Kabwe

Worth watching the whole video (all 7 minutes):

http://toddcwood.blogspot.com/2019/09/fossil-focus-kabwe.html

Among other things:

If it's human, what's it doing way down in Africa at such an early radiometric date (around 300,000 years ago)? That's considerably before the earliest signs of civilization that we see in the Middle East…What does this mean for dispersal after the flood.

On a YEC or OEC paradigm, humans originate in the Middle East. Regarding how Kabwe-type humans migrated to African and how that antedates civilization in the Middle East by however long, perhaps there is no good YEC explanation.

However, depending on where we put the last ice age in relation to man, that would have a highly disruptive effect on civilization so that after the thaw, humans might have to start from scratch. Pre-ice age civilization would be largely lost and forgotten. That might fit into an OEC timetable, don't know about a YEC timetable. 

There's a stone age, bronze age, iron age, age of writing timetable that's post-ice age. But humans are capable of independently developing the same technology. So Gen 4 doesn't have to be intercalated into that timetable. 

So easy, a caveman could do it

https://humangenesis.org/2016/05/26/neandertals-continue-to-surprise-in-the-south-of-france/

Theriolatry

Todd Wood responded to some feedback regarding his recent naledi posts:

http://toddcwood.blogspot.com/2016/05/homo-naledi-feedback.html

That included a response to my post:

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2016/05/pet-cemetery.html

i) I'll comment on his response to me, but before I get to that I'd like to back up a bit. I don't object in principle to the human identification of nailed. For instance, given the vast variety of dog breeds, some of which are scarcely recognizable in relation to each other or the wild canines from which they derive, by the same token you could have considerable variation in humans.

ii) In addition, I'm not challenging a burial hypothesis.

iii) That said, Todd himself says naledi had a brain the size of an orange. That, of course, raises the question of whether a creature with a brain that size could have human intelligence. Admittedly, the correlation between mind and brain is complex. I'm a substance dualist. Young children have simpler, smaller brains than adults, yet they have cognitive abilities that adults typically lose. Young kids can sponge up languages. They have retentive rote memory. So perhaps a creature with a brain the size of an orange could have human intelligence. But that demands more discussion. 

Over on Triablogue, we find these questions:

is it possible that the floor of the cave is higher than it used to be, due to cumulative debris building up over the intervening time? In other words, was there originally more space between the ceiling and the floor?

Yes, definitely.

What about the possibility of flooding? Would that deposit debris in the back of the cave?

No, there is no evidence of any of that in the Dinaledi chamber.  That point has been emphasized more than once.  These bones did not wash into the back of the cave.

I'm afraid Todd misunderstood the thrust of my question. I wasn't suggesting the fossils were deposited in the cave by flooding. Rather, my second question was piggybacking on my first question. Would repeated flooding be a possible source of debris which, over time, effectively lowered the ceiling of the cave–by raising the floor, through cumulative layers of debris? 

The tacit assumption is that the agents who buried the remains were the same kind of creature as what was buried. However, humans sometimes bury animals.

That's true.  I thought of that myself, but I'm not sure it gets us anything.  As hard as it is to believe someone would crawl that far underground to bury their own child, I'm not sure it's any easier to believe they would do that for a beloved pet.  The only thing it would get you is the ability to affirm the burial hypothesis while saying that Homo naledi isn't human.

I find that response unsatisfactory in several respects:

i) Todd's objection is predicated in part on the inaccessibility of the location. Yet he conceded that originally, the site might have been more accessible. There may have been more space between the floor and the ceiling at the time of burial. But that concession weakens the premise of his objection, does it not?

ii) I'm puzzled by his saying "I'm not sure it gets us anything…The only thing it would get you is the ability to affirm the burial hypothesis while saying that Homo naledi isn't human."

But surely that's a consequential alternative explanation. There's the hypothesis that it wasn't human and wasn't buried. There's the hypothesis that it was human and was buried. Then there's a third hypothesis that I proposed, which splits the difference. 

iii) Moreover, he doesn't seriously engage my argument. My counterexamples weren't confined to pet animals. I gave two examples of ancient burial customs involving animals. The first involves donkeys. As Kenneth Way documents, in the monograph I cited, donkeys had symbolic/ceremonial significance in the ancient Near East, which is why they were sometimes buried.  Among other things, Way mentions ancient cultural associations between donkeys and socioeconomic status, scapegoat rituals, sacrificial rites, death, divination, and donkey deities.  These associations wouldn't even occur to a modern reader. It's so far removed from our worldview. 

