Did Early Man Have a Soul?

Some recent discoveries are surprising paleoanthropologists by much some early ancestors seem – well, human.  We’re talking about ancestors half a million years old in the evolutionary scheme.  They were supposed to be prior to Homo sapiens and the Neanderthals, but they seem to exhibit intelligence and compassion.
    A report on New Scientist inferred that these early humans cared for the disabled.  The skull of a child found in Spain suggests it was mentally retarded.  To be able to live to age 12 indicates its parents or the social group cared for the individual.  They claim the skull is 500,000 years old.
    Another find surprised evolutionists.  Ann Gibbons reported in Science Now the earliest stone tools ever found – said to be 500,000 years old.  “Paleoanthropologists working in Africa have discovered stone blades more than a half-million years old,” she wrote.  “That pushes the date of the earliest known blades back a remarkable 150,000 years and raises a question: What human ancestor made them?”  A little history lesson shows just how remarkable this is:

Not long ago, researchers thought that blades were so hard to make that they had to be the handiwork of modern humans, who had evolved the mental wherewithal to systematically strike a cobble in the right way to produce blades and not just crude stone flakes.  First, they were thought to be a hallmark of the late Stone Age, which began 40,000 years ago.  Later, blades were thought to have emerged in the Middle Stone Age, which began about 200,000 years ago when modern humans arose in Africa and invented a new industry of more sophisticated stone tools.  But this view has been challenged in recent years as researchers discovered blades that dated to 380,000 years in the Middle East and to almost 300,000 years ago in Europe, where Neandertals may have made them (ScienceNOW, 1 December 2008).
    Now it appears that more than 500,000 years ago, human ancestors living in the Baringo Basin of Kenya collected lava stone cobbles from a riverbed and hammered them in just the right way to produce stone blades.

It should be remembered that all of recorded human history, in which man went from stone tablets to interplanetary space flight, covers just 6,000 years.  Scientists must be shocked at this announcement; “the discovery of blades this early suggests that these toolmakers were capable of more sophisticated behavior than previously thought,” Gibbons wrote.  She ended by hinting that maybe even older blades are waiting to be found.

The evolutionary picture of early man has stretched credibility way, way beyond the breaking point.  Every year it seems to get worse for them.  Who could possibly believe that beings as anatomically close to us, with brains our size, just sat around in caves caring for retarded children and making tools without learning how to ride a horse, farm, write and build cities for 450,000 years – 45 times longer than recorded history?  How much longer before the scholarly community rises up and tells these storytellers they have no idea what they are talking about?