[I had written] "Yet there are several fossils which show a gradation from Homo erectus to Neanderthal. So if the ICR still wants to classify Homo erectus as '100% ape', they have those 'missing links' to contend with."[Bill responded] "Please tell me specifically which fossils you are talking about."
This is a great rarity among Bill Morgan's questions to me. This is one of the very few times that his question actually had anything at all to do with the subject under discussion. Unfortunately, his response to my answer was very typical of Bill: he abruptly dropped the subject and did not respond to follow-up questions about whether my answer had helped him in his research.
Bill Morgan's typical dropping of the subject in response to my answering his question indicates that he had never had any real interest in learning something in the first place. It is obvious to me that he had asked that question only to "call my bluff" and then folded immediately when he realized that I wasn't bluffing.
Here's a hint: I don't bluff. Maybe that's the problem that Bill Morgan has with my questions. My questions about his claims effectively call his bluff and he doesn't want to have to admit that he has nothing to back them up. No wonder he loves his "rabbit trails" so much!
In the Creation Science Association of Orange County monthly newsletter, Bill Morgan usually writes an article reporting on the previous meeting's speaker/event and repeats some of the claims that were made. In a 1998 newsletter, Bill repeated some claims about Neanderthal Man which did not make much sense to me since those claims lacked any context or references. He also went on about how Neanderthal Man had been used in the ninth grade to trick him into accepting evolution, even though elsewhere he has claimed that he didn't actually believe evolution but rather wanted to use it as a convenient excuse to avoid personal responsibility for giving his burgeoning hormones free-rein.I wrote an email to Bill asking for more information on those claims and questioning his "personal story". I included an observation I had made years before in a discussion on CompuServe:
One thought on this. The ICR decries the lack of a "missing link" between man and apes. They proclaim that Neanderthal was "100% human" and that Homo erectus was "100% ape, nothing human about it!". Yet there are several fossils which show a gradation from Homo erectus to Neanderthal. So if the ICR still wants to classify Homo erectus as "100% ape", they have those "missing links" to contend with.I wasn't able to deliver that email until two years later (see below), because that is when Bill suddenly closed his AOL account and didn't post it again in the newsletter until a full year later. Even though I had raised a number of points -- including problems with the quality of science education and what to do about it -- , Bill zeroed in on that one statement above and pursued it instead:
Please tell me specifically which fossils you are talking about.Since I had originally written that observation several years earlier, I knew that it would take me a while to dig my source back up. I also remembered that my source had not named names, but rather the author was summing up his own professional experience in the matter, so it would not provide Bill with the information he requested.
So I started researching the question, which brought me to an excellent source of information: Jim Foley's FAQ on the Talk.Origins Archive, "Fossil Hominids: The Evidence for Human Evolution". I gleaned two examples from there, Petralona 1 and Arago XXI, along with some more information (eg, leading creationists being unable to agree which hominids are "100% ape" and which are "100% human" with a couple even changing their mind). Further research on those names and with Foley's bibliography confirmed what Foley had written about them. The bibliography search also yielded yet another transitional hominid fossil, Omo II, and again a Google search confirmed what had been written on that specimen.
During my Google searches, I made the rather striking observation that there weren't any creationist sites among the search hits. 1 They have written much on "ape-men" and most of the sites devoted to Piltdown Man and Nebraska Man (both with more than ten pages of hits) are creationist. Yet they remain strangely silent about these hominid fossils that are clearly transitional. Well, not so strange when you consider that they really don't have a case and the only effective way they can try to deal with these transitional fossils is to ignore that they even exist.
I sent my answer to Bill Morgan and got the same response from him that I have sadly come to expect: he completely ignored my answer and all my follow-up questions regarding it.
