More Upsets in Human Evolution

If you like scientific truths that become untrue every year or month, join the paleoanthropology guild.

Anything you are told about human evolution today doesn’t match what National Geographic was proclaiming as scientific truth in the 1960s, and will probably be overturned next year. Paleoanthropology is a storytelling empire with few equals. With a few bones for divination and an imaginary Darwinian timeline, the experts in this field constantly readjust their stories. The over-arching story, though, is fake science on the face of it, because it never matches what we know to be true from our common human experience.

Neanderthal News

Neanderthal healthcare practices crucial to survival (University of York). Remember when Neanderthals were dumb brutes living in caves, inferior to “us” the modern humans? Now that it’s trendy to rehabilitate Neanderthals as equal brethren (27 June 2018), these paleoanthropologists admire their healthcare practices: healing injuries, assisting in childbirth, and compassionate care for the dying. Oh, but never forget, they remind us, that there were “evolutionary drivers” behind these behaviors. Are there not “evolutionary drivers” for the odd behavior known as writing evolutionary papers?

Similar cranial trauma prevalence among Neanderthals and Upper Palaeolithic modern humans (Nature). Remember when Neanderthals were numbskills beating each other over the head with clubs? “Neanderthals are commonly depicted as leading dangerous lives and permanently struggling for survival,” this article says. Not any more (27 Sept 2018). This paper corrects the picture, saying that “preservation bias” led to incorrect conclusions. They didn’t have any more head injuries than we have. See also the companion article in Nature, “The not-so-dangerous lives of Neanderthals,” which says, “The result adds to growing evidence that Neanderthals had much in common with early human groups.” Well, duh; they were human. Phys.org‘s coverage says that the paper “challenges what the authors call the prevailing view of our evolutionary cousins, that they lived risky, stressful lives.” Why are they “evolutionary” cousins, and not just cousins? What evolved?

“Hominin” News

Evolution: South Africa’s hominin record is a fair-weather friend (Phys.org). “Climate change” enters this story, as if climate made humans what they are. Latest overturned idea: that South African caves were not connected in time to what “hominins” were thought to be doing.

The ‘Swiss Army knife of prehistoric tools’ found in Asia, suggests homegrown technology (Science Daily). The latest upheaval in the human evolution story involves sophisticated stone tools found in Asia. Watch for the ‘earlier than thought’ refrain: “New analysis of artifacts found at a South China archaeological site shows that sophisticated tool technology emerged in East Asia earlier than previously thought.”  Thought by whom? If you understand Tontological sentence construction you know: thought by the so-called experts, who try to include us in their errors. Don’t let them get away with it.

Late Middle Pleistocene Levallois stone-tool technology in southwest China (Nature). The scientific paper about the stone tools in Asia calls it a record:

Here we present evidence of Levallois technology from the lithic assemblage of the Guanyindong Cave site in southwest China, dated to approximately 170,000–80,000 years ago. To our knowledge, this is the earliest evidence of Levallois technology in east Asia. Our findings thus challenge the existing model of the origin and spread of Levallois technologies in east Asia and its links to a Late Pleistocene dispersal of modern humans.

This is basically contemporary with the same technology in Europe, they admit. “Our findings, however, demonstrate a behavioural capacity compatible with their counterparts from the Western Hemisphere.” Is this some kind of weird form of convergent evolution? They actually consider that a possibility.

Complex stone tools in China may re-write our species’ ancient history (New Scientist). Weighing in on the story, New Scientist says these stone tools are “challenging our understanding of how our species spread around the world.” (Again, notice how they try to include us in their Tontological use of “our” in the sentence.)

If it were our species, though, that would suggest H. sapiens reached China much earlier than we thought. Recent finds have pushed back China’s record of H. sapiens to about 120,000 years, but that is still 50,000 years after the tools at Guanyindong cave were in use.

This is another reason why evolutionary paleoanthropology persists in spite of its incessant failures: every turnover provides more opportunity to get funding and work on the next myth.

Modern Human News

The taming of the dog, cow, horse, pig and rabbit (Science Daily). This article admits that humans have only been domesticating mammals for “a few thousand years.” The previous articles cited above, however, talk about beings not inferior to us living almost 200,000 years ago and more – as long ago as 315,000 years. Did not one individual in all that time (multiple times the length of all recorded human history) ever think of taming a cow or horse? How “sapiens” (wise) were those Homos?

The better question is, how sapiens are the paleoanthropologists who believe this stuff? And how sapiens are the taxpayers who keep enabling their divination, Tontologizing, and storytelling?

A new book by Sanford and Rupe examines all the latest fossil hominids.

For a critical look at all the major “hominin” fossils, see Contested Bones by Sanford and Rupe. They conclude that all the fossils cluster into “clearly ape” or “clearly human” without overlap.