The splitters are a determined lot, telling us that “the notion that multiple human species are the norm . . . has only got stronger with a series of major scientific discoveries. Since 1994, four new species [e.a.] of hominid have been added to the human family tree.”38 But rather than species, these are simply different races.
Built into anthro-speak is a slippery, disorienting use of this term species, where only races apply. Even Stephen J. Gould, the late-twentieth-century darling of paleontology, couldn’t get it right: “Before commerce and migration mixed us up, each race is a separate biological species.”39 This is a contradiction in terms! We ought to remove Neanderthal from our species, Gould also argued—in agreement with Tattersall, a consummate splitter, who urges that Neanderthal be restored to separate species status, ignoring the now incontestable evidence that they interbred productively with mods. And how about this: J. B. S. Haldane, the esteemed English biochemist and founder of the new synthesis (neo-Darwinism) said “new species may arise by hybridization.”40 Well, in that case we don’t need evolution at all. England’s Douglas Palmer counts at least twenty species among our ancestors, again using “species,” where really only race (subspecies) applies. In fact many of these “species” are not even distinct races—just variations, strains, crosses, mongrels.
A recent discovery in Africa, honored with a new species name, Australopithecus sedipa, was presented to the world with all the fanfare of an exciting new discovery who will “rewrite long-standing theories.” Dated to about two million years, it was initially hailed as our direct ancestor. However, critics say Au. sedipa actually came after H. habilis and hence is too young to be our ancestor. All the while Au. sedipa screams hybrid—nothing but an upgraded Au. Found in 2008 near Johannesburg, this creature is made of “spare parts,” said to be an “odd blend . . . head-to-foot combination of features of Australopithecus and the human genus, Homo.”41 And, yes, it is just that. Testifying to Ihin genes are: reorganized front brain, projecting nose, smaller teeth, humanlike hips and pelvis, longer legs, and precision grip.
In 2010, when they found “distinct” mtDNA in the Siberian Denisova remains (it was only part of a pinky finger), it instantly became a new species. Assigning new species to every new fossil, sometimes named after the finder or the sponsor, is like having a star named after you. After all, there is little hope of hitting the news with mere varieties or races; only new species will do the trick. One paleontologist decried “the rashest statements in the face of evidence . . . generalizing on single observations. . . . Journalism, my dear boy, journalism pure and simple.”42 With Denisova, the glory went to the geneticists, the finger fragment supposedly “marking an entirely new group of ancestral humans.”43
All these new species create “a terrible paleontological mess. . . .Everyone who had a fossil come into their hands . . . wanted it to be something new . . . for their purposes of self-aggrandizement. . . . Some were unhappy when their prize species were lumped together with those that others had discovered.”44
Weidenreich, one of the best minds in the game (“that masterly student of ancient man,” according to Hooton45), was right to warn that raising the differences between racial groups to the rank of species is artificial, an illusion, a “taxonomic trick,” exaggerating dissimilarities to make your find important. Like Weidenreich, Dixon and Hooton explained the confusing varieties of man simply, parsimoniously, by way of amalgamation. Harvard supported this for a while, though the debate fired up again: Were races actually species (splitters) or just variants (lumpers)?; today you get as many opinions as professors. Interfertility, for example, is quibbled with and not always considered a perfect criterion for species inclusion. (Significantly, it is biologists—not taxonomists—who are satisfied with using interfertility as the best available guide to define species.)
Darwin muddied the picture with floundering logic, arguing that even if all human races are interfertile, still this is not a safe criterion for single species. These matters, he said, are governed by “highly complex laws . . . a naturalist might feel himself fully justified in ranking the races of man as distinct species, for . . . they are distinguished by many differences in structure. . . . The enormous range of man . . . is a great anomaly in the class of mammals, if mankind be viewed as a single species. . . . The mutual fertility of all the races has not as yet been fully proved.”46 It took the twentieth century—with its uptick in racial blending—to prove it.
[No] animals very different will breed together.
CHARLES DARWIN, NOTEBOOK C
It is a fact, too, that some species that look quite distinct interbreed regularly.