1 When I ran the same search again today for "Petralona 1", I did find one single creationist site, The Creation Concept by Douglas Cox. He obviously leans towards creation science, though he seems to be more objective and more inclined to do his own research than most creationists are. His page, "Human Fossils and the Flood", does not take the usual approach of "proving" that a fossil must be either "100% ape" or "100% human" nor of claiming fraud. Rather, Cox is addressing the question of how creationists should understand human fossils; his own understanding leans towards considering them to be the remains of pre-Flood people. He presents a partial list of human fossil finds, which he tries to keep factual and devoid of interpretation, particularly with respect to evolutionary sequence and dating. His entry for Petralona 1 reads:At Petralona, Greece, a skull, known as Petralona 1, was found in 1960. The brain size was 1220 cc. It has some Neandertal characteristics, featuring a large face with particularly wide jaws.He provides a list of links, mostly creationist sites, but including Jim Foley's FAQ, which says of Petralona 1:Petralona 1, Homo sapiens (archaic)
Discovered by villagers at Petralona in Greece in 1960. Estimated age is 250,000-500,000 years. It could alternatively be considered to be a late Homo erectus, and also has some Neandertal characteristics. The brain size is 1220 cc, high for erectus but low for sapiens, and the face is large with particularly wide jaws. (Day 1986)
In the following text, I am "DWise1" and Bill Morgan is "BillyJack1." Liber8r was a third-party witness to our correspondence.
######################################################### Subj: Re: You get the first look at my newsletter! The Peppered Moth Fraud! Date: 20-Jul-00 18:18:06 Pacific Daylight Time From: DWise1 To: billyjack1@hotmail.com CC: DWise1 First, I do hope that you have corrected your mistake concerning the "Spanish Inquisition". Second, I corrected my "Morgan Pages" in the matter of when you started posting your email address and FTP'd them up yesterday. Please let me know if I missed one. Third, your web site is down. I keep getting a 403 message, "Access Not Authorized". Are you aware of this problem? Could you please let me know when it gets corrected? And if it ends up that you need to change your URL, could you please pass it on to me so that I can update my own pages? Fourth, I would like to comment on this paragraph in the newsletter: "When I was 14, I thought the Theory of Evolution was scientific truth thanks to my 9th grade Biology teacher. He was the expert! Why would he deceive me?" You always seemed to have a problem in identifying experts, though the attitude that you express here is in keeping with a 14-year-old's perspective. I am not criticizing the use of that perspective here, since it is appropriate for what you were trying to communicate. There are definite problems with science education, especially in the secondary schools. I think that this would be a good subject to discuss. Of course, my solution would be to try to improve the quality of science education whereas your "solution" would be to destroy it further. I discussed this issue in my 1998-Sep-04 email to you, which never got delivered because you had disappeared suddenly. At least, I couldn't deliver it until now: [from 1998 Sep 04] Sorry for my absense of late. Besides being away for my two weeks of active duty, I have been very busy with work and with the events unfolding due to the Boy Scouts of America, Inc, having decided to attack our church [visit http://www.uua.org for details]. Bill, in your last newsletter, you wrote: "Some bones, claimed to be from Neandertal Man, were claimed to be non-human since the number of substitutions in their mitochondrial DNA was 24, and the human average is 8. What isn't taught, is that the human range for this is from 1 to 26! Thus it fell within human range. And if it were Neandertal Man's remains, how was its DNA preserved? Neandertal man supposedly disappeared 30,000 years ago, there is strong evidence that DNA cannot be preserved more than a few thousand years!" [Liber8r, there were a lot more statements made, but I didn't feel like typing them all in. Has Bill started emailing you a copy of the newsletter as he had planned? He has not emailed it to me.] Could you please cite your source(s) for this statement? Until I can read what the scientific source(s) say, I cannot make sense of your statement. As for your questions about the survival of the DNA, refer to the subject of Miocene "green fossils" (I'll have to dig the article out on my files), from which proteins were extracted and sequenced and a pattern of biochemical differences was discovered across morphologically identical specimens. Again, the primary source of your statement (ie, the scientific source, not a creationist claim supposedly based on an unnamed scientific source) should describe how the mitochondrial samples were obtained. While there is disagreement among scientists on exactly