A perfect example of anthropologic contradiction lies in that some evolutionists claim that Neanderthals were incapable of modern speech. They apparently lacked the ability to produce the full range of vowels, because the flat, non-flexing bone at the base of their skull and larynx was positioned higher in the throat than in modern humans, or even chimpanzees. A computerised reconstruction of this part of their anatomy showed that the resonating chamber at the back of the mouth was all but eliminated. This obviously supported their argument and placed Neanderthals in a completely different league to humans. But a new reconstruction of the same anatomy showed it to be quite human. What brought Neanderthals even closer to us modern humans, was a discovery of the most complete Neanderthal skeleton in 1983, which contained the first Neanderthal fossil hyoid bone. This bone is located in the throat and is integral to the formation of sound in speech; it is indistinguishable from that of modern humans.
To add to the intrigue of who these Neanderthal people really were, let me add some more startling discoveries. In 1996, a small flute made from the thigh bone of a cave bear was found in a cave in Slovenia. It had four precisely aligned holes punctured on one side of the four-inch-long bone, pointing irrefutably to evidence which strongly supports Neanderthal ‘humanness’. Furthermore, they made tools to make other complex tools, buried their dead, had controlled use of fire, practised religious ceremonies, used complex syntax in their spoken grammar and played musical instruments.
Some Neanderthal graves have stone tools, animal bones, and even flowers buried in the ground next to their remains. The corpse was not simply dropped into a hole in the Earth without preparation; it was prepared and buried in an unusual posture. This implies an awareness of the ‘after-life’, demonstrates the existence of formal ritual and is also an indication of strong social ties. This is also supported by evidence that Neanderthal individuals with severe crippling injuries were cared for. So? Were Neanderthals human and somehow related to us? Or were they just wild and primitive cave men who deserved extinction? Maybe an explanation of our own humanity may shed some light on the possible answers a little later in this book.
Now that we have dealt with a possible human relative who lived on Earth and shared it with modern humans for around 200,000 years, let us travel further back and take a quick look at how the other hominid ancestors fit into the picture. Once again, the most recent knowledge is constantly under scrutiny and will most likely be modified as a result of new discoveries in years to come. But years after the first discovery of Australopithecus, scientists still do not rank them as ancestors to humans. In the areas of archaeology and anthropology, like in all the others of science, disagreement is widespread. So, the information below should be absorbed with a sense of speculation and uncertainty.
Just recently in the year 2000, scientists discovered a possible hominid which they call Orrorin tugenensis. It lived around 6 million years ago in Kenya and possessed clear features which indicate that it walked upright. This was certainly an early entry for the two-legged race and some dare to say that it may be one of the many missing links. Certain features, like the teeth of Orrorin tugenensis, suggest this species could even be more closely related to Homo sapiens than the many Australopithecus species it predates. Like our molars, the molars of Orrorin tugenensis were small compared to any of the australopithecine teeth. Their teeth also had very thick enamel like ours.
Australopithecus afarensis lived from approximately 4 - 2.7 million years ago along the northern Rift Valley of east Africa, and possibly even earlier. They seem to be the root ancestors to all subsequent hominids who were reasonably adapted for upright walking. But some of the bones in their feet were slightly curved and looked like the bones you would expect to see in a human ancestor who climbed trees. Although they probably lived in flat savannah areas, Australopithecus afarensis was capable of climbing trees in times of danger, and it is possible that they slept in trees, like baboons do in areas where there are no caves for shelter. Australopithecus afarensis is classified as an ape, not a human: a hominid ape closely related to human beings but not necessarily an ancestor.
So, maybe my friend Jana was right after all. When the apes came down from the trees and started walking upright, we became human; because the origin of bipedalism must be seen as the major step in human evolution. Walking around on their hind limbs, leaving their forelimbs free for other jobs, was an unusual mode of locomotion for mammals. Suddenly, many things associated with being human became possible. Such as fine manipulation with the hands and carrying food back to base camp. This does not necessarily mean that four million years ago primitive hominids evolved upright walking to develop a ‘food-sharing’ economy. This kind of behaviour only arose several million years after the development of upright walking.
Australopithecus africanus, or ‘southern ape of Africa’ was actually the first discovery of an early hominid in Africa. They lived between 2 and 3 million years ago and probably stood around 4 feet 6 inches tall, which means they walked upright. Raymond Dart found the well-preserved skull of a child, the ‘Taung baby’, in South Africa in 1924 and set the world alight with speculation. Could this be the missing link? For quite a while this speculation did the rounds until it became quite clear that the concept of a ‘missing link’ is far more complex than just one skull. This discovery led to an intense focus on Africa as the probable site of human origins and early development. But Australopithecus africanus shows no signs of tool use or any kind of permanent living site. Their huge teeth and skulls with prominent dorsal crests and large jaw muscles, show that they specialised in eating tough plant material. They must have been vegetarians, while our supposed ancestors evolved as omnivores with a taste for meat.
