Indeed, some areas of the deepest ocean are highly radioactive, suggesting a much higher rate of radioactive decay in times past.32 The quantity of cosmic rays penetrating the atmosphere may also affect the amount of C-14, research indicating that past surges of radiocarbon affected all parts of the globe. It is thought that the amount of rays varies as Earth passes through magnetic clouds; the strength of the magnetic field (which is ever decreasing) also affects the amount of rays that reach us. Baby Earth registered a fabulously turbo-charged atmosphere in ancient rocks, showing a hundred times the expected magnetism. The rocks are faithful recorders of the enormous amplitude of our planet’s original force field, that force in turn having led to bigger earthquakes and greater volcanic activity—leaving lava beds almost a mile deep in the western United States. Lava flows in the Cretaceous covered land the size of India: today the Deccan Traps still extend over 200 thousand square miles, a mile and a half thick in some places.
Figure 6.3. Vortex energy: the rotary force behind all motion; the force that driveth all things. The force is movement toward center, from external to internal, symbolized by the whirlwind.
From Molecular Dating to Genetic Analysis
When evolution turned “molecular” in the 1960s, we were told that this new science was based on proteins evolving at a known and constant rate, even though different proteins have different mutation rates. Anyway, this molecular revolution was followed, in the 1970s by the sequencing of DNA. In the same way that the DNA breakthroughs of the late twentieth century revolutionized the identification, the “fingerprint,” of individuals (especially criminals), it also transformed the paleoanthropological arts, the celebrity status of DNA even threatening to rob the thunder of the good old fossil hunters.
Genetics (Mendelian), having once saved Darwinism (when it fell out of favor around the turn of the twentieth century), now made another go at it. Recent advances in molecular biology and genetics, it is now bruited about, can determine the history of species and virtually replace morphology (referring to the skeletal anatomy recovered at digs). Genetic distance can be measured, telling us when species diverged (split off), all of which is then nicely plotted on an evolutionary tree.
But outside the English-speaking cabal, there are geneticists like Maciej Giertych (Polish Academy of Sciences) who find no biological data relevant to tree genetics. Giertych says he could pursue his entire career without ever mentioning evolution. Built on supposition, this new school of population genetics assumes (1) that there is a constant rate of mutations and (2) that species have arisen by splitting off (diverging) from a parent stock—the theory blithely assuming a common ancestor, which it is supposed to confirm! All this is null and void if there has been extensive crossbreeding in the human family.
Race mixture is a very ancient phenomenon.
EARNEST HOOTON, UP FROM THE APE
Geneticists using mtDNA contend they can assess the amount of time that separates two species by measuring the accumulated mutations, the method called, appealingly, “the molecular clock.” Offsetting this confidence is the fact that mtDNA is only a small fragment of our genetic heritage. And what if variations in mtDNA are due to factors other than mutation (like hybridization)? There is also the little problem of species that have not changed, mutated, or evolved in millions of years. Do we really have an “exact” (or relevant) science here? In an intriguing interview shortly before her death, biologist Lynn Margulis called the population geneticists who have “taken over evolutionary biology . . . reductionists ad absurdum.”33
Bunny Suits
Archaic DNA is easily contaminated with extraneous DNA, making the process of looking for ancient DNA extremely sensitive to contamination. Workers at an excavation site in Spain have taken to wearing “clean-room” bunny suits (jumpsuit, gloves, booties, plastic face mask) to protect samples from their own DNA. Handling, or even breathing on, a sample can easily throw off results.
Current work in RNA molecules has researchers claiming to have isolated collagen from a 68-myr Tyrannosaurus rex. Other scientists, however, suspect that the collagen comes from bacteria rather than dinosaurs, citing similar claims, for instance, of 80-myr dinosaur DNA, which actually came from a human. In any event, despite the claim to have found blood cells of some unfossilized dinosaur bone, it is doubtful that cells could have lasted any more than a few thousand years, no less 65 myr!
Dinosaurs have been gone too long for any genetic material to remain in fossils.
BRYAN WALSH, “THE WALKING DEAD,” TIME, APRIL 15, 2013
Most recovered Neanderthal bones have been extensively contaminated with modern human DNA. It is a painstaking process isolating these ancient genomes; as a rule, bacteria contaminates fossils. Recovering genetic material from such remains is fraught with difficulty, if only because DNA itself degrades rapidly. (Protein and DNA break down so fast, it is hard to believe they could survive more than 30 kyr or so.) Svante Pääbo’s genome project was based on a leg bone from Croatia, and there were no bunny suits around when those Vindija Neanderthal bones were first collected; the remains sat in a drawer in Zagreb, the DNA unprotected for 30 years.