how Neanderthal Man is related to our species, Homo sapiens sapiens, most scientists do consider him to be very closely related to us, some even placing him as a sub-species, Homo sapiens neanderthalis, I believe. Precisely how are you using the terms, "human" and "non-human", here? Are you being consistent in your usage of those terms (ie, not engaging in standard creationist semantic shifting)? Are you using it to refer strictly to Homo sapiens sapiens, or a bit more loosely to include all possible sub-species, such as Homo sapiens neanderthalis? So what is your point, Bill? You seem to have proceeded from the premise that all scientists have been involved in some grandiose conspiracy to misrepresent what Neanderthal Man is. However, except for most of the interpretations that you threw in, all that information about Neanderthal has been freely available to anyone who has bothered to look it up. Like NOAA's answers to your questions about ozone-layer depletion. What it looks like is that yet again you had had a totally mistaken idea of what science says and, upon discovering that you were mistaken, you mistakenly interpreted that as debunking science. Just like your "discovery" that C-14 has too short a half-life to be used in dating anything older than about 50,000 years. Having your misunderstanding of science corrected does not disprove science, it only means that you didn't understand the science in the first place! "According to evolutionsts, Neanderthal Man lived at the same time as Homo Sapiens." Yes, that is correct. So, what is your point? Do you have a point, or are you trying to rely on innuendo again? "Because for many years, millions of school children were taught that Neandertal Man was evidence for the Theory of Evolution." What kind of evidence are you saying that it has been taught as? There is lots of different evidence for evolution, each piece of evidence pertaining to a different part of the overall view. What specifically are you saying that Neanderthal was being presented as evidence of? One thought on this. The ICR decries the lack of a "missing link" between man and apes. They proclaim that Neanderthal was "100% human" and that Homo erectus was "100% ape, nothing human about it!". Yet there are several fossils which show a gradation from Homo erectus to Neanderthal. So if the ICR still wants to classify Homo erectus as "100% ape", they have those "missing links" to contend with. But back to the question of what school children are being taught. We have touched on the problem of the quality of science education before. IS what is being taught in school as science current scientific thought? Is it accurate? Is it understood by the students? Is it even understood by the teachers? First, the science curriculum is not current. For various reasons, usually several years will pass before a new discovery or theory finds its way into the text books. As Frank Steiger pointed out, trying to keep science text books current would require them to be revised several times a year to include all the latest views and information. Our school district gets new books only about once every seven years. Rather, current scientific thought is to be found in the professional scientific journals. How often are professional scientific journals used in junior high and high school science classes? I cannot say that I've heard of it. Second, there are definite problems in the accuracy of the science curriculum in the elementary and secondary schools, particularly in the textbooks. When California was preparing to buy new science textbooks in the mid-to-late 80's, a group of scientists volunteered to review the textbooks under consideration. They found none of the books to be acceptable; all contained numerous inaccuracies, misconceptions, and just plain wrong information. For one thing, none of the authors were scientists. Also, in order to appease fundamentalist activists and board members, the publishers had their authors equivocate on, and even leave out, certain "controversial" subjects, like evolution. The scientists had to reject most of the books and drew up a long list of corrections that had to be made in the best of the candidates before they could even approach being adequate. As soon as the publisher had implemented a few of the corrections, the State Board met in secret and went behind the scientists' backs to approve the still-very-flawed textbook. Third, besides working from inaccurate material, many teachers are themselves not sufficiently trained in science. In most school districts, they find practically anyone they can to teach a subject, even if that teacher has little training in the subject. Two years ago, my younger son's 6th grade science teacher's experience was in teaching home-ec; our son knew more about the subject matter than she did and the other students kept turning to him for explanations. I don't know what his older brother's 9th grade science teacher's training was, but that guy was horrible; he was apparently a low-profile creationist who left