And how can you make H. erectus an African émigré when his Javanese “descendant” is actually older?2 Let’s see: East African H. erectus is dated 1 myr3 while Java’s H. erectus is up to almost 2 myr (1.9 myr). Shouldn’t it be just the other way around? Chinese H. erectus from Sichuan Province were also dated 1.9 myr (at Longgupo Cave), while Java’s Modjokerto Man, and even Georgia’s Dmanisi Man, are dated 1.8 myr. Well then, the tailor-made solution is that H. erectus left Africa “earlier than we thought.” Just like that—a major migration and new time line is created. Theory dictates.
Yet this is only the beginning of difficulties—and ad hoc solutions. This pipeline from Africa to everywhere else (monogenesis) just doesn’t wash, but when conflicting evidence turns up, theory is salvaged with pseudoexplanations, like “specialization” or entirely specious waves of migration.
AFRICAN EXODUS PART TWO
For the second phase of OOA, it is taught that some time between 130 and 30 kya (a good window or “scatter” for later deniability), African H. sapiens went forth and supplanted all previous hominids in the world. According to this replacement model, outmoded species were replaced by new, freshly adapted ones. But H. sapiens coexisted in Java with H. erectus, who were therefore not replaced by their “betters.” Java’s H. erectus, in theory, is supposed to have been extirpated, without contributing in any way to the modern genome.
But given a ballpark figure of 100 kya for this second exodus, how do you explain the appearance of AMH features in European specimens much earlier than that? Why do European hominids start showing mod traits long before the world’s supposedly only mods left Africa? Examples include fossil men from Petralona, Vertesszollos, Atapuerca, Terra Amata, Arago, and Swanscombe—all said to be around 300 kyr, and all showing at least some AMH traits. Dated ca 400 kya, the various Homo heidelbergensis specimens in Europe (a pre-Neanderthal type) also have H. sapiens traits. But that’s way too soon (for the 100 kyr part two exodus), and it also places mods before Neanderthals in Europe.
When faced with hominids like Heidelberg Man who look rather like their contemporaries in Africa, it again signals “a fresh wave of African immigrants”4 who, theory claims, evolved into Neanderthals in Europe, but whose sisters and brothers evolved into H. sapiens in Africa! How does that grab you?
According to OOA, nothing hinting of mod got to Europe any earlier than, say, 50 kya. So what do we make of those Atapuerca bones in Spain, dated 1.2 myr? These people had fairly large braincases at 1,390 cc and jawbones with a real chin. Apparently, there was some sort of AMH in Europe much earlier than OOA theory allows. To save theory, hominids, they now said, after leaving Africa, came here to Europe and evolved into the newly christened Homo antecessor, much earlier than we thought.
If all this is difficult for you, it is difficult for me, too. Let’s back up a moment and try to get a grip on exodus, part two. It finds us in Africa (at least one and a half million years after H. erectus’s departure), waving good-bye to the second set of émigrés: a host of black AMHs. The OOA theory, inaugurated in 1987, dispatches this Eve out of Africa, naming her the single mother of all! Using mtDNA to determine the molecular clock of time, the resulting genetic tree tracks us all back to this common ancestress: mitochondrial Eve. Comparing ages of lineages from different regions, analysts came up with a time line for the outward bound migrations of this black Eve, or Mother Superior, as some have dubbed our mutual ancestor.
While the Eve theory assumes that all changes in her mtDNA (as observed in her living offspring, today’s races) were the result of steady mutations over time, these “changes” could just as reasonably be due to nothing more complicated than race mixings. Geneticist Alan Templeton maintains that precisely such mixing could have scrambled the DNA sequences, to the extent that “a date for Eve can never be settled by mtDNA.”*133 Others say the computer program that worked out this family tree was biased by the order in which the data were entered. Enter it a different way, and it does not give an African origin at all. Henry Gee, from the editorial staff of Nature, described the results of the mtDNA study as “garbage.” Even Mark Stoneking, who did the original mtDNA research in 1987, acknowledged that African Eve has been invalidated.
And there’s this: Some estimates put the grand exodus OOA (part two) at 160,000 years ago; though it may have been only 133,000 years ago.5 Others say 200,000 years ago, and yet others arrive at an age “much greater than 200,000 years,” that is, three million years ago!6 Read a different book or article, and that changes to 50,000 years ago7—hardly enough time for all the different races of the world to take shape from the Negroid original.