Likewise, I mentioned the ancient Egyptian practice of mummifying animals. That's in part because Egyptian mythology has theriomorphic deities. (Hinduism is another example in kind.) Surely it takes as much effort to mummify animals as it did to bury naledi.

In certain pagan cultures, animals aren't merely animals. Animals were vested with religious, numinous, or preternatural significance. They could represent deities. You have this in various American Indian cultures as well as indigenous African religions, in addition to Hindu and Egyptian mythology. From what I've read, theriolatry, theriomancy, and theriomorphism were widespread in paganism. 

We need to make allowance for the mindset of ancient humans when we interpret burial rituals. It may take a special effort for modern people, even Christians, to assume that viewpoint, because it's often so alien to our own view of animals. The heathen outlook differs both from Christianity and secularism with respect to the animal world. 

As I understand it, Todd thinks a local naledi community used the cave as a family crypt or cemetery for its own dead. That's possible.

But I'm questioning a non sequitur in the argument. The inference that if burial presumes human intelligence, and the remains are naledi, then they were buried by naledi–in which case nailed were human. Naledi buried their own kind. 

I'm documenting the fact that ancient humans sometimes bury animals. Some ancient humans have a cult of animals. Theriolatry. They attack sacral significance to some animals. As a result, they go to some trouble in disposing of the remains (e.g. burial, mummification). So it's possible that the naledi remains are extinct apes.

And that might be more consistent with the subhuman brain size. That's not what we normally associate with an adult human brain.

Homo naledi

The internet has been abuzz regarding a new fossil find, named Homo naledi. What do I make of that?

i) Let's begin with deja vu. Every so often we're treated to the discovery of the missing link. Lots of fanfare. Upon closer examination, it turns out there was far less to the story than meets the eye. It's like fake hate crimes. 

ii) Darwinians know that showing the public skeletal remains isn't very impressive. So what they do is give us a hypothetical reconstruction of what the creature allegedly looked like.

Now, I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with that. Forensic anthropologists do that sort of thing.

Nevertheless, it's just an "artistic rendering." And it's bound to be prejudicial. You aren't seeing what the creature actually looked like, because we don't know what the creature actually looked like. 

Take the face. Obviously, a skull has no face. So that gives tremendous play to facial reconstruction. It can be made to look more human, protohuman, or apish. 

We've all grown up with imaginative mock-ups of "early man". So when we see a hypothetical reconstruction, that subconsciously conditions us to perceive evidence for human evolution. The fossil is depicted in a way that makes it appear to be an intermediate form: more than a monkey but less than a man.

Again, though, that's prejudicial. Salting the mine. We're not viewing the actual fossil. We're not seeing the raw evidence. Rather, we're seeing a face that's, at best, imaginative guesswork. How much of the transitional appearance is due to artistic imagination? 

For instance, if all we had was the skull of Nefertiti, could we go from that to the famous bust? 

Moreover, the skull was pieced together from fragments of four different skulls. And it's unclear if these even come from the same species. 

iii) Then there's the reconstructed body. That raises the question of what makes a body recognizably human. 

Even in modern-day humans, there's a wide rage of body shapes and sizes. That often reflects environmental adaptations. Likewise, some sports, like pro football and pro basketball, select for extreme body shapes and sizes. 

As I boy I used to read Road & Track and Car & Driver. When commenting on Italian cars, reviewers would quip that Italian cars were made for drivers with long arms and short legs!

More seriously, I once read an interview with a costume designer for The Highlander. She said it was hard to costume Adrian Paul because he didn't have a typical 17C body. Rather, he had a typical mid-20C body. His body shape wasn't suited to period attire. They had to fudge it. 

iv) What did Adam and Eve look like? We don't have much to go on. Assuming that Eden was located in a hot river valley, it would make sense if they had tan skin and dark eyes.  

Fossil remains

http://blog.drwile.com/?p=12362#more-12362

Milankovitch cycles

For the sake of argument, let's suppose macroevolution is true. Let's also suppose various parts of the world are fairly stable over time.

On those assumptions, the fossil record embedded in the geological column of a given region would be vertical snapshot of how local species evolved. Something approximating a control group. Based on the law of superposition, species lower down would be more primitive while species higher up would be more advanced. 