out certain topics and hinted at the existence of "scientific evidence" against other topics, his idea of educational materials included the movies "The Lion King" and "Free Willy", and he also had a local fundamentalist activist speak to the class a number of times. Why, one local high school even had a PE teacher teaching biology, of all things, even though he had the absolute minimum biology training required for his PE degree! You may have heard something about that one. One thing that I have noticed about the misconceptions expressed by creationists about science in general and evolution in particular, is that they are very similar to the misconceptions held by much of the general public about science in general and evolution in particular. That might be a large part of the reason for most people's willingness to accept the claims of creation science. They are confused by what the scientists tell them, but they understand it when the creationists tell them what they already "know." When a teacher teaches science without knowing the subject matter, then he/she must depend on the textbook, which we already know to be woefully inadequate and inaccurate. Beyond that, they will rely on their personal "knowledge", such that they end up propogating their own misconceptions and misunderstandings to the next generation. Which brings us to the question of how much the students understand science. Considering the textbooks and teachers that most of them have to learn from, I wouldn't think that they would have much chance. "I was taught [that Neandertal Man was evidence for the Theory of Evolution] in 9th grade back in 1974, and I believed it and became an evolutionist!" Uh, Bill, now you're changing your story. In AOLCREAT.DOC, you wrote that you did not really believe it, but rather that you wanted to believe the [mistaken] conclusion that it made you free to indulge in all kinds of debauchery, "to sin without guilt." It was not the ideas of evolution that you had embraced, but rather false Christian conclusions about evolution and science. You claim to have become an atheist, but your own words speak differently: "But I honestly know that you know God exists but choose not to honor acknowldge or give thanks to God. Romans 1 says that and that was my case when I was an atheist, I prayed many times while an atheist." Bill, an atheist is one who does not believe in the gods. From what you describe of yourself, you were never an atheist, but rather had always remained a theist, even when you were trying to pretend to be an atheist. An atheist realizes that he does not need any gods upon whom to base his beliefs and that he must accept responsibility for his own actions. Your entire masquerade as an "atheist" was nothing but a theist's attempt to escape responsibility for his actions. Face it, Bill, except for your earliest infancy, you never were an atheist. "We have a free lesson for your youth so they may defend their faith in junior high, high school and college. Call 714 898-8331 and ask for more information (adults need this lesson too)." Could you please share some of that free lesson with us? You had freely offered to present your lesson to me before, which offer I accepted, but which you never did deliver on. "Mr. 100%". If you protest that none of it is written in electronic form, then it is high time that you do commit it to disk, since I would think that, since you appear to think so highly of your work, you would want to make it widely available on your web page. Also, could you please tell us what measures you have taken to ensure the scientific accuracy of this lesson with which you expect the youth to "defend their faith." Especially considering that you are well aware of how creation science's contrary-to-fact teachings about geology and the age of the earth has destroyed or nearly destroyed the faith of staunch creationists when faced with the truth. What have you done to ensure that your free lesson will indeed perform as advertised? That it will indeed defend their faith and not sow the seeds of its destruction? BTW, how is the work going on your web page? When should we expect to see it put up? And how are you doing on your opening statement for our on-line debate? ######################################################### Subj: Re: You get the first look at my newsletter! The Peppered Moth Fraud! Date: 22-Jul-00 23:29:52 Pacific Daylight Time From: billyjack1@hotmail.com (Bill Morgan) To: DWise1@aol.com Oh, D Wise, you remind me of a commercial I saw when I was about 10 (that would be in 1970). This hapless looking fellow is hitchhiking in the middle of a terrible snow strom, shivering away and holding a sign that says "Miami." Up pulls a Corvette, the door opens and inside is a very pretty girl who says, I am only going as far as Ft Lauderdale.....he shrugs, and says "no thanks." He missed the point! You did to. You selectively chose to not address the Peppered Moth fraud. Also, I have never hid the fact I was eager to sin and happy to stop trusting the Bible. At 