Early Humans Have Always Been Smart

Evolutionists trying to portray ‘primitive’ humans as evolving ‘hominids’ beneath our intellectual abilities keep running afoul of new discoveries.

Neanderthals’ lack of drawing ability may relate to hunting techniques. Science Daily reports another revision about Neanderthal Man. The lack of artwork attributed to them could be explained by differences in hunting techniques: “Spear-throwing gave Homo sapiens better eye-hand coordination, smarter brains.” So now, an evolutionist presents a “new theory of the human evolution of the human brain” that gives pride of place to so-called ‘modern humans’ while admitting that “Neanderthals had large brains and made complex tools.” So even though he admits that “Neanderthals, whose ancestors left Africa for Eurasia before modern human ancestors, used thrusting spears at close range to kill horses, reindeer, bison, and other large game that had not developed an innate wariness of humans,” this evolutionist weaves a story that Neanderthals, who migrated long distances before ‘modern’ humans, and were highly successful for a long time, and interbred with modern humans, were beneath the intelligence of ‘modern’ humans just because we don’t see their cave paintings yet. Evolutionary historical racism lives on.

Put a suit on a Neanderthal and most people wouldn’t notice the difference. There are people with Neanderthal traits today.

Rare wooden tools show that Neanderthals got creative with fire (New Scientist). Maybe Neanderthals preferred sculpture or engineering to painting. This article by Michael Marshall says, “A rare cache of wooden tools created by Neanderthals suggests our cousins knew how to make implements with fire and used them to dig up plants buried underground for food.” Jeff Hoffecker at PNAS is impressed with “The complexity of Neanderthal technology.” In fact, Hoffecker concludes, Neanderthal technology exhibits the same kind of “computational complexity (and working memory capacity) of an unrestricted grammar or natural language.”

Someone made advanced stone tools in India 172,000 years ago (New Scientist). Michael Marshall also puzzles over stone tools way too early for the standard evolutionary “out of Africa” timeline.  Paleoanthropology textbooks seem to go obsolete the moment they leave the press.

A mysterious cache of stone tools may end up revising our species’ prehistory. It seems people in Africa, Europe and Asia all invented the same kind of tools around 280,000 years ago. The find implies that, even this long ago, ideas could spread over thousands of miles.

So drastic is this anomaly to the standard timeline, National Geographic says “Stone Tools Found in India Upend Tale of Human Migration Out of Africa.” We can expect more upsets, because “India’s ancient humans are understudied,” the article says. Patrick Randolph-Quinney at The Conversation is even more shocked, leading with the headline: “Indian stone tools could dramatically push back date when modern humans first left Africa.” He doesn’t know which hypothesis to choose. All of them seem improbable, and certainly at odds with previous notions taught in the public schools throughout the 20th century:

The new findings could mean that archaic humans in India developed such technology all on their own, which some researchers have previously suggested. However, it could also mean that modern humans left Africa much earlier than recent archaeological and palaeontological evidence on Africa’s doorstep suggests. In fact, they could have left Africa shortly after evolving, making it as far as the east coast of India in perhaps a few tens of thousands of years.

Artists have long portrayed ‘less-than-modern’ humans as brutes.

He thinks that a few tens of thousands of years is a short time. But does it not stretch credulity to imagine beings smart enough to make tools and migrate over continents taking so long to get to India?

Ancient rock art rewrites the natural history of Arabia (New Scientist). Petroglyphs in Arabia show something else interesting: “rock engravings in north-west Saudi Arabia suggest that the region was once home to a host of unexpected animals.” This is just 11,000 years ago, mind you. It shows that regions can undergo large ecological swings in relatively short times.

Now rock engravings in north-west Saudi Arabia suggest that the region was once home to a host of unexpected animals. They say the tracks are 700,000 years old. Something about them, though, looks very familiar, as if a child is learning from dad how to hunt. Bennett and Reynolds, at The Conversation, weave tall tales about the society above the footprints:

The findings create a unique and momentary insight into the world of a child long ago. They clearly were not left at home with a babysitter when the parents were hunting. In the harsh savannah plains of the East African Rift Valley, it was natural to bring your children to such daily tasks, perhaps so they could observe and learn.

And yet, if children could stand and learn from parents, why on earth did it take the precocious children of that era so long to invent civilization? If the story is true, it sounds as familiar as “Take your child to work day” at many businesses. The children were “probably allowed to handle stone tools and practice their skills on discarded pieces of carcass while staying out of the way of the fully-occupied adults,” Bennett and Reynolds daydream. “This was their school room, and the curriculum was the acquisition of survival skills” (with intelligently-designed tools, incidentally). But of course, in evolutionary dating, they were way too dumb to go further. The evolutionary dating scheme required them to stay subhuman for another half a million years.

Doesn’t it sound much more credible that all of these people (yes, people, not ‘hominids’ or sub-humans) lived in relatively recent times? The late onset of civilization is a baffling mystery to evolutionists. It makes no sense, but evolutionists are required to believe it in spite of the evidence, why? Because Darwin needs the time.