Now let's introduce Milankovitch cycles. Orbital eccentricity, axial precession, and axial tilt are cyclical variations which combine to affect the distance and position of the earth in relation to the sun. Solar variation is another factor. 

In theory, these cycles effect climate change. Because they are mutually independent, and have different durations, they intersect in complex ways.  

Assuming this is roughly correct, I assume it will affect biogeography and even biodiversity. Fauna and flora are sensitive to climate. If a wetter region becomes dryer, or vice versa, if a warmer region becomes cooler, and vice versa, that will impact local fauna and flora. 

Some species may adapt to new conditions. Some species may migrate out of the affected area while other species may migrate into the affected area. Some species may become extinct because they can't adapt and lack the mobility go migrate, or because natural barriers impede migration. 

Although we think of migration in terms of fauna rather than flora, since plants immobile, seeds are widely dispersible by various natural mechanisms. So it's possible for exotic flora to be transported to a new region. 

But consider how these factors would affect the fossil record. You'd no longer have a continuous record of species from the same area. Rather, that would be disrupted by preexisting and coexisting exotic species migrating into the area, to supplant previous occupants, which either migrated out of the area or went extinct. 

This, in turn, complicates the inference that the geological column charts the continuous evolution of local species. For the sequence no longer represents the history of a stable control group. Rather than a clean diachronic progression, you have synchronous species from different regions that relocate. It's horizontal as well as vertical. Change in place as well as time. 

Is a species higher up evolved from a species lower down? Or is this an exotic species which, due to climate change, migrated to a more hospital environment? A preexisting species that coexisted with species further down? 

I'm not qualified to assess these variables. But it's something I consider when Darwinians confidently appeal to the fossil record. 

Fossilized soft tissue

http://blog.drwile.com/?p=11753

Dmanisi fossils

Steve tipped me off about the following excerpt from a recent post by Todd Wood:

Let's think carefully about these claims. According to Thomas, there are anatomical reasons to conclude that Skull 5 is an ape. But in my own baraminological analysis of very similar skulls with similar anatomical traits, I found evidence that they are human. To me, Dmanisi illustrates everything I've been saying about the human baramin: the human family is highly variable, even to the point of producing humans that look ape-like in some of their characteristics. Even more exciting is that these Dmanisi fossils are basically from the same locality, making it very likely that they're all one highly variable population. That was the point of the original article, which I summarized previously. In an unpublished email to a reader, I excitedly pointed out that these are some of the earliest human fossils in the fossil record, and they're right there near the mountains of Ararat. Amazing!

I asked Dr. Wood if he might provide further info. He kindly replied. Here's his helpful response:

H. erectus fossils are conventionally dated to about 2 million years ago, making them stratigraphically the first human fossils we encounter in the post-Flood sediments.

Then you have their geographic location right there about as close to Ararat as you can get. It's absolutely remarkable that the earliest human fossils are close to Ararat. You can find out a bit more about the Dmanisi finds at Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_erectus_georgicus#Homo_erectus_georgicus

Science and Human Origins: A Review

Jonathan McLatchie reviews Science and Human Origins.

Also, Casey Luskin has a related series here (which Steve previously posted).

While we're on the topic, I'll likewise mention Jonathan Sarfati has a series of books Refuting Evolution and Refuting Evolution 2.

A Proposed Paleontology Study

The past couple of days I’ve been thinking a bit about the fossil record. I’ve e-mailed a couple of people some of my thoughts, but today something finally crystallized in my mind and I’ve come up with a paleontology study to propose. Obviously, this study is beyond my capabilities to perform myself, but I wanted to throw this out there to see what other people thought about it anyway (and who knows, if a paleontologist reads it and decides it’s worth studying then maybe I’ll get an actual answer sometime!).

First, this study begins with two assumptions:

Assumption 1: Most (animal) organisms that die will be very young, very old, or infirm; the “ideal” specimen (i.e., the age when the species is, on average, the healthiest) only dies in the case of random accidents, which are rare. As anecdotal evidence to back up my assumption here, consider your local city’s closest graveyard. If you go through it and look at the various tombstones, you will see that the large majority of people buried there are going to be very young or very old. Furthermore, a detailed excavation of the graveyard would indicate many people there died of diseases. However, if you look at the number of graves of, say, people aged 15-30 years, the vast majority of those will be people who died of non-natural causes (e.g., suicide, murder, car accidents, drug overdoses, etc.).