14 this happened when Mr. Smeadela taught me I was related to a squid. I will mail you a tape of my lesson; where shall I mail it? Do you belong to a group that wants me to speak to them? I will, as long as you promise it will be respectful....I sure will be. Where is my error in the Inquisition? I thought you would be honored that I mentioned you. I can't do anything right in your eyes. I make you famous, accurately quote you, and you correct me. I will keep trying to please you. Dave Phillips is the Neandertal expert, would you like to call him regarding the N mans DNA????? I added liber8r to my newsletter mailing! You said: "Yet there are several >fossils which show a gradation from Homo erectus to Neanderthal. So if the >ICR still wants to classify Homo erectus as "100% ape", they have those >"missing links" to contend with." Please tell me specifically which fossils you are talking about. Bill ############################################################## Subj: Re: You get the first look at my newsletter! The Peppered Moth Fraud! Date: 28-Jul-00 17:52:49 Pacific Daylight Time From: DWise1 To: billyjack1@hotmail.com CC: webmaster@liberator.net, DWise1 I'm including Liber8r in this discussion and in the "Peppered Moth Fraud" one, since they are more technical in nature and could be of interest. Also, Bill, if you are planning to rely on your memory to store all this, then please copy it off and save it. You will find that keeping a copy makes subsequent research a lot easier and more accurate. [Bill, 23 Jul 2000 2:29:52 EDT] >>You said: "Yet there are several >fossils which show a gradation from Homo erectus to Neanderthal. So if the >ICR still wants to classify Homo erectus as "100% ape", they have those >"missing links" to contend with." Please tell me specifically which fossils you are talking about.<< It will take me a while to track down my source again. That statement was made two years ago and based on an earlier statement at least a few years before that. However, I can tell you that my source said little more than I did on that particular matter. Still, the article's bibliography may lead us to the more specific information that you seek, so I will keep looking for it. Until then, to help you find that information, I did a web search and found Jim Foley's FAQ, "Fossil Hominids: The Evidence for Human Evolution" on Talk.Origins at http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/index.html . Besides describing several specific fossils, he also provides a sizable bibliography, which also contains a number of creationist sources, on his "Fossil Hominids: References" page [http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/referenc.html]. Specific to our question are two of the specimens on his "Prominent Hominid Fossils" page [http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/specimen.html]: Petralona 1, Homo sapiens (archaic) Discovered by villagers at Petralona in Greece in 1960. Estimated age is 250,000-500,000 years. It could alternatively be considered to be a late Homo erectus, and also has some Neandertal characteristics. The brain size is 1220 cc, high for erectus but low for sapiens, and the face is large with particularly wide jaws. (Day 1986) Arago XXI, "Tautavel Man", Homo sapiens (archaic) (also Homo heidelbergensis) Discovered at Arago in southern France in 1971 by Henry de Lumley. Estimated age is 400,000 years. The fossil consists of a fairly complete face, with 5 molar teeth and part of the braincase. The brain size was about 1150 cc. The skull contains a mixture of features from archaic Homo sapiens and Homo erectus, to which it is sometimes assigned. A search for these specific fossils confirmed what Foley had written. Interestingly, the search did not yield even a single creationist site, which tells me that the creation science literature must be ignoring these fossils. In the summary on the same page, Foley notes: "There are no clear dividing lines between some of the later gracile australopithecines and some of the early Homo, between erectus and archaic sapiens, or archaic sapiens and modern sapiens." Now, if these are different and distinct species, as the "creation model" says they would be, then there should be clear dividing lines between them. We should have no difficulty assigning a given specimen to one group or the other. However, transitional forms do not fit neatly into one group and not the other and so we do have difficulty figuring out to which group to assign them and they do blur the dividing lines between the groups. When a transitional form is assigned to a group, it must be done arbitrarily by picking one or a few specific distinguishing characteristics, such as the presence of feathers or the placement of the jaw joint, while noting the characteristics that alone would have placed it into another group, or which are transitional between the two groups. The creationist literature makes much of the arbitrary assignment of a transitional form to a group while ignoring those other characteristics; their