One might also ask: If a troop of H. sapiens ventured OOA say, 100 kya, why is there no sign of their culture (artifacts normally associated with the modern type: art, ornament, burials, storage pits, quarries, tools, trade, long-term occupancy) for another 50,000 years? Why the gap? This is unexplained. Why are Mousterian (Neanderthal) tools found at some sites inhabited by men of the modern type? These are fossils with the modern physique, but without modern behavior—for tens of thousands of years. “They tell you that modern man has been in existence for 200 kyr. Holy cow, what do they think these fully structured humans were doing for the past 190 kyrs?”8 South Africa’s Boskop Man, for instance, shows no culture to go along with his mod features and huge brain (1,830 cc), only rudely worked Mousterian tools. The same holds for South Africa’s Klasies site (as well as Israel’s Mt. Carmel, Krapina, Crimea, Borneo, and Malaysia).
In 1970, before African genesis came into fashion, Neanderthaltype tools in Africa were dated with no difficulty to 25 kya. But that figure changed to 200 kya—to better suit the newly minted OOA theory. Well, the dates are no more consistent than the theory itself, which (part two) goes on to claim that after these hardy AMHs left Africa, and trickled out to populate the entire world, becoming (or mutating into) the South American Indians, Australians, Pacific Islanders, and everyone else. All from the African hub! Thus was the whole world settled by these great migrations. Or so it is taught.
The New Guinea population, to take one example, presumably became established in this manner some sixty thousand years ago—overlooking the geographic fact that Sundaland (insular Southeast Asia) and Sahul (New Guinea and Australia region) are separated by deep ocean channels swept by strong and swift north to south currents. How exactly did these folks (with not much culture or technology) get out of Asia and Sundaland across to Sahul? Boats? Island-hopping across Indonesia to Australia? I doubt it.
If they arrived by water, why are there no traces of such boats or rafts on the northern Australian coast? Proponents say, disingenuously, we simply do not know their ship-building abilities; but no decent watercraft in the region can be dated that long ago. Neither do today’s Aborigines’ boats seem likely candidates for crossing to Australia or Oceania from any part of Southeast Asia. Did Micronesia’s little Palauans cross 370 miles of shark-infested deep ocean just to get to rocky Palau?
Today phylo-geographists claim they can track and identify long-distance migrations that bands of humans made in prehistoric times. Much of this science, however, is set up in the first place to prove a point—evolution—and its latest Garden of Eden: Africa. Thus does current genetic mapping “prove” African origins, the family tree beginning with the San (Bushman) and branching out.
The Bushmen are thought to have the oldest mtDNA in the world. Hence African Eve—everyone’s ultimate mother. I believe, however, that the great age of Bushman DNA can be explained otherwise: They are the last surviving people in Africa who lived before the flood, relics of a separate race, as Coon suggested, having come from a different pre–H. sapiens stock, the true aborigines of Africa’s grasslands. (The younger age of all other African DNA devolves on postflood hybrids, which I go into later in this chapter.)
Since the late 1980s population genetics has been mapping the earliest migrations undertaken by modern humans OOA, following “the inexorable progression of coloni
zations” from continent to continent. This concept of replacing the natives or colonizing the world is compatible, not with protohistory, but with the rule of expansionism and imperialism, which began only in recent time—the Holocene. “The oldest tribes are invariably peaceful. . . . The seed of conquest is not in them. Mankind’s desire to make himself master of [others] is a comparatively late development in the world.”9 Though OOA ostensibly credits the black man with conquering the world, all this is really the white man’s burden in disguise.
BORN TO ROAM
Proto-Negroids have never ventured beyond the tropic lands.
ROLAND DIXON, THE RACIAL HISTORY OF MAN
Why would they leave dear Africa, anyway? The reasons given are food shortages, “skirmishes with other groups,”10 scarcity of drinking water—pure guesswork, bald conjecture. Why would H. erectus (part one) abandon his warm home? Hypotheses include drying or cooling climate, which forced them out to Western Asia. Failing that, this man was simply “born to roam.”11 How lyrical: “The spread of Homo erectus into the northern continents was an inevitable consequence of evolutionary momentum. There was already kindled in the human mind a spirit of adventure, a real curiosity about the world around them,”12 this fancied wanderlust totally contradicting the reverse impulse, known as nostophylia, meaning, the deep-seated reluctance to abandon one’s ancestral home, which the Filipinos call bungungot, spiritual homesickness.