The next group of hominids lived around 2.2 - 1 million years ago. They were Australopithecus robustus. This seems to have been a more robust version of Australopithecus africanus which seems to have outlived its relative in southern Africa. Also referred to as Paranthropus robustus, or ‘robust near-man’, but very few fossils of these hominids have been uncovered.
At this point we really kick in with humanity. Homo habilis, is the earliest known species of the genus Homo. The first human species. It existed from approximately 2.2 - 1.6 million years ago in east Africa. Only a few fossil remains have been unearthed so far, but they all exhibit a clear trend towards a larger brain size. Homo habilis brains were about 30% larger than those of Australopithecus africanus.
Next in line was Homo erectus who lived from approximately 2 million to around 400,000 years ago. Coming across this information was to me like finding the holy grail. As we will uncover later, it is around this time that the tampering with genetics first begins to pop its head out of the pages of prehistory. Based on ancient scriptures on clay tablets from Sumer, the many steps of humanity were captured and preserved for us to unravel. These dramatic tales will be looked at in great detail. Homo erectus had a large brain ranging from 900 to 1,200 ml. This was a fifty-percent increase in brain size over the older Homo habilis. The largest brain sizes of Homo erectus fall within the range of modern humans, although the brain is configured somewhat differently than our own, it nevertheless provides a crucial link to the origins of Homo sapiens and our very first direct relatives.
The following statement is the kind of scientific babble that truly demonstrates our need to make empty pronouncements, when there is actually not much to say. “The transition from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens, the earliest forms of our own species, occurred approximately 300,000 to 400,000 years ago.” Do yourself a favour and ask any paleoanthropologist to explain to you how exactly this transition occurred! Unfortunately there is no clear explanation for this process and they rely on some imaginary sequence of events and environmental conditions that would have speeded up the evolutionary process. What seem to be missing are the many gradual steps from one form to the other. It is simply not feasible that the last female of the species woke up one morning and gave birth to a completely new
species.
What is however very important and impressive is the fact that they found items such as wooden tools and weapons which give evidence of a hunting lifestyle among Homo sapiens. There is much speculation about a 300,000 years old skull which was found near Petralona in north-eastern Greece by Dr. Aris Poulianos in 1997. He claims that it is the most complete find of early Homo sapiens and believes that human civilisation existed on Earth over one million years ago. He has produced a variety of tools and other implements which indicate that these ‘humans’ had the ability to communicate with speech. There is much more to be explored around this find, so for now I would like to return to what is historically documented in Sumerian tablets.
Once again I ask you to place this in your memory banks, as it will be used further as evidence of our birth as a ‘slave species’. A number of 130,000 year-old skulls have been found in southern and east Africa, once again giving us a link to the story of human creation. But we will discover that our creation was followed by 200,000 years of exploitation by a more evolved species who appeared on this planet out of ‘nowhere’. The rest of the chapters will slowly introduce us to these progenitors of the human race, expose the readers to the calculated steps that were taken to create the ‘primitive worker’ as they called it, and the years of enslavement that followed.
Why is it that we can trace slavery and the obsession with gold all the way back to the very beginning of human origins? Therein lies the terrible truth about the reasons for our existence, our ignorance and our genetic origins. All of this information has been carefully handed down to us in cuneiform clay tablets from the earliest days of writing. These tablets will also explain our natural tendencies; why we look the way we do, and why we could have possibly experienced such rapid stages of mental evolution in the past few hundred years. Deep inside our genome, in between all the brutal and barbaric genes, there is a natural tendency for compassion, love and peace, which is encoded, but switched off. Sometimes it breaks through the clutter, as the genome evolves and allows us to move closer to a completely reconstructed DNA; one step closer to a perfect genome and total enlightenment on both the physical and spiritual fronts.
CHAPTER 5
The Genome: Human Software Programme
By the time we reached the year 2000, there were two terms in the global vocabulary which spread fear and confusion among people around the world. ‘Millennium bug’ and ‘cloning’. But hindsight is an exact science, and in hindsight it certainly seems that the first feared item, namely the ‘millennium bug’was possibly a conspiracy by the global computer industry to rake in billions of dollars on the back of ignorant consumers. The millennium came and went with virtually no hiccups but the coffers of the IT sector swelled with unimaginable wealth. The other term that was brandished about carelessly by the media and swashbuckling journalists trying their best to impress their readers with their knowledge of this new science, was ‘genetic engineering’. This was highly unfortunate as it was inevitably followed by another new buzz word: ‘cloning’. This was very sad, as those two words immediately conjured up gruesome images in the minds of the global population, of ‘butcher-like’ scientists, hacking and splicing human genes, while creating an endless number of humanoid monsters and other unimaginable creatures who will overpopulate the world. People were imagining horrific tales of human-animal clones and many other inter-species clones of unthinkable horror. There was talk of cloning extinct animals like the mammoth, sabre tooth tigers and even some dinosaurs. This was however a typical sensationalistic response by the media in an attempt to attract readers and audiences. You see, if they were to report responsibly on the subject, keeping the facts as scientific and realistic as possible, they would not have had as large a response from the consumer, whose perception of science and progress is pretty much driven by Hollywood.