treatment of Archaeopteryx is classic, as is the creationist's assessment of the hominid pelvis I witnessed on CBN (since stealth-named to "Family Channel" and then sold off years later) and reported on my page, "How I got started and why I oppose 'creation science'" [http://members.aol.com/dwise1/cre_ev/warum.html]. Foley demonstrates the classification problem by surveying how creationists themselves classify certain fossils (see discussion below on his "Comparison of all skulls" page [http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/compare.html]). In doing a search on "erectus", I found a number of references to the "Homo Erectus Problem" (no Viagra jokes, please). Following up on the bibliographic reference for Petralona 1, I found in M.H. Day's "Guide to Fossil Man" a section entitled "The Homo Erectus Problem" (pp 409-412). Day states the basis of the Problem as: "No longer is Homo erectus a clearly defined taxon temporally, morphologically or even geographically." The Problem is multifaceted and boils down to 5 questions: 1. Does Homo erectus exist as a true taxon or should it be sunk into Homo sapiens? 2. Is it a palaeospecies that exists, in classical form, as a segment of the line that emerged from Homo habilis and gave rise to Homo sapiens? 3. Is Homo erectus a good example of a 'stasis event' in hominine evolution with little or no evolutionary change in its form during its existence? 4. Is there a clear cut example of Homo erectus in the European fossil record of man? 5. Are the Asian forms so far removed from the evolution of Homo sapiens in Africa to call into question the existence of Homo erectus sensu stricto in Africa at all? Much of the debate stems from the wide dispersion of Homo erectus populations and the wide range of dates for it, which overlap Homo habilis and Homo sapiens. There are distinctive Homo erectus characteristics, but in many fossils they are found to be mixed with or grading into archaic Homo sapiens, so that the debate is mainly whether it can be considered a separate taxon or should be seen as a grade of archaic Homo sapiens. Please add to our list of transitional fossils Omo II, of which Day writes that it can be aligned with Homo erectus or "included in an 'archaic' Homo sapiens group that displays a suite of mosaic or intermediate characters." Now let's go back and take a closer look at Foley's "Comparison of all skulls" page [http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/compare.html] (which is called "Comparison of creationist opinions" on his home page). At the top of the page, he displays 14 skulls for comparison: 2 ape, 1 human, and 11 hominid. He then displays a table showing six of the hominids (ER 1813, Java Man, Peking Man, ER 1470, ER 3733, WT 15000) and whether 8 creationists (Gish [in two publications], Taylor [in three publications], Mehlert, Bowden, Menton, Baker, Van Bebber, Lubenow) thought that they were ape or human. Please refer to the page itself for the bibliography list and for the actual table itself. Foley points out that creationists disagree on whether Java Man, Peking Man, and ER 1470 were ape or human. In some cases, the creationist changed his mind about a particular fossil: eg, Gish with ER 1470 and Taylor with Java Man and Peking Man. Here's the table data, with a short description added for the fossils in question: KNM-ER 1813, Homo habilis?? Discovered by Kamoya Kimeu in 1973 at Koobi Fora in Kenya (Leakey, 1974). This specimen is similar to 1470, but is much smaller, with a brain size of 510 cc. Estimated age is 1.8-1.9 million years. Apart from its extremely small size, ER 1813 is quite similar to a number of Homo erectus and Homo habilis skulls. It is surprisingly modern, with a rounded skull, no sagittal crest, modest eyebrow ridges, and a small amount of nasal prominence. Creationists almost totally ignore the existence of this fossil (Lubenow briefly mentions it without describing it). However it is safe to say that all creationists would classify it as an ape; its brain size of 510 cc is far too small to be considered human. Votes: Ape: Gish (1985), Mehlert (1996), Bowden (1981), Menton (1988), Taylor (1992), Gish (1979), Baker (1976), Taylor and Van Bebber (1995), Taylor (1996), Lubenow (1992) Human: none Trinil 2, "Java Man", "Pithecanthropus I", Homo erectus (was Pithecanthropus erectus) Discovered by Eugene Dubois in 1891 near Trinil in Java. Its age is uncertain, but thought to be about 700,000 years. This find consisted of a flat, very thick skullcap, a few teeth, and a thigh bone found about 12 meters away (Theunissen, 1989). The brain size is about 940 cc. Trinkaus and Shipman (1992) state that most scientists now believe the femur is that of a modern human, but few of the other references mention this. Sangiran 2, "Pithecanthropus II", Homo erectus A very similar but more complete braincase was found at Sangiran in Java in 1937 by G.H.R. von Koenigswald. It is even smaller, with a brain size of only 815 cc. Many creationists consider Java Man to be a large ape, but it