by metatron 35 Replies latest watchtower bible
Interesting link dealing with the find:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2983300.stm
"In the front row, the state minister for information, Netsanet Asfaw, who organised the conference, beamed throughout. In the front row, the state minister for information, Netsanet Asfaw, who organised the conference, beamed throughout."
Make me feel a little cynical and sceptical!
frogit
Scienece grows and develops based on evidence; Darwin looked at finch bills on an isolated island and inferred that they came from the same ancestors and had specialised over time for particular ecological niches. He was right. You can run genetic profiles to prove it.
People found fossils of hominds like the Neanderthals, and inferred they were ancestors. They then found that H. sapiens and Neanderthals had co-existed, and speculated they had interbred. Now they've got a good enough genetic window, they've found that while related, H. sapiens did not descend from Neanderthals.
Neanderthals were very like us; some people could probably pass for Neanderthals, and some Neanderthals for H. sapiens.
Neanderthals also had some concepts that lead them to show what we would call respect for the dead. There's been some speculation that Neanderthals didn't have 'art'; here's a good article;
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/282/5393/1451
Others have speculated that runaway sexual selection lead to creative intelligence in H. sapiens mushrooming, and that this process didn't occur in Neanderthals. The Mating Mind by Dennis Miller examines this.
earnest,
I am not quite sure what brought that on but post Chris Stringer's article for your edification.
these two statements led me to say ignorant people are attacking science once again:
Sounds like the WT with their "new light"! Milton Henschel and Carl Sagan hand in hand.
realist,
Thanks for the clarification...I (wrongly) assumed your comment was a reply to my post. I am sure that OldHippie's remark "Milton Henschel and Carl Sagan hand in hand" was said tongue-in-cheek and his viewpoint (below) is not that very far from your own.
We don't know for sure now, it's an ongoing process, we might have an overall picture, but suddenly something is discovered that overthrows much of it.
Certainly, a consideration of professor Stringer's (now highlighted) article in my previous post tends to confirm his observation.
Earnest
Just a note on an earlier comment...When neanderthal skeletons were first discovered over 100 yrs ago, one of the first ones was an older man who (medical professionals later explained) was actually deformed by arthritis...the "gnarled, stooped ape man" image that people have of them is incorrect and actually caused by that early misunderstanding.
I have no idea if that's actually true, but I suspect it's not. I think it would be mentioned far more by evolutionists if it was. I do know that it's a common misconception (among creationists, at least) that Neanderthal fossils were just those of Homo sapiens who had arthritis or rickets or some other disease that deformed their features. This is nonsense of course, the features of Neanderthal man are strikingly and consistently different to those of modern humans (including thicker bones and cranial ridge but not stooping) in a way that is difficult to match to any known disease. It has long been accepted in the real world that Neanaderthals were a different species to modern humans, but it is only recently that we've been able to determine that they were our cousins rather than our ancestors. See http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/a_neands.html