Frankly, Darwin’s ideas on fertility and sterility of hybrids came mostly from his study of flowers. Though he denied it for man, he did note the increased fertility of crossbred flowers.
CUTE IN THEIR OWN WAY
Whenever the populations of early man met they did exactly what modern populations do, they interbred.
ASHLEY MONTAGU, MAN: HIS FIRST TWO MILLION YEARS
Perhaps there is some ingrained repugnance at the idea of elegant AMHs mating with clumsy cavemen, even though the Indo-Europeans, our forebears, “spread across the world . . . interbreeding with peoples of the most diverse hues and features.”47 Tattersall, a great splitter, thinks we’re much too fine to be lumped together with the early hominids: “Our own living species, Homo sapiens, is as distinctive an entity as exists on the face of Earth, and should be dignified as such instead of being adulterated with every reasonably large-brained hominid fossil that happened to come along.”48
In fact, I suspect a hidden factor behind the slow acceptance of amalgamation as the true ascent of man: xenophobic bigotry. Awarding species status to mere race differences may be part of a lingering deepseated racialism that views these differences as irreconcilable and unassimilable, the same spirit of apartheid that invented and used the word miscegenation to denote interracial marriage.
Tattersall goes on to bolster his claim with the argument that “Neanderthals . . . and Homo sapiens would probably not have recognized each other as very desirable mating partners.”49 “Few Cro-Magnons may have wanted to mate with Neanderthals,” agrees Jared Diamond, who supposes that “the differences may have been a mutual turnoff . . . [H]ybridization occurred rarely if ever . . . [one] doubts that living people of European descent carry any Neanderthal genes.”50 Cro-Magnon, say others, regarded uncouth Neanderthal as “little more than animals.”51
Despite these parochial opinions, the fact remains that “race pride or the differences of religion and customs have never prevented the Anglo-Saxons from crossing with the lowest of savages,” as Armand de Quatrefages made bold to assert in The Pygmies. Let’s not allow our puritanical or other views to blind us to these liaisons. Highbrow and lowbrow have somehow always bridged the gap; folks from opposite sides of the track, so to speak, have always been drawn together across the divide. “One thing human beings don’t do,” observed prehistorian/anthropologist/archaeologist Robert Braidwood, “and never have done, is to mate for purity.”52
Franz Weidenreich, in Apes, Giants, and Man, also stressed “the tendency of man to interbreed without any regard to existing racial difference. This is so today . . . and there is no reason to believe that man was more exclusive in this respect in still earlier times.” And who knows, some of these hybrids might have been quite fetching. Hey, if high cheekbones and full lips were in then, as they are now, no telling what these mosaics looked like. Writers are beginning to ask if the Neanderthals “were the ugly brutes often portrayed by popular science, or were they cute in their own way?”53 (Some had freckles.)
Figure 5.10. Mixed Fijian. In the Fiji archipelago Polynesians and Negritos crossed in all degrees.
Historically, some of the most backward people have mated with more sophisticated tribes: Alpheus H. Verrill reported that “the living Indians of these districts [Nicoya, Chiriqui, Terriba, in South America] are the result of mixtures o
f the cultured races and the more savage tribes.”54 In Brazil, Percy Harrison Fawcett thought the Morcegos (see chapter 12) and their kindred the “most bestial and degenerate savages in existence,” yet some of them intermarried with the more noble Tupis and Caribs, and from this amalgamation sprang two different types, the Botocudos (“Neanderthaloid in type,” according to Czech anthropologist Ales Hrdlicka) and the extremely varied Aymaras. This region also had milk-white Indians, their skin covered with short down, who saw best in moonlight; those mooneyed types are of extraordinarily composite heritage.