is far more humanlike and has a far larger brain size than any ape, and the skull is similar to other Homo erectus skulls. Votes: Ape: Gish (1985), Bowden (1981), Menton (1988), Taylor (1992), Gish (1979), Baker (1976), Taylor and Van Bebber (1995) Human: Mehlert (1996), Taylor (1996), Lubenow (1992) "Peking Man", Homo erectus (was Sinanthropus pekinensis) Between 1929 and 1937, 14 partial craniums, 11 lower jaws, many teeth, some skeletal bones and large numbers of stone tools were discovered in the Lower Cave at Locality 1 of the Peking Man site at Zhoukoudian, near Beijing, in China. Their age is estimated to be between 500,000 and 300,000 years old. Most creationists have considered the Peking Man fossils to be those of apes, or, even more improbably, monkeys, but recently the view of Lubenow that they were humans has been gaining ground. Votes: Ape: Gish (1985), Gish (1979), Bowden (1981), Menton (1988), Taylor (1992), Human: Mehlert (1996), Baker (1976), Taylor and Van Bebber (1995), Taylor (1996), Lubenow (1992) KNM-ER 1470, Homo habilis Discovered by Bernard Ngeneo in 1972 at Koobi Fora in Kenya (Leakey, 1973). Estimated age is 1.9 million years. This is the most complete habilis skull known. Its brain size is 750 cc, large for habilis. It was originally dated at nearly 3 million years old, a figure that caused much confusion as at the time it was older than any known australopithecines, from whom habilis had supposedly descended. A lively debate over the dating of 1470 ensued (Lewin, 1987; Johanson and Edey, 1981; Lubenow, 1992). The braincase is surprisingly modern in many respects, much less robust than any australopithecine skull, and also without the robustness and large brow ridges typical of Homo erectus. The face, in contrast, is extremely large and robust. In the last few years, an increasing number of scientists have been classifying this skull as Homo rudolfensis. Creationists seem to be fairly evenly divided on whether 1470 is an ape or a human. Originally, Gish (1979) thought it human, then later (1985) decided it was an ape. Lubenow's (1992) opinion that it was a human seemed to be gaining ground in the early 1990's, but more recently other creationists such as Mehlert (1996) and Hartwig-Scherer have decided that it is just a large-brained ape. Votes: Ape: Gish (1985), Mehlert (1996) Human: Bowden (1981), Menton (1988), Taylor (1992), Gish (1979), Baker (1976), Taylor and Van Bebber (1995), Taylor (1996), Lubenow (1992) KNM-ER 3733, Homo erectus Discovered by Bernard Ngeneo in 1975 at Koobi Fora in Kenya. Estimated age is 1.7 million years. This superb find consisted of an almost complete cranium. The brain size is about 850 cc, and the whole skull is similar to some of the Peking Man fossils. The brain size of 850 cc is extremely small by modern standards. A very similar skull, ER 3883, is even smaller, at 800 cc. Votes: Ape: none Human: Gish (1985), Mehlert (1996), Bowden (1981), Menton (1988), Taylor (1992), Gish (1979), Baker (1976), Taylor and Van Bebber (1995), Taylor (1996), Lubenow (1992) KNM-WT 15000, "Turkana Boy", Homo erectus Discovered by Kamoya Kimeu in 1984 at Nariokotome near Lake Turkana in Kenya (Brown et al.1985; Leakey and Lewin, 1992; Walker and Leakey, 1993). This is an almost complete skeleton of an 11 or 12 year old boy, the only major omissions being the hands and feet. (Some scientists believe erectus matured faster than modern humans, and that he was really about 9 years old (Leakey and Lewin 1992).) It is the most complete known specimen of H. erectus, and also one of the oldest, at 1.6 million years. The brain size was 880 cc, and it is estimated that it would have been 910 cc at adulthood. The boy was 160 cm (5'3") tall, and would have been about 185 cm (6'1") as an adult. Votes: Ape: none Human: Gish (1985), Mehlert (1996), Bowden (1981), Menton (1988), Taylor (1992), Gish (1979), Baker (1976), Taylor and Van Bebber (1995), Taylor (1996), Lubenow (1992) Foley writes: "As this table shows, although creationists are adamant that none of these are transitional and all are either apes or humans, they are not able to tell which are which. In fact, there are a number of creationists who have changed their opinion on some fossils. They do not even appear to be converging towards a consistent opinion. Gish and Taylor both used to consider Peking Man an ape and 1470 a human, but now Gish says they are both apes, and Taylor says they were both humans. Interestingly, the most widely differing views are held by the two most prominent creationist researchers on human origins, Gish and Lubenow. Bowden, who has also written a book on human evolution, agrees with neither of them, and Mehlert, who has written a number of articles on human evolution in creationist journals, has yet another opinion. "It could be pointed out that evolutionists also disagree on how fossils should be classified, which species they belong to, etc. True enough. But according to evolutionary thinking, these fossils come from a number of closely related species