As molecular genetics steps into anthropology’s bailiwick, it boldly presumes to trump the paleontological arts. With DNA sequencing technology*89 upstaging morphological analysis (the bones) and claiming its increased rigor, “fresh evolutionary insights do not necessarily require any fossils at all.”34 Highly specialized biochemists (who are neither historians, archaeologists, anatomists, or paleoanthropologists) are then left to call the shots on the human record; and these population geneticists are saying that H. sapiens and Neanderthal did not interbreed.35 This, we know can’t be right.
Evolutionary geneticists Svante Pääbo and Johannes Krause of Germany’s Max Planck Institute, using high-tech lab equipment and supercomputers, were the first to identify a novel Siberian hominid (Denisova) by using genetic analysis alone, without any real fossilized remains (the analysis was based on fragments of a pinky finger). Studying that precious pinky’s mtDNA, scientists determined it was “twice as distant from us as Neanderthals.” OK, but you cannot infer anything about the organism from the genes, which is to say, they have no idea what this creature looked like—its anatomy, context, ecology, or behavior. Nothing.
You don’t discover a Lucy in the molecular lab, protested one anthropologist, others agreeing that genetics can never replace the hard work of the dig. Cold weather, significantly, helps preserve ancient DNA, but, hey, most early fossils are from tropical regions where conditions for DNA survival are poor. Neanderthal DNA, we learn, is only viable for 35 kyr; and protein will not last more than 100 kyr.36 How then can this science tell us anything about creatures who roamed Earth (supposedly) millions of years ago?
Organic matter, metals and nonmetals . . . disintegrate within a few thousand years . . . a million years from now, the skeletons of Rodin, Renoir, Einstein. . . . . Will have turned to dust, along with the coffins in which they were buried.
ROBERT CHARROUX, MAN’S UNKNOWN HISTORY
Passing the buck . . . the evolutionists resolve all their problems by pushing them over to the geneticists.
GORDON RATTRAY TAYLOR,
THE GREAT EVOLUTION MYSTERY
And so molecules (and radiometrics) are now setting the time frame for human evolution, the molecular clock supposedly measuring the passage of species time, even though mutation rates are not so fixed or reliable, as discovered in the work of molecular biologist John Cairns, who found bacteria were stress dependent, mutating at a faster rate when faced with an environmental challenge. Even the esteemed Ernst Mayr, considered perhaps the greatest twentieth-century evolutionary biologist, warned this eager new generation of scientists against the alleged constancy of rates.
The vaunted molecular clock uses average mutation rates, although there is “no theoretical reason why the accumulation of genetic change should be steady through time.”37 The rate of DNA mutations can fluct
uate: “they fail to take account of the different rates at which mutations can accumulate.”38 Mutations can be brought on by cosmic rays, radiation, just as X-rays can produce mutations.39 In excess, it “gives an array of freaks, not evolution.” We well know that radiation can increase mutations, as the atomic age has made plain such horrible genetic effects.
Some scientists think supernova events threw colossal amounts of radiation to Earth. “The explosion of supernovae has subjected the earth at least fifteen times to showers of radiation strong enough to kill most forms. . . . These bouts of high radiation could well have been a significant factor in the evolution of life,” says Lyall Watson in Supernature. Paleobiologist of Chicago’s Field Museum, David Raup, in The Nemesis Affair, predicts that “as we near the plane of the galaxy, various aspects of our cosmic environment change. . . . Interstellar clouds of gas and dust, and the levels of certain kinds of radiation may increase . . . [which] might produce biological effects on earth.”
And how much stock shall we place in genetic distance when chimpanzees are said to be genetically closer to human beings than to gorillas and we humans are 98.4 percent identical to chimps? Or when 95 percent of DNA is “junk DNA”?40 Or when Neanderthal sequences come out as “somewhere between modern human and chimp sequences”? Paradoxically, one molecular biologist, John Marcus, after performing his own DNA distance comparisons, found “the Neandertal sequence is actually further away from . . . the chimpanzee sequences than the modern human sequences are.” Humans closer to chimps than Neanderthals are? Marcus concluded: “the Neandertal is no more related to chimps than any of the humans. If anything, Neandertal is less related to chimps.”41 Huh?