TABLE 5.1. SIGNS OF CROSSBREEDING: MIXED MORPHOLOGY AMONG EUROPEAN FOSSIL MEN
Where/What Modern Traits Archaic Traits
Croatia/Krapina Man*78 Frontal region, Beetle brow, sloping forehead, great jaw, large face and orbits, barrel chest 1,300–1,500 cc, brachycephalic, limbs mod, light build
France/Arago Man “A fascinating mosaic of old and new features”†79
France/Fontéchevade Man High forehead, 1,400 cc,
light build Heavy browridges
France/La Chapelle Man Big brain: 1,625 cc Heavy browridges, long and low cranium
Germany/Heidelberg Man Modern dentition Massive mandible, broad jaw, no chin
Greece/Petralona Man “Hints of modernity” “Distinctly primitive”‡80
Germany/Steinheim Man Well-developed forehead Heavy browridges
Hungary/Vertesszollos Man Some modern features, 1,500 cc Thick and broad cranium
Portugal/skeleton Modern chin and teeth Thick bones, short legs, hefty jaw Romania/skull Modern skull
Long and flat forehead, large molars
Spain/Atapuerca Man Modern chin Heidelbergensis in type
UK/Swanscombe Man Big brain: 1,325 cc Thick skull and bones, primitive features
Figure 5.11. Heidelberg mandible compared to a modern one.
Figure 5.12. Heidelberg site.
Betwixt and between: The pattern remains the same as we go farther back in time—earlier hominids were profound blends as well: H. habilis (found in the same general area as Au) shows foot morphologically quite mixed, the ankle in particular. While he was erect and bipedal, with modern femur and dentition and thin skull, nevertheless his stride was shambling, his arms long, legs short, and hands curved. Although H. habilis’s Ihin genes gave him a notably short stature, his small brain betrays the legacy of Au. Those early men of the African savanna came in a great variety of shapes and sizes, some scholars (noting the great range of types) even doubting that there was a separate species of H. habilis; Mayr, for example, calls H. habilis an Au.
LAST DITCH: DIFFERENTIAL EVOLUTION
We need to take these mixtures more seriously, before tossing them in the “variability” bin or squeezing them into imagined evolutionary sequences or inventing such chimeras as differential, rapid, or mosaic evolution. Differential evolution is the hypothesis that all aspects of an organism do not evolve together, but each at its own rate. African hominids in particular needed this theory; consider Kenya’s Black Skull, for example: “parts of this skull were evolving faster than other parts.”55 How does that grab you? In the case of the australopiths at Olduvai with a foot more modern than the hand, or Au. garhi with relatively mod legs but long (archaic) forearms, supposedly the legs “evolved” quicker than their forearms. And in the case of Laetoli, the feet supposedly evolved before any other body part.
Or take Turkana Boy whose well-preserved skeleton from East Africa (“a mosaic of erectus and sapiens features”) was clearly modern “from the neck down” (the rib cage almost identical to modern man’s), whereas his skull was markedly primitive—with hardly any forehead or chin, and the frontal lobes rather small (880 cc). Now, all this indicated, at least to Brian Fagan, that “different parts of the human body evolved at different rates.”56 Evolved? I don’t think so.57 If face/head/ brain evolved last (as the evolutionists tell us, and as surmised in the case of Turkana Boy), then why did Taung Child of South Africa, an upgraded Au, have a high, round forehead, smooth browridge, delicate cheekbones, and flat (not prognathous) face? Taung, the first Australopithecus africanus ever discovered, was modern from the neck up, just the opposite of Fagan’s differential evolution of Turkana Boy.
Must we resort to ex post facto theories like differential evolution (or modular structure of the genotype) to explain (away) these mosaics, or to explain how the primitive features of Neanderthal compute with his large brain? The Neanderthal skull is more modern than its femur (the same combination found in Swanscombe Man), which is to say, these people were modern from neck up. The same is true for that troublesome Portuguese skeleton, with the perfectly modern chin and teeth that contrast with his thick bones and short legs (of the classic Neanderthal type), reversing the so-called differential evolution of body parts conjured by Fagan for Turkana Boy. And so, at least with the Portuguese find, archaeologists grudgingly conceded “significant interbreeding.” We don’t need differential evolution or any other principle to explain these patent hybrids.