We also have evidence from the animal kingdom. Most victims of predators are the young and defenseless, the old who have weakened, or those who are otherwise already disabled in some manner. It is rare that a healthy animal will be killed by a predator (it still happens, but statistically this would happen far less often than any other type of death of a species).

Assumption 2: Most living (animal) organisms have larger populations close to the “ideal” specimen age than in any other demographic. In the case of the elderly, since organisms have to pass through the younger ages to get to an advanced state and there is the possibility of death in those younger ages too, it is obvious that there will be fewer elderly people than younger people. However, it is also the case that given the high infant mortality rate of most species and the fact that only a few will survive past the first couple of months (and also the fact that the youngest age ranges are typically far shorter than the length of the “ideal” specimen), there will usually be more of the “ideal” organisms living than the young. Again, this is not a hard and fast rule, but it is an assumption I think has some validity in the animal kingdom).

Hypothesis: If fossils have more “ideal” specimen types than very young, old, or infirm types, then organisms that are fossilized are almost always killed by catastrophic and indiscriminate “accidents” rather than due to factors such as predation, illnesses, or other more natural causes.

Note that under these circumstances, the “catastrophic and indiscriminate accidents” would not necessarily be such things as mudslides (although depending on the extent of the mudslide, one could qualify). The reason being is that if you have two organisms of the same species and a mudslide is heading toward them, the one that is the fastest will have greater odds of escaping than the slower one (this is the unobjectionable—and trivial—aspect of Natural Selection). Therefore, the very young, very old, and infirm would have a greater likelihood of dying in that mudslide than would a healthy organism.

This would not be the case, of course, in a widespread mudslide that would kill everything regardless of the speed of the organism involved. As such, minor mudslides would not qualify as a “catastrophic and indiscriminate accident” whereas a major mudslide would. Note also that the “major” and “minor” aspect of the mudslide depends on such things as the size of the organism and the location of the organism too. For instance, a meter high mudslide has a good chance of wiping out an entire colony of trilobites, but probably wouldn’t kill a Brachiosaurus. Further note that there could be other things than mudslides too (I only use the mudslide illustration since fossils are often explained as having been created by rapid burial of animals, such as during a mudslide).

The reasoning for my hypothesis is: Since most natural deaths will be of organisms that are very young, very old, or infirm (assumption 1), then if the fossilization happens after a natural death there should be far more young, old, and infirm specimens than “ideal” types. However, since there will be more of the “ideal” specimens alive at any one time (assumption 2), then if a catastrophic and indiscriminate accident occurred to create the fossil, a random selection out of the entire population has a greater chance of landing on one of the “ideal” specimens than on any other demographic. Therefore, if there are more “ideal” types of fossils than the very young, very old, or infirm, most (if not all) fossils are caused by catastrophic and indiscriminate events instead of natural and common causes.

If that reasoning is valid, the question is: What does the fossil record show? Are most fossils “ideal” types? Or are most fossils very young, very old, or infirm?

While this study would be interesting just for the sake of knowledge alone, there’s another reason it might be important. Think about the large size of many dinosaur species. After all, we’ve already noted that a mudslide could be one of these catastrophic and indiscriminate events for a colony of trilobites; but many dinosaurs were huge. If there are more “ideal” types of these large dinosaurs, then there would have had to have been many large-scale catastrophes to hit these dinosaurs (especially since modern assumptions are that it is very difficult to make a fossil in the first place, let alone to find it after it has been made, so there would have been many more of these catastrophes that have occurred than we have found fossils). And that, of course, would lead to the question of whether it is more plausible to assume a score of major catastrophes or that our assumptions about fossil creation are false.

By the way, I’d also note that if someone responds that it would be impossible to tell this from the fossil record, then it would be impossible to tell anything relevant to evolution from the fossil record too. That is, if we cannot tell the relative age of a dinosaur or whether or not it was severely ill from the fossil record, how are we to tell the relationship of that dinosaur to other similar-looking dinosaurs? Could they not be similar looking because they’re identical species but one had scurvy, for instance?

Just some thoughts.

The Touchstone Fossil

It’s been a week since I last challenged T-Stone to demonstrate evolution (specifically, mutation followed by Natural Selection) from the fossil record. However, T-Stone has since said he has family obligations that prevent him from writing as much during the summer. Therefore, I thought I would do the pro-family thing and help T-Stone out a bit here by demonstrating why he should just give up now. Now he can spend the time with his kids rather than in a futile effort to prove the impossible-to-prove.