A spot of common sense: Hominids at the low level of Druk or H. erectus were more the stay-at-home sort than globe-trotting adventurers. How can we credit these brutish types, hardly advanced beyond their ground-burrowing, worm-eating ways, with such challenging migrations? How did
H. erectus cross the forbidding desert barriers of the Middle East? The awesome rivers of Asia? The major mountain barriers east out of the Levant? If they went north and east out of Africa, why are their typical hand axes not found in Southeast Asia or the Caucasus or China? Neither can anyone figure out how those early humans reached Spain and Italy (Ceprano) “without leaving traces in Turkey, Greece, or other points en route.”13
Which route did they take out of Africa?: “Your guess is as good as mine,” says expert Brian Fagan, who nonetheless declares that H. erectus OOA “possessed all the awesome mental abilities of modern humanity.”14 I must say, when it is useful to have H. erectus appear as a link to the anthropoid apes, he is drawn in books and journals with a “brutal muzzle,” primitive canines, small brain, and curved back—“a large-brained ape that looked rather like a man.”15 In the nineteenth century Pithecanthropus allalus was regarded as sufficiently distinct from humans to warrant an altogether separate genus. Marcellin Boule, in 1923, didn’t even think Java Man (H. erectus) was prehuman—just an anthropoid ape, a giant gibbon!
Figure 11.1. Gabriel Max’s painting of Pithecanthropus allalus, a missing link, reproduced in Ernst Haeckel’s Naturliche Schopfungsgeschichte.
It is indeed hard to comprehend Homo erectus’s means of transport . . . how a creature of his limited intelligence could have crossed the waters separating Java, Australia, and Africa.
JEFFREY GOODMAN, THE GENESIS MYSTERY
The ground people traveled not.
OAHSPE, THE LORDS’ SECOND BOOK 3:3
Only consider Darwin’s sensible thoughts on the matter, stated in The Descent of Man: “The wilder races of man are apt to suffer much in health when subjected to changed conditions. . . . Take them away from their . . . homes, and they are almost certain to die. . . . Man in his wild condition . . . is susceptible when removed from their [sic] native country.”
Instead of giving up OOA in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, theorists prop up hypothetical migrations at every turn:
Since Australians and New Guineans are so different genetically, it must be a separate migration that got them to their respective lands.
The DNA of Denisova or X Woman, being different from mods and Neanderthals, calls for a separate migration (500 kya), Pääbo suggesting that her people migrated out of Africa at a different time than Neanderthals or mods. If not, Denisova alone could overturn the OOA theory.
Another study posits a different wave of early Africans who made the exodus and interbred with the H. erectus who had left Africa a million years earlier (so much for parts one and two).
With the discovery of Indonesia’s hobbit, “proponents now believe . . . the first human ancestors to leave Africa may have been far more anatomically primitive [than H. erectus]—and may have left far earlier—than previously thought. If they are right, the Flores [hobbit] remains rank among the most important paleoanthropological discoveries of all time. . . . If they are wrong, it will be worse than Piltdown,” referring to the 1912 hoaxers who combined modern human and orangutan fragments into one fraudulent fossil.16
Those little hobbits supposedly “evolved from a normal-size island-hopping H. erectus population that reached Flores around 840,000 years ago. . . . The ancestors of hobbits probably left . . . on foot about 2 million years ago, ultimately crossing treacherous ocean waters . . . With a brain just one-third the size of a typical Homo sapiens adult, the hobbits were managing some extraordinary things . . . crossing at least two water barriers to reach Flores from mainland Asia.” But how exactly did they cross the deep, seemingly impassable waters? One scientist speculates that “a giant tsunami . . . swept them out to sea. Survivors clinging to trees could have been washed ashore.”17 Yeah, right. Pure moonshine.
Before the Holocene (only 10 kya), as Jared Diamond wrote in The Third Chimpanzee, “unfettered travel was impossible.” Early people, he pointed out, “had no social framework for travel beyond immediately neighboring lands.” Indeed, other tribes would simply “kill any trespasser. . . . To venture out of one’s territory . . . was equivalent to suicide.” Human populations, Diamond concluded, are basically sedentary.