But the lack of understanding of this exciting new field of science was suddenly thrust into the limelight of global politics and attracted the attention of religious groups worldwide. In a flash the world had a new ‘evil’ to fight. Lengthy debates on cloning and genetic engineering erupted all over the world, causing one of the most controversial issues of the new millennium. The truth is that genetic engineering is the most exciting development in the history of Humankind. As we develop this knowledge and refine our skills in this area, we will come ever so closer to dealing with most, if not all disease in living creatures, but more importantly, we will come to understand our imperfect genome. This knowledge will help us in speeding up our evolutionary process by unlocking the ‘Junk’ genes which will most likely help speed up our spiritual evolution. What this really means, is that we will not only be able to deal with our physical disorders and malfunctions, but also our mental and spiritual shortcomings. This means we can speed up the evolution towards a violence-free global community that strives for absolute physical and spiritual harmony. This is what excites me most about this new science of genetic engineering. But before we can elaborate on this subject, we need to dispel some myths and misconceptions you may have heard from your mechanic while he was changing your oil.
In short, genetic engineering deals with the study of our genome, splicing, duplicating, copying, replacing and any form of manipulation involving genes in our DNA. There is so much interest in the actual activity of genes, and what kind of effect they have on our bodies, that there is very little time to dream up the creation of monsters. My assumption is that the most active area of genetic engineering is the study of genes for medical research and medical applications. After all, we are driven by the ‘greed’ gene, and in a global capitalist economy, genetic healing is where all the money and power of the future will be. It is now known that genetic engineering will most likely be able to treat any human disease imaginable. It follows that the world will soon be run by two major players. The media – telling us what to think; and genetics – allowing us to be what we want to be. But we first have to understand much more about this field of science before we can make such claims convincingly.
So what are genes? We talk about genes as if we see them on a daily basis. As if we all have a stash of genes somewhere in our bodies and we can reach in and grab a handful whenever we need to. Well, to a certain extent this is true, because every cell in our body (with the exception of a few) holds our genetic material in the nucleus of the cell. These are called eukaryotic cells and could also be put into the animal cell category, where the chromosomes are in the nucleus of the cells, surrounded by a nuclear membrane. The other kind of cells are called prokaryotic cells, but we are not dealing with those in this instance.
Our DNA performs the most complex activities imaginable, and yet the structure of the DNA molecule is so incredibly simple, that it truly baffles the mind. I am extremely concerned to find that the majority of source material I used, called DNA the ‘most complex molecule in our body’.
I strongly disagree. The simplicity with which the molecule is put together is another indication of the miracle of life and the absolute supreme intelligence of the creator God with a big G, or the Supreme Being, or whichever name makes you feel comfortable. I always imagine DNA as a very long line of Lego blocks, made up of only three different colours. If we consider that DNA is a molecular structure that contains all the codes and information needed to build, control and maintain a living organism, we once again stumble upon the subtle hint that we should live forever because DNA should control and maintain a living organism. All the programmes and codes that control our body are in this tiny molecule. The structure is actually so simple, that it raises another question. Could the DNA be somehow extended to whatever length we want it to be? Since we only use 3% of our DNA at present, this suggestion may seem a little premature, but you never know what our future needs may be. I would like to suggest, that once we have come to terms with our genetic material and unravelled the mystery behind its code, we will be able to sculpt future DNA molecules exactly as we need them. On the other hand, that may already be p
re-programmed into the molecule itself, as part of its evolutionary function. In a sense, like the metric system. All you do is add a zero, and you create a new unit of measure. See… that’s how simple it is. But let’s take a quick tour of the genome to demonstrate. For those with molecular science as a major, please skip this section.
Every cell in our body has a nucleus. In this nucleus lies a long double-stranded molecule shaped like a twisted ladder, called DNA: deoxyribonucleic acid. This ladder is broken up into 46 chromosomes which pair up into 23 pairs. One side of the chromosome is derived from the mother, the other side from the father. People born with Down’s Syndrome have one extra chromosome, totalling 47 chromosomes, causing their unusual features and brain activity. Each side of the twisted DNA ladder chromosome is made up of only three components. A sugar known as deoxyribose, phosphate, and any one of four bases which are: adenine, thymine, guanine, or cytosine. They are represented by the letters A, T, G and C. That is why scientists get very excited when they find traces of phosphate on Mars, which could indicate life possibly driven by DNA. The sugar and the phosphate bind together to form the two parallel sides of the DNA ladder and the bases join each other from each side to form the rungs of the ladder. But the bases making up the rungs of the DNA ladder can only join in a specific sequence. A joins with T, and G joins with C. It is this specific combination of A-T and G-C, which contains the codes for life and all the complex functions that keep us going. A short stretch of this chromosome, with a unique sequence of A, T, G, C, is referred to as a gene. And because of the unique sequence of the bases, this gene is specifically coded to control a specific function in the body. This gene can also be identified and mapped because of its unique sequence of components. This is referred to as ‘gene mapping’. The largest human chromosome contains around 280 million DNA base pairs, and it is estimated that the entire human genome consists of about three billion base pairs. All this genetic material in the cells of a human is called the genome.
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