intermediate between apes and humans. If this is so, we would expect to find that some of them are hard to classify, and we do. "Creationists, on the other hand, assert that apes and humans are separated by a wide gap. If this is true, deciding on which side of that gap individual fossils lie should be trivially easy. Clearly, that is not the case. "ER 1813 (H. habilis?, 510 cc) is almost totally ignored by creationists, but it is safe to say that they would all classify it as an ape. Few mention ER 3733 (H. erectus, 850 cc) either, but those who do seem to consider it human (although it's hard to be sure in Bowden's case). The Turkana Boy is not mentioned much either, but it is safe to say, in view of its essentially human skeleton, that no creationist would consider it an ape. It would be fascinating to know what creationists think about fossils such as OH 12 (H. erectus, 750 cc), Sangiran 2 (H. erectus, 815 cc), OH 7 (H. habilis, 680 cc), but unfortunately few creationists even mention these fossils, let alone discuss them in any depth." We may as well end on a merry note. Foley also examines the creationist claims concerning the inner-ear in "Creationist Arguments: Semicircular Canals" [http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/a_canals.html]: "A number of creationists (Gish 1995; Lubenow 1996; Mehlert 1996; Wieland 1994) have cited studies of the semicircular canals as evidence of a lack of transitional forms leading from apes to humans. These claims are based on the work of Fred Spoor and his colleagues (Spoor et al. 1994; Shipman 1994). ... Hoping that their structure might reveal something about hominid evolution, Spoor studied the canals of many living primates, including humans, and compared them with some hominid fossils. Because the canals are so small and buried in a bony part of the skull, it was necessary to use CT (computerized tomography) scanning to examine the canals without destroying the fossils. "Spoor's results were interesting. The canals in Australopithecus africanus and robustus skulls were most similar to the great apes. Spoor et al. found this consistent with the commonly-held view that australopithecines were partly arboreal and partly bipedal. (They did not conclude that australopithecines were quadrupedal, as most creationists imply or claim.)" However, there were some interesting results. Homo erectus, which most creationists consider to be ape, had a humanlike pattern. And the semicircular canals in Neandertals are different from those of modern humans, which would: "... indicate that Neandertals are not particularly closely related to modern humans, and gives some support to those who believe that they should be considered a separate species, Homo neanderthalensis, rather than a subspecies of Homo sapiens. It is not a result that can be easily explained by creationists, who have always argued that Neandertals are little more than a racial variant of modern humans." As it turns out: "More recently, in a study which compared the bony labyrinth of humans, apes, and other primates, Spoor and Zonneveld admitted that the issue of inner ear morphology is too complex, both phylogenetically and functionally, to allow simple conclusions to be drawn, or even to easily distinguish between bipedal and quadrupedal behavior ..." "While these early results have not shown any clear evidence of transitional types of semicircular canals, neither are they, with the exception of Stw 53, enough out of line with evolutionary expectations to cause much surprise. Moreover some results of these studies are problematic for creationists. The human-like canals of Sangiran 2 are a serious problem for the many creationists who claim Java Man is an ape, while the distinctive canals of Neandertals suggests a greater difference between them and modern humans than most creationists are likely to be happy with." Foley's site has lots more good factual information than we have been able to touch upon here. It is well worth the visit. ##############################################################Typically, Bill Morgan did not respond to my answer and he completely ignored all my follow-up questions on this subject.
I finally had a chance to track down my original source:C. Loring Brace, "Creationists and the Pithecanthropines", Creation/Evolution, Issue XIX, Winter 1986-1987, pp 16-23.On pages 22&23 is the concluding paragraph:Homo erectus remains are known from Africa, Asia, and Europe. Late examples grade into early Neandertal forms (some scholars even treat Neandertal as late erectus). In summary, Homo erectus is a well-documented, well-dated, and widespread hominid intermediary fossil antedating Homo sapiens.Article's biographic note:Dr. C. Loring Brace is professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan and curator of physical antrhopology at the university's Museum of Anthropology. He is a leading authority on human fossils and evolution.
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First uploaded on 2001 November 03.
Updated 2015 October 21.