Successfully intimidating with complicated formulas and daunting nomenclature, the work of the geneticist has been properly scientized by all these: molecular phylogenetics, allopatric populations, epistatic interactions, allelic combinations, prezygotic isolation, sympatric speciation, and amphiploids—none of which anyone outside the cabal understands and little of it in fact pertaining to humans—mostly to plants and fruit flies. Does the number of bristles on fruit flies tell us anything about human evolution?
Chemical and Faunal Dating
One chemical dating technique measures the amount of nitrogen lost and fluorine gained in bones buried in a deposit. But the amount of fluorine in the bones depends on the amount of fluorine in the soil; if rich in it, the bones there embedded can become rapidly saturated. Neither does fluorine, which yields highly variable results, accrue at a uniform rate; its absorption in volcanic areas tends to be quite erratic. Result: Bones of wildly different dates may have similar fluorine contents.
Fontéchevade Man has been loosely assigned a meaningless scatter of ages, anywhere from 40 to 800,000 years. But recovered from damp, clayey soil, it makes the latter date most unlikely. The nitrogen preserved in bone, a factor used in dating, varies greatly depending on the amount of clay in the soil. England’s acclaimed Ipswich skeleton, beneath only four feet of clay, was assumed nevertheless to antedate the last glaciations, even though “the geological evidence of antiquity was actually quite inadequate,” as noted by Le Gros Clark in The Fossil Evidence for Human Evolution; he further remarked that “even so, it was seized with avidity by those who were particularly anxious to bolster up arguments for the remote origin” of our species. (To Boule, these AMHs were “in reality barely prehistoric.”)
Concerning Au dating, Le Gros Clark went on to warn that South African deposits are mostly in the form of breccias in which stratification (observable layers) is either absent or too poorly defined to permit geological dating. So an alternative was to base dating here on associated fauna—even though South African faunal correlations of those early periods were still not worked out. Some of these fossils (mammals) put Au in association with Pliocene fauna, even though a number of these mammals actually survived to a much later date.
Faunal dating uses animal bones to determine the age of sedimentary layers or fossils buried in those layers. This method is a touch circular: How is the geological age of rock determined? By its index fossils, meaning the fauna (animals) most characteristic of a particular stratum; but that fossil in turn is dated according to an assumed evolutionary sequence determined by the rocks. In other words, rocks are used to date fossils; fossils are used to date rocks. Trilobites, for example, have been dated about 550 myr because they are found in Cambrian layers; how do we know it is the Cambrian? Because of the presence of trilobites (index fossil). Faunal fossil markers (animal remains) may be mistakenly labeled, say, Tertiary, when they might actually be much more recent. As an example, the fauna used to long-date Krapina Man to 130 kyr actually survived to a much later time, 30 kyr. When such “index fossils” turn out to be long lived throughout several strata (or in fact still extant), you can throw out the whole ball game. (Some modern, extant, species previously thought to be extinct for millions of years are listed in chapter 12). Although Australopithecus africanus was dated by faunal assemblages, “African faunal sequences are not very precise indicators,” warned William Howells; faunal dating is “notoriously capricious.”42
Paleomagnetic Dating
Paleomagnetic dating is yet another method of determining age, this one according to magnetic field reversals: north pole becomes the south pole and vice versa. Such pole shifts are evidenced by the alternating zig or zag direction marked in ancient rocks: this is because volcanic basalt (the commonest rock on Earth) cools in the direction of the magnetic field. Solidified lava is then magnetized like the compass needle, facing North.
It was paleomagnetic dating that came up with that extraordinarily old date for Au. sedipa. But, trust me, the timing of these magnetic pole shifts is still indeterminate. Magnetic polar shifts are not the same as geographical pole shifts, the notion that the rotational axis of the Earth flips or turns over in space either due to crustal slippage or movement of the entire planet. Geographical pole shifts have been investigated in John W. White’s Pole Shift and found by him to be pseudoscientific, without basis in fact.
I have researched these shifts and have never succeeded in finding any scientific consensus on the rate of these reversals. Again, it’s a question of time. To give you a taste of the discrepancies: Some say a reversal occurs once every 5,000, 7,000, or 28,000 years; others say, every 100 kyr; others 200 kyr; still others 250, 500, 550, 780, or 1 myr. The Mammoth reversal supposedly lasted from 3.1 to 3.0 mya; the Gilbert reversal from 3.6 to 3.4 mya. Alternatively, a pole shift happened 26,500 years ago.43 Or the Mungo event occurred some 35 kya; the Gothenburg event 13 kya; a