Colonizers of new regions are particularly liable to perish.
STEPHEN JONES, THE CAMBRIDGE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF HUMAN EVOLUTION
What a sport it has become, moving the races of men (and the clock of time) around like pawns on a chessboard! How disconcerting, then, that the same scholars, conversely, suddenly become strict isolationists, adamantly denying much more plausible migrations, to America, for example, by prehistoric (Holocene) Chinese, Egyptians, Phoenicians, proto-Greeks—nations with excellent ships. “Men were on the move around the world much earlier than mainstream scholars would have us believe.”*134 The Vedics of India, a maritime culture, navigated around Africa and across the Atlantic, mining the copper and tin in South America. The Phoenicians left many signs of their foray into Brazil for its mineral wealth. Worldwide legend is full of such traveling wise men in the Stone Age. “And man built ships and sailed over the ocean in all directions, around about the whole world”†135 (the passage referring to a period around 40 kya).
POLYGENESIS AND THE RACE CARD
Subsapient man was not a traveler, and we needn’t take him out of Africa or anywhere else to populate the world. It is much less trouble-some and more realistic to take all the early races as indigenous to the lands in which we find their bones (polygenesis).
Carleton Coon, besides positing that the five races developed independently, also theorized that they developed at different times. It was this different times that got his approach rejected by the American Anthropological Association. Coon, writing in his memoir Adventures and Discoveries, describes how, in 1962, he became, in his own word, the “target” of a passel of do-gooders who accused him of racism when he worked out the relative date when each transition [to the modern form] took place; Coon had Mongoloids and Caucasoids arising around 250 kya, but Africans at a later date.
Coon and his Harvard mentor Hooton discovered that the earliest men of modern type were brachycephalic Caucasians (most early hominids, in contrast, leaned toward long headedness: dolichocephaly). Well, for some reason, their critics jumped to the conclusion that the first race to cross the sapiens thresho
ld must therefore be the most advanced. The implication, Coon explained, is that whoever came first is thereby best; but this is a logical fallacy (Coon saw the timing in a different light, simply a matter of different environments).
Hooton had found the first mods to be a Europoid race, an understandable position considering the Ihins came before all subsequent mixes. The first AMH specimens, as we have seen many times, resemble the Europoid type—the Ihin. “The parent stock [of sapiens] must be regarded as proto-Caucasoids.”18 But consider this: Since Caucasians have the straight hair of the anthropoid apes and since skulls of anthropoids are brachycephalic, it is the dolichocephalic Africans who are morphologically furthest from the simian type. George Frederick Wright’s observations put to rest any attempted definition of blacks as relics of the evolutionary past:
The European has a small face and a high nose—all features farther removed from the probable animal ancestor of man. On the other hand, the European retains in the strongest degree the hairiness of the animal ancestor, while the specifically human development of the red lip is most marked in the negro. The proportions of the limbs of the negro are also more markedly distinct from the corresponding proportions in the higher apes than are those of the European.
GEORGE FREDERICK WRIGHT, ORIGIN AND ANTIQUITY OF MAN
Coon, it seems, was assailed by people who were plainly afraid of blowback in the form of “a certain snobbishness as to whose ancestors became sapiens first.” A moot point, really, seeing that Homo sapiens sapiens (the Ghans) arose “in all [e.a.] the divisions of the earth” out of the cross between Ihins and Ihuans.19 In fact, like the Batek Negritos say, the very first people were created from brown soil; next came beings from white soil (Ihin), therefore they (Batek) were created first. This is what we saw in chapter 2: Negritos were not only a universal race, but were the original occupants of most regions in the world. Coon went on to explain “When I wrote that our Caucasoid ancestors crossed [the sapiens threshold] earlier than the ancestors of some Africans. . . . I knew that I was in for trouble.” T. Dobzhansky, leading the charge, stated publicly that Coon’s parallel evolution (polygenesis, separate descents), “would require a mystical inner drive that propels evolution.” Which is nonsense, since parallel developments are seen everywhere in the record. “The multifaceted phenomenon of man,” Jeffrey Goodman noted in The Genesis Mystery, “started off in a number of geographic regions at once.” And, I might add, not by evolving, but simply by crossbreeding.
Mysterious Origins of Hybrid Man Page 36
