than our own, although his prefrontal
lobes were smaller so he wasn’t as efficient at
reasoning as we are. He was an expert hunter, as well as skilled in making stone
tools, apparently being the
first hominid to tip his spear with a stone blade. He cooked
his food and wore clothes. He had the capability of speech, and was emotional
like us. His language had developed from that of Heidelbergensis into
one with greater flexibility and more complex sentence structure. Thoughts and
questions about the future and the consequences of his actions would have been
contemplated and discussed with others of his kind. He lived in small groups
where the bonding was very strong and each depended on the others for survival,
so disputes between them would have been few. He had an awareness of himself as a living being, and conceived
for himself his place in the world. He understood what was normal and what was
unusual to his environment. In spite of this mental capacity, however, Neanderthalensis
didn’t develop an intellectual mind for the thousands of generations that
he existed. He had a normal life span of about thirty to forty years. Although
there are a few signs that he sometimes buried his dead, there seems to be no
ritual surrounding these acts, suggesting that it was
merely a means of disposal and not due to any sort of spiritual beliefs. He left few if any traces of any art or other signs of having a creative
imagination until after Homo Sapiens also arrived in the area, and
this suggests that the latter race were influential in this respect. The two
races lived together in Europe for at least ten thousand years before
Neanderthal man died out at around 25,000 BC. The reason for his extinction is not certain.
Homo Sapien
At least as early as 150,000
years ago, while Neanderthal man was arising in other colder parts of the
world, the ice-free parts of the African continent were seeing the appearance of his
close cousin, Homo Sapien. Life
was completely different for this species than it was for its northern cousin
the Neanderthal. The environment was harsh in the opposite extreme for the Sapien
species, being arid, rainless desert where for the Neanderthal it was cold
and damp in the northern glacial landscape.
Homo Sapien was almost identical to modern
humans (Homo Sapien Sapien) in
physical form, without the heavy brow and sloping forehead of his Neanderthal cousin, and instead having the prominent
forehead that we see in our species today.
Like his cousin, but for
different reasons, Sapien had to live by his wits. Survival
was just as hard as in the north, and the possibility of extinction was an equal threat. It’s believed that he had
to be able to reason and to plan ahead and to use his imagination out of
necessity, which forced his rapid mental development. By about 100,000 BC, he
was beginning to master the art of language, even beyond the
linguistic development that Neanderthal man had reached. His imaginative powers would
have allowed him to think in metaphors and to create analogies, which was an
increased advantage in his mental development. He knew the benefit of having
allies, of adapting and of recognizing and taking advantage of situations to
manipulate them into his favor.
At about 100,000 BC, Sapien began to migrate out of Africa and populate the rest of the globe, reaching
almost every continent. In Europe, he did exceptionally well, but at a cost to
his cousin the Neanderthal. By 30,000 BC, Sapien was
showing signs of his increasing cultural development, leaving his mark in the
form of cave paintings for later generations to reflect on and
admire, as well as clay figurines and intricate carvings made out of rock and bone. With these artistic creations, he left a vague history of his
people’s life in the symbolic representations that revealed both his
intelligence and his imagination. What he believed about the nature of reality
back then is uncertain, but it’s obvious that he had already begun to develop
an understanding of his existence that had spiritual elements to it.
Homo Sapien Sapien
Homo Sapien Sapien, also
known as Cro-Magnon man, was physically indistinguishable from
modern humans. He was tall, long-legged, and muscular. He had a high forehead,
prominent chin, an aquiline nose, and small, even teeth. It’s believed by
mainstream scientists that Cro-Magnon man emerged out of Africa at about 100,000 BC and journeyed through the
Middle East to finally arrive in Europe while it was still in the grips of the last
ice age, at about 30,000 BC.
Europe had up until then been inhabited by another species of human –
Neanderthal – who had lived there since 200,000 BC.
Scientists now admit that Neanderthal man was an entirely different species
than Cro-Magnon man. These two species lived side by side for at least 10,000
years before Neanderthal man finally died out, or was perhaps exterminated, leaving Cro-Magnon the
only living human species on Earth. Cro-Magnon lived in
settlements that were larger than those of Neanderthal. He was a trader and
traveled long distances, eventually spreading to every habitable region of the
planet. He was the first hominid to make and use baked pottery, and to weave baskets.
One of the most startling things
about Cro-Magnon man was that he was such a significantly
skilled artist, having created sophisticated cave paintings and carvings as early as 30,000 BC. This artistic sophistication arose suddenly and seemingly
out of nowhere in an already advanced stage of development. Among his cave
paintings are also more symbolic forms, such as dots, grid patterns, and
squares. These were representations of abstract ideas and were probably commonly
recognized among his kind. Caves appear to have been used by Cro-Magnon for
social gatherings, and therefore would have been the likeliest place for
spiritual activities to take place. His early art forms
– the carvings and paintings – appear to be the artifacts of an early spiritual tradition.
By 10,000 BC, Cro-Magnon man had learned the skills of agriculture, animal domestication, metalworking, writing, religion,
politics, and so much more.
This is the evolutionary
development of our ancestral lineage, according to mainstream
science.
The Missing Link and Other Inconsistencies in Our Evolution
Going back to about 7,000,000 BC,
an ancestral hominid species is supposed to have existed that links
the human species to the chimpanzees. This would be the
‘missing link’, the species that was
our common ancestor, but for which there’s not a scratch of physical evidence to show that it ever actually existed.
