A Change of Climate in Human Evolution Storytelling

New findings continue to complicate theories of human evolution.
Maybe they can sound trendy by dragging climate change into it.

 

 

The Show Must Go On

Any news item on human evolution has a high likelihood of upsetting applecarts. The old “march of human progress” is long gone. The discovery of Neanderthal DNA in modern humans represented a huge upset. One article quoted below says that human evolution “isn’t a tree – it’s more like a series of streams that converge and diverge at multiple points.” That picture fits Biblical history.

To try to sound relevant now, some paleoanthropologists drag “climate change” into their latest tales.

Study of Ancient Skulls Sheds Light on Human Interbreeding With Neandertals (North Carolina State University, 23 Aug 2022).  “The picture is really complicated,” say evolutionists at NC State and Duke University. That language is often a signal of cluelessness. The textbooks were so simple 100 years ago. Now, nobody is sure of anything. One prof waxes Tontological as he ponders his field’s path of wrecked ideas:

“Ancient DNA caused a revolution in how we think about human evolution,” says Steven Churchill, co-author of the study and a professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University. “We often think of evolution as branches on a tree, and researchers have spent a lot of time trying to trace back the path that led to us, Homo sapiens. But we’re now beginning to understand that it isn’t a tree – it’s more like a series of streams that converge and diverge at multiple points.”

Who’s “we,” paleface? Did you think that?

The forlorn evolutionists turned to their favorite hobby, divination. They stared at skulls, hoping for visions of Darwin to appear. The storm clouds that appeared in the skull faces, though, were their own theories growing dark, not evidence of climate change influencing evolution.

We found that the facial characteristics we focused on were not strongly influenced by climate, which made it easier to identify likely genetic influences.

So if climate change was not driving evolution, it had to be interbreeding. It should be obvious that men do not marry ape-women or vice versa; like breeds with like. So much for neo-Darwinism, which tried to explain everything by mutation and natural selection.

 

Tools for Effective Storytelling

Archaeological excavations in Romania show life of earliest modern humans in Europe (Leiden University via Phys.org, 23 Aug 2022).  Evolutionists from Leiden University performed divination on stone chips and axe handles collected over a wide area. Some indicated use of fire in their toolmaking. With thousands of data points, they tried to conjure up images of human evolution. They didn’t learn much.

The results of the large lithic assemblages and their high-quality contexts from the new excavations at Româneşti indicate changes in the ways Homo sapiens subsisted compared to Neandertals, helping to explain their success.

The next step is trying to elaborate on what the relationship of these early Homo sapiens was to earlier Neandertals. Nearby contemporary fossils indicate that Homo sapiens and Neandertals were interbreeding, but we still don’t know what that means for the ways in which their mutual lifestyles were changing and how we can see that in their archaeological remains.

It’s a fair question to ask if their “next step” represents part of a path of progress in knowledge, or a drunken sailor’s walk. The press release summarizes their paper in Nature Scientific Reports, which again tries to find comfort in the booze of climate change.

In the environment, BC [black carbon] sedimentary input is driven by fire activity that is in turn, influenced by climate and/or human activity.

That “and/or” associates opposite things: climate is unguided nature, while human activity involves intelligent design. The old story was that more-evolved “modern humans” walked into the Neanderthal’s turf one day and said, ‘Step aside, brutes; we’re taking over your land.’ That’s no longer credible. The two groups lived together and some married, just like Europeans did with Native Americans in the Old West. They could, because they were all members of one human family.

Biting into Novel Approaches

Revelations from 17-million-year-old ape teeth could lead to new insights on early human evolution (The Conversation, 22 Aug 2022). How about evidence at the other end of the human-evolution timeline, when apes supposedly decided to start walking upright toward rocket science? Tanya Smith and Daniel Green performed divination on ape teeth, hoping to find clues. Aha! Climate change!

Some scientists suggest early humans and their ancestors also evolved due to rapid changes in their environment, but the physical evidence to test this idea has been elusive – until now.

After more than a decade of work, we’ve developed an approach that leverages tooth chemistry and growth to extract information about seasonal rainfall patterns from the jaws of living and fossil primates.

So what did they find? The main thing they found was a film producer willing to give them 3 minutes of fame. Watch the embedded video to see Tanya boasting about the thousands of measurements of oxygen ions in ape teeth, as she is surrounded by lab equipment. She brags about the international collaboration with other Darwinists. But the data collecting—the whole purpose of all this work—gave Tanya and Daniel no answers. The video ends only with hope that seeing changes in tooth chemistry “from one season to the next in the first years of an individual’s life” might help them

better understand whether, you know, large-scale climate change may have been influencing the origins of some of our human ancestors.

Whoa; that’s one giant leap from oxygen isotopes in ape teeth to her modern human brain!

An individual ape who wore that tooth, clearly, did not evolve within its lifetime. How much about climate change, let alone evolution, is discernible in an ape’s few years of life? How does seasonal variation within a tooth fit within stories of human evolution? The teeth were all ape teeth. Where is the progression to humanity?

Oh, now you understand. It’s all futureware:

This novel research approach, coupled with our fossil ape findings and modern primate data, will be crucial for future studies of hominin evolution – especially in Kenya’s famous Turkana Basin.

For example, some researchers have suggested that seasonal differences in foraging and stone tool use helped hominins evolve and coexist in Africa. This idea has been hard to prove or disprove, in part because seasonal climatic processes have been hard to tease out of the fossil record.

Our approach could also be extended to animal remains from rural Australia to gain further insight into historic climate conditions, as well as the prehistoric environmental changes that shaped Australia’s unique modern landscapes.

This is new: the marriage of climate change with human evolution research. That should really excite the funding agencies!

We can see a future headline: “Climate Change May Turn Humans into Reptiles, Researchers Suggest.”

This is how evolutionists have job security, even if their work fails to establish any knowledge about evolution. They can just look busy and ask to keep the funds coming. Then they can pass the hot potato of explaining human evolution to the next Darwin Party dogmatist. They can keep making “suggestions” about how humans are evolving now, and the public will pay homage, mumbling, “Ah, science!”

It works because they pre-censored any critical thinkers outside the Darwin Party. What a scam.