Paleoanthropology: The Science of Being Always Wrong
Fossil hunters looking for human evolution have been wrong so many times, the rubble of bombed theories is bouncing. Listen to their own admissions.
Jen Viegas in Seeker, in an article reposted by Live Science, describes three clever ways that Neanderthal Man invented adhesives 200,000 Darwin Years ago. More interesting than the techniques, though, are her opening admissions about the flawed, ape-headed ideas of the past about human evolution:
Neanderthals — early members of the genus Homo from Europe and Asia — have had such a lowly standing on the human family tree that the very word Neanderthal is often synonymous with archaic ways and ignorance.
Neanderthals, however, had big brains, complex societies, and tools so useful that some designs created for leatherworking are still in use today. Many researchers even believe that a true extinction of Neanderthals might not have occurred, but that these individuals instead were absorbed into what evolved to be current Homo sapiens. To this day, people of European and Asian heritage retain Neanderthal DNA.
Viegas doesn’t pin the blame on these wrong notions, but she should. The flawed picture did not come from the bones themselves, nor from the public. They didn’t come from reason or logic, or from evidence. They came from the evolutionary worldview of scientific experts in Darwin’s Century (the 20th century), who needed stupid ancestors to emerge by Darwin’s mechanism into the highly-intelligent humans that could look back with pride at how far they had evolved.
With the benefit of historical hindsight, consider just how wrong the 20th-century picture of Neanderthals was:
- They were not “archaic” or “ignorant” as described.
- They were not “cavemen” but real people with complex societies.
- They used “high-tech skill” to design tools for working leather–techniques so good, they are still in use.
- They invented clever ways to make strong adhesives out of natural materials. Which of us could do that with leaves and bark and fire?
- If they contributed DNA to the modern human race, they were (by definition) the same species as us.
That last point was a recent bombshell when genetic studies confirmed the association. So now, why even call them by a different species name? Isn’t that a form of racism? Wouldn’t it be just as wrong to call members of tribes who prefer to live by hunting and gathering by a different species name, even though they are interfertile with civilized people? Yet in the popular mind, “Neanderthal” continues to carry the same derogatory connotations. It is the paleoanthropologists’ “N-word” of today.
Why Paleoanthropology Will Continue to Be Wrong
If you build on a crooked foundation, you will get a crooked building even if you demolish the first crooked building and try building a new one in its place. The crooked foundation is the assumption that hundreds of thousands of years separate Neanderthals from modern humans. Look how evolutionary paleoanthropologists build crooked ideas with years, treating tens of millennia like Lego toys:
Placing materials in ceramic containers can help with tar production. There is no evidence that Neanderthals ever produced pottery, however.
“There was probably no need for pottery until quite recently — speaking on a scale including hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution — and even in most modern human hunter-gatherer societies, pottery is an exception,” Kozowyk explained.
Does the “scale including hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution” contribute anything to the discussion? No. Well, actually, yes: it contributes nonsense. It promotes the irrational idea that smart human beings, able to design tools and develop complex societies and interbreed with modern humans, continued the same way of life for hundreds of thousands of years. Think of it! Wouldn’t that have been ample time to encounter other tribes using pottery and borrow the technology? Wouldn’t it have been ample time to learn how to ride a horse or invent a wheel? After all, we’re talking ten to twenty times the history of civilization, during which people went from grass huts to the moon. The assumption of all those years, none of which have ever been personally experienced by any living human, is not a contribution. It is positive anti-knowledge. Here’s how Science Daily commits the shameless flub:
Hundreds of thousands of years ago, the ancestors of modern humans diverged from an archaic lineage that gave rise to Neanderthals and Denisovans. Yet the evolutionary relationships between these groups remain unclear.
“Hundreds of thousands of years ago”… Stop right there! On what basis? Evidence? No—on the basis that Darwin needs the time. But what if Darwin was wrong about human ancestry? Continue reading: “Yet the evolutionary relationships between these groups remain unclear.” Stop again! On what basis do we owe trust to experts who cannot be clear? Maybe it’s time to turn our trust to other experts who can show some clarity, such as those who are not beholden to finding “evolutionary relationships” that remain as perennially elusive as snipe in the woods. The article continues tripping over various false notions that contradict each other and “conventional wisdom”— a euphemism for folly that does not deserve to be conventional.
Do the Experts Continue to Deserve Our Trust?
Chris Stringer tends to be a little more transparent about his wrongness than other paleoanthropologists. Here’s what he admits in this article:
“I used to argue that ‘anatomically modern humans’ — including fossils that essentially look like us today — are the only group that should be called Homo sapiens,” Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London said. “Now, I think that anatomically modern humans are only a sub-group within the species Homo sapiens, and that we should recognize the diversity of forms within early Homo sapiens, some of which probably went extinct.”
While this sounds nicely politically correct (diversity and all that), Stringer basically says he used to argue for historical racism. He’s like a modern Democrat who was against the civil rights bill before he was for it. But now we can trust him. After all, he is a paleoanthropology expert. Wrong, wrong, wrong, but expert.
The adhesive that holds so many wrong notions together is the assumption of millions of years. By making “reckless drafts on the bank of time” (7/02/07), evolutionists expand the resources for storytelling, like buying up vast tracts of empty land on which to practice divination, hoping to conjure up shrines to Darwin by the use of imagination. We don’t need a single one of them. Vote these know-nothings out of office, and let them do something useful with their lives, like delivering Amazon packages or curing cancer. It would be a service to all mankind. They could be better replaced by historians and archaeologists not overdrawn on debts to Darwin.