But the theories are piled high and deep. Turkana Boy’s combination of modern body surmounted by a primitive head was so “improbable,” an observer might “wonder if . . . [he] was a visitor from an alternative universe or perhaps the product of some strange genetic experiment.”58 How silly and inane. Java Man, like Turkana Boy, had a primitive skull combined with a fully upright body. Noting the modern femur of this H. erectus, anthropologist Jeffrey Schwartz ventured “our ancestors had become human first from the waist down.”59 But if so, why do Au and H. habilis have humanlike dentition? Ad hoc and inconsistent, a differential rate of evolution is held nonetheless as a “principle,” Turkana Boy nicely confirming that different parts of the body evolved at different rates. Why else would H. erectus appear with modern limbs but primitive jaw, dentition, and cranium? S. J. Gould saw evolution “proceeding at different rates in different structures. . . . This must be true or evolution couldn’t have happened.”60 Well, maybe it didn’t happen.
6
THE TIMEKEEPERS
The Uncertainties of Scientific Dating
In every case, the story [of man] seemed to hinge on the age of things.
JAMES SHREEVE, THE NEANDERTAL ENIGMA
Current geological dating is arbitrary at best, and wildly inaccurate at worst.
DAVID HATCHER CHILDRESS, LOST CITIES OF NORTH AND CENTRAL AMERICA
I pay not the least attention to the generally received chronologies.
GODFREY HIGGINS, ANACALYPSIS
INFLATIONARY TIMES
Does mankind (or Earth itself, for that matter) have as long a history as we’ve been taught? Millions and billions of years? I have come to doubt it. One century ago, geologists like George Frederick Wright placed the first forms of life at only 24 mya and the age of man as no older than 100 kyr—in contrast to the five million currently assigned to him. (The subject of Earth’s age is touched on again in chapter 10).
Historically, it was Darwin’s ponderously gradual and long evolution that kicked off deep time, for his theory demanded vast eons for organisms to evolve. Yet, it is a plain fact that with hybridization of the races, new types can happen quickly, in a matter of generations. Darwin, we know, had postulated accumulated and minute adaptations building up over huge amounts of time; after all, “millions on millions of generations” are needed for speciation to happen.1 Darwin’s detractors, however, twitted his conveniently “indefinite time . . . an unlimited number of generations for the transitions to take place.”2
I want to stress that the inflated dates handed to us for life on Earth bear the heavy imprint of evolutionism. And we know that long dating stands at the very opposite extreme (the opposite fallacy) of young Earth, the biblical age of Adam said to have occurred a meager 6 or 10 thousand years ago, which is just as suspect as the dates given us by today’s deep-time enthusiasts. I think the truth actually lies somewhere in between. Sure, dating by the bone people is reliable enough up to, say, 40 or 50 kya (the carb
on-14 limit), but beyond that time, things go hog wild, off the charts. I would sooner accept their dates relatively (reflecting sequences), than as an absolute time count.
Absolute dating . . . is still subject to a very large margin of error.
GEORGE GAYLORD SIMPSON, THE MAJOR FEATURES OF EVOLUTION
ADDING ZEROS
“Not a trace of unquestionable evidence of man’s existence has been found in strata older than the Pleistocene,” said William J. Sollas, Oxford geologist.3 Before the 1950s, the Pleistocene was believed to extend back some 700 kyr; today, that’s tripled to at least 2 million years.
Man today has no more conception of how many years ago the Pleistocene commenced, or the length in years of any geological time, era, or period, than the ancient fossil on my library table.
JAMES CHURCHWARD, THE LOST CONTINENT OF MU
Moving man (hominids) beyond the Pleistocene, back to the Tertiary (up to 6 mya) has been de rigueur since Louis Leakey’s time (as per Zinj) and the rise of potassium-argon dating (K-Ar method) in the 1960s. This is how the bone people keep score, and one thing is for sure—the older the better. Given the academic race to outstrip the earliest dated man, most dates are suspiciously overestimated.
Figure 6.1. Louis Leakey as a young man.
And it is dominoes. Almost overnight, H. erectus of Java was made to jump from 500 kyr to 1 million years old, Louis Leakey’s headliner Olduvai finds pushing everything back even further. (A cute consequence: In 1957, Ashley Montagu’s book was titled, Man: His First Million Years. Reprinted in 1969, the revised title was: Man: His First Two Million Years.)
Mysterious Origins of Hybrid Man Page 20