Human Evolution Story Constantly Rethought

Nothing we were taught is true.
Everything is up for revision.

“At this point it’s a truism that the story of human evolution is being rethought.”

The 2023 discoveries that made us rethink the story of human evolution (New Scientist, 13 Dec 2023). How can anyone trust a “science” that gets rewritten every time a new bone turns up? Reporter Michael Marshall, who believes humans evolved from apes, doesn’t know what to think any more. Read his embarrassing opening sentences:

At this point it’s a truism that the story of human evolution is being rethought. Discoveries in recent years have forced us to rethink many crucial points, such as how old our species is – about 300,000 years old as opposed to 200,000 – and what extinct hominins like the Neanderthals were really like.

2023 was equally dizzying: discoveries continued to come thick and fast. But because there are so many species and eras involved, it’s hard to discern the common threads linking them – at least, beyond “we found out some more stuff”.

Stuff happens, he says, and it happened in the past; we know because stuff got found. Those ending sentences betray a long-standing problem in evolutionary anthropology: it is constantly being rethought. That has become a “truism” that continued into “dizzying” 2023. A truism is a “self-evident, obvious truth”—in this case, that human evolution is constantly being rethought. If thoughts don’t stick, they must not be very good thoughts.

Like a good woke liberal, Marshall feels compelled to insert some gender lingo as he tries to get back into a standing position in the quicksand of evolutionary thinking. He couches his hope in Tontological form:

However, I do think it’s possible to draw out some overall messages from the blizzard of archaeological finds. Two things stand out to me. One is the growing evidence that many supposedly “advanced” behaviours, such as architecture and art, can be traced much further back in time than we thought, often to hominins that existed before modern humans. And the other is that we have badly misunderstood gender roles in prehistoric societies, imposing patriarchal values onto cultures that had very different ideas about how women should behave.

For the first point, if advanced behaviors existed earlier than thought, that fact contradicts gradualistic evolution. For instance, those hewn logs that were discovered this year (see 20 Sept 2023) “seem to have once been part of a larger structure, perhaps a building,” he confesses. That would have been thought impossible for human ancestors 476,000 Darwin Years ago. For the second point about patriarchy, he wasn’t there to observe how these people lived. He needs more epistemic modesty (see 13 Dec 2023). And, quizzically, how does he think “values” evolved if we are all just meat puppets of our genes?

Photographer shooting a previous “rethink” that Neanderthals were naked. How did the artist know they weren’t well dressed?

Were Neanderthals soulful inventors or strange cannibals? (Nature, 11 Dec 2023). This is just a book review by Rebecca Wragg Sykes about The Naked Neanderthal by Ludovic Slimak, both of whom were not present when Neanderthals (human beings) walked the earth. “To understand the true otherness of Neanderthals, researchers must rethink the meaning they give to their archaeological finds, argues a new book,” Sykes begins. In conclusion, she sums up the book:

The Naked Neanderthal is absorbing, elegantly written and sometimes mischievously humorous, yet in places also frustratingly unbalanced. Its depiction of the community that studies Neanderthals as dominated by competing sides with inflexible, ideological agendas is not a fair portrait. But Slimak’s way of highlighting the uncertainty is refreshing. To have your ideas and views challenged is a healthy thing, and the willingness to say “I’m not sure” or, even, “we cannot know” is not common enough in popular science books.

Some things Slimak wrote are already out of date, the reviewer says, and Slimak knows the ideological agendas of some anthropologists from experience. In short, don’t worry about the arguments by either writer. Everything you know has been wrong, is wrong, and will be rethought tomorrow – maybe even discovering that Neanderthals were fashion conscious and were skilled tailors.

The late Jack T. Chick, a Christian illustrator, had some fun with the iconic progression, pointing out flaws in the interpretation.

When did Homo sapiens first appear? (Live Science, 11 Dec 2023). This article by Kristina Killgrove can be ignored also, since everything you know is wrong and will be rethought again. She gives the opinions of various experts, who are all wrong (as a truism), and ends with Chris Stringer’s call, “We need much more, and better quality, evidence,” a confession that reveals that the evidence for human evolution is woefully inadequate. Why, exactly, are we listening to these people? Oh, because they are “experts.” Got it. Check.

The only value in this article is an object lesson on the power of visualization propaganda. At the top is an animated photo of an ape skull morphing into a human skull. The fact-free graphic gives an evolutionary message without words. Beware. You could make a similar graphic of a pair of pliers morphing into a pipe wrench.

Neanderthals may have been morning people, says new study (Oxford University via Phys.org, 14 Dec 2023). O great, another “study.” Don’t stand up and salute, because the evolutionists didn’t study very hard. Based on the flimsiest genetic evidence, they claim that Neanderthals were early risers. This is a form of genetic determinism that deserves no place in science. Move along.

People make choices in spite of their genes. There is no gene that is going to make you an early riser. If you get a job that requires the late shift, you will adjust. Why do evolutionists living in the present make such deterministic judgments about upright-walking, fire-using, world-traveling intelligent human beings who lived long ago and cannot be called on to testify in their defense?

How about an explanation that doesn’t change, fits the evidence, and explains who we are? “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth… God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:1, 27). No need to rethink that! Jesus believed it, and He ought to know. He also warned that if the blind lead the blind, both will fall into the ditch. Don’t be one of those people.