Chinese Teeth Upset Early Man Timeline

Is the truth in the teeth? Modern-looking human teeth in a Chinese cave create improbable migration patterns and dates.

The old story: modern humans emerged out of Africa 40,000 years ago and conquered the Neanderthals.

The new story: modern humans migrated to south China 80,000 to 120,000 years ago, but not into north China; that’s where the simpletons hung out. Then, 40,000 to 80,000 years later, the moderns decided to go west into Europe after the Neanderthals started committing collective suicide or starved, unable to support themselves as they had for up to half a million years. The moderns married some of the Neanderthals and had kids that became us, but shoved the others out and moved into their caves. They didn’t think about civilization for another 30,000 years but made some nice art, some of it as good as Picasso.

Does this make any sense?

It’s what you’re going to have to believe if you take seriously what Chinese paleoanthropologists (with some help from the Spanish and Dutch) are saying in Nature. They found 47 teeth in a cave in south China that shouldn’t be there. The Editor’s Summary lays out the trouble:

A collection of 47 anatomically modern human teeth from the Fuyan Cave in Daoxian, southern China, shows that anatomically modern humans were in the region at least 80,000 years ago, and possibly as long as 120,000 years ago. That is 30,000–70,000 years earlier than in the Levant and Europe. These people were much more modern-looking than hominins in northern and central China. The discovery adds to the complexity of the human story and shows that much remains to be discovered.

Robin Dennell tries to be nice about this in her Perspective piece in the same issue of Nature. “A discovery in southern China of human teeth dated to more than 80,000 years old indicates that Homo sapiens was present in the region considerably earlier than had previously been suspected.”

Let’s see if we get this. People our equals in stature and brain size, able to migrate across continents, sat in caves for 40,000 to 80,000 years. Not one of them ever thought of planting a farm, riding a horse, or building a building. All this time they didn’t mix with the stupid hominins to their north, although they could have married them and had children. Then (nobody knows why) they decided to move west clear across Asia, have sex with Neanderthals, and watch them all die out. About 6,000 to 10,000 years ago, a mutation must have happened, and presto! Civilization.

Better believe it. All the media & the experts do: you know, Ann Gibbons at the Science Rag, (twice), Ewen Calloway at Nature, the UCL pros at The Conversation, Charlie Q at Live Science, — all the smart guys. Who are you to doubt the new tale? Some creationist wacko nut job?

They need to be reminded, “Oh what a tangled web we weave when we at first practice to deceive.” When the self-proclaimed experts all laughed their away from Genesis and became the new wizards of the misty past, they started a train of lies that is now so thick, it would take an acid wash to get down to the first one. Each layer proclaims, “Everything you know is wrong.” At what point will their current tale become so convoluted and ridiculous, people will scream, “Start over!” How about now?

Mark Strauss had a good piece in National Geographic when he wrote, “12 theories of how we became human and why they’re all wrong.” Today we add a 13th, but we think he miscounted. It should be up somewhere around 144 by now; you know, real gross.  All that stuff about Java Man, Peking Man, Nebraska Man, Heidelberg Man, Piltdown Man, the Laetoli prints, Skull 1470, Zinjanthropus, and on and on. Nobody talks about those anymore, because secular paleoanthropology drops its old bones in the muddy past and keeps holding up the Latest New Thing. That’s how they get funding. That’s how they lure reporters to follow the Pied Piper down the Primrose Path.

Sadly, there are creationists of the old-earth persuasion who follow the Pied Piper too. They trust the stories these “experts” tell about their finds and how old they are. When something has to give, it’s always God’s word. They keep all the hominids and their long ages, then picture God picking out a couple of them and naming them Adam and Eve, sheltering them in some garden away from the others. (All the others were not really people, they say; they were just animals without souls that looked like people, built tools, used fire, cooked food, migrated long distances, probably had language, but were kind of, well, zombies.) “But,” is there comeback, “we don’t have to give up on SCIENCE!”

Choose you this day.