To show how futile T-Stone’s efforts would be, I am going to employ an over-simplification of the problem. If the theory, even stated in such an obviously simplified manner, is hard (read: impossible) to prove, then it is going to be even more difficult to prove it from the complicated reality.

Let us begin as simply as possible. Suppose that T-Stone finds two fossils of the same species. What type of fossils these are doesn’t really matter, but for the purposes of illustration let’s say they’re Cothurnocystis fossils (yes, I just wanted to include a "big word" here to give T-Stone something else to do a trivial Google search on). Let us also argue that, due to the rock strata they are discovered in, T-Stone knows for a fact which one of the fossils is older than the other fossil.

These fossils can fit somewhere on a “typical” genealogical branch:



But where do they fit in there? Is it possible for T-Stone to prove that one fossil is a descendant of the other? The answer is a resounding: no. Let us look at this. Suppose that the fossils are descendants of one another. In such a case, we’d have something looking like:



But it could just as easily be something like:



In fact, the odds that two fossils are actually in a direct lineage are small when you consider how many thousands of members of each species actually exist, and how many offspring come from each of these organisms. So right off the bat, we see that T-Stone cannot even prove two fossils are in direct lineage with each other.

If we cannot prove that two fossils of the same species are direct descendants, how can we demonstrate that a fossil of another species is directly descended from the previous fossil? Obviously we cannot.

One way that Darwinists avoid this problem is to ignore the direct lineage problem within the species itself. That is, the Darwinist will take each of the two fossils found for the same species as representative of the whole. Thus, the two Cothurnocystis fossils are arbitrarily allowed to stand for any of the points along the genealogical chart. This is because the species, as a whole, shares aspects; and thus, the Darwinists claims, we can treat each individual as typical of the whole.

Aside from the fact that this commits the error of composition and becomes a hasty generalization, it doesn’t really solve the problem for the evolutionist. After all, now instead of having individuals in the chart, we have entire species. If each dot represents an entire species instead of individuals within a species, we still cannot tell if fossils from two different species, a Cothurnocystis fossil and a more modern echinoderm (like a starfish) for instance, are direct descendants either. In other words, is the relationship direct:



Or indirect:



The Darwinist cannot say.

But there is another problem with these diagrams. The problem is that everything that is black in the diagrams is pure conjecture. That’s right; the relationships between various fossils are purely human invention. There is nothing in the fossil record that shows the links between the fossils.

As such, the relationship between two fossils is found only in the imagination of humans who interpret the fossil record. The fossil record does not show these relationships, for it is possible that there is yet another alternative explanation:



That’s right; the second fossil might not be related to the first fossil at all. Without being able to show the direct links, we have only the conjecture that there is a link.

But what is the conjecture based on? The conjecture is based on having already accepted the theory of Darwinistic Evolution as true. That is, the links between fossils are “discovered” only when one first assumes this kind of evolution is true. There is nothing in the fossil evidence that indicates whether there is a direct link, indirect link, or no link at all between two fossils. The evidence is not sufficient to say which one it is.

As such, my original comment—the one way back on the comments on this post still stands. I originally said:

Evolutionary claims are completely independent of the fossil record. Consider what the fossil record shows and compare that to the evolutionary theory.

The fossil record shows only organisms that existed at some point in the past. That is it. It says nothing about the relationship between organisms--that is left to extrapolation.

Evolution, on the other hand, needs a process by which it can function (genetic mutation followed by natural selection). Mutations cannot be demonstrated by fossils since mutations require looking at DNA. Likewise, natural selection cannot be demonstrated by the fossil record either (except when natural selection is taken in its completely irrelevant tautological sense).

So the theory of evolution is quite independent of the fossil record. The fossil record is only used as a prop. The claim is that the fossil record is what we would expect given evolution. But as I pointed out above, given the inability to recreate this (due to the massive amount of time and the pure randomness of fossil formation), this claim is anything but empirical.

So at most, all the fossil record can be used for is to say that it is consistent with evolutionary theory. But then, the fossil record is so spotty that it is "consistent" with virtually any theory.

Evolution cannot be proven from the fossil record, because one can never show the direct lineage between two fossils of the same species, let alone between two different species. The Darwinist claims that they don’t need to show direct lineage between specific individuals can only be true if one first assumes Darwinian Evolution. In other words, belief in Evolution precedes this interpretation of the fossil record.

With this in mind, T-Stone should now return to ferrying his children to baseball games and drop this matter completely.