However, genetic evidence apparently shows that chimpanzees
branched off from the hominid line at about this point in time, thus linking us
to them.
However, a slight problem has
recently arisen with the discovery of Australopithecus Anamensis, a hominid that existed at about 4,000,000 BC. This
species was very similar to Afarensis in many ways, but other aspects
seem to be more human-like than in the later hominid species. This has created some
uncertainty as to the variety of branching that has actually occurred in the
hominid line, and it even suggests that perhaps evolution doesn’t progress in the perfectly linear
fashion that Darwinism dictates, although few scientists today will even consider such an idea.
The increased brain size and the change in that organ’s structure that
arose with Homo Habilis leads to the question of how this
change came about. According to the laws of Darwinian evolution, such changes could only
be due to random mutation, which means that the
first Habilis must have been a creature who was mutated in such a way that
the ordinarily incredibly intricate neural structure and workings of his brain
just happened to mutate so as to connect and operate in a manner that
was even more complex than before, and worked more efficiently. It’s extremely
unlikely that the changes that took place in the brain could have been small
and incremental ones over many generations, leading to a final new structural
and operational design, but instead must have been a single sudden change in
its complete form within a single generation. This is because the brain’s
extremely intricate complexity renders significant changes in its design
extremely unlikely to randomly mutate in such a way that it would operate
significantly better without some sort of major loss to its previous operation.
The question has often arisen in
the past as to whether Homo Neanderthalensis and Homo Sapiens may have attempted to interbreed at some point, considering the fact that they
lived so closely together for so long. First in 1997, and then again more
recently, scientists were able to successfully extract and examine
the DNA from the fossil of a Neanderthal, and have revealed that
there appears to be no direct ancestral links between Neanderthals and modern
humans. However, the skeleton of a young Neanderthal child that lived around
25,000 BC was found on the most westerly tip of the European continent – the last place that Homo
Sapiens would have reached as they ventured across the land from Africa. The skeleton was
partially painted in red ochre, and a shell bead was
found nearby, signifying some sort of ritualistic activity had taken place. But who performed
the ritual, and for what reason? A strange fact about this skeleton is that it
had physical characteristics of both Neanderthalensis and Homo
Sapiens. It was a hybrid cross. A sapien human had
apparently mated with a Neanderthal, and although the interbreeding was successful, the child died early in life,
for whatever reason. Only DNA tests on the remains of this child will ever
provide a definitive answer as to whether it was an actual crossbreed, but no
such tests are ever likely to be made.
The fact that this Neanderthal child was one of the very last of its dying
race leads one to believe that this may have been regarded as a special child,
perhaps the last real hope of survival for a small, near-extinct group of
Neanderthals who knew that they were doomed if they didn’t acquire the genetic advantages of their racial cousins in order
that they could keep up. There’s almost no other evidence to show that Neanderthal man had any sort of
spiritual beliefs, so it seems strange that they would
be involved in what appears to be a ritual over this dead child, even if the child had
been of special interest to them. Perhaps they were attempting to copy what
they had observed the sapien race doing, not fully understanding their ways but
hoping desperately to learn in order to survive.
Cro-Magnon man seems to have arisen quite suddenly and
with an unparalleled burst of evolutionary development beyond his predecessor, Homo
Heidelbergensis, who had
existed for almost 800,000 years before evolving into Homo Sapien, who in
the span of only 100,000 years or so had evolved further into Homo Sapien
Sapien. The end
of the ice age may have been one factor for this sudden
evolutionary change, but this doesn’t explain the advanced
artistic ability that Cro-Magnon seemed to have
attained so suddenly. That he painted such magnificent and realistic artwork on
cave walls in France and Spain, but left no works there
or anywhere else that would show the expected progressive development in skill,
poses a problem with our current understandings concerning the origins of
Cro-Magnon, and therefore of our own origins as well. In looking at the skill
of artistry in many of the cave paintings that have been discovered over the years, it
becomes difficult to imagine that humans were still barely intelligent 25,000
years ago.
It has been established through both
physical evidence and scientific theory that the human species originated on the African continent, where the earliest of our ancestors
spent the better part of three million years before showing any signs of
spreading into Europe and elsewhere. Within a relatively short time
after this, at about 100,000 BC, we see two races of more advanced hominids starting to appear in Europe, one almost
immediately after the other, where they lived side by side for ten thousand
years. Although one of these races was far more advanced than the other, it has
left absolutely no signs of any progression to this state. A question naturally
arises as to where this evidence is, for surely it must still exist on cave
walls and in the digs of ancient human settlements where this race had lived
before. Although scientists seem to have ‘proved’ through a trail of
fossils and other artifacts that this latter race originated in Africa, it
has yet to be found where their incredible artistry originated, for there are no signs of it
anywhere else but in Europe, fully-developed and immaculate in its conception.
Could the scientific theories of
our origins, presented to the public
body as fact, be a distorted corruption of a truer reality? Has the
archeological evidence, as it arises, been fit
into a false tapestry that suits those in power to have us believe an adulterated conception
of ourselves, while they alone retain the truer understanding? Who would have
the ability to do this, and what purpose would it serve?
In order to arrive at a clear
answer, certain other clues should first be considered, and the best of these
that we might look at are those things that have been ignored or ridiculed by
the scientific establishment, since
those are the things that so often seem to offer an element of truth in spite
of the forced suppression of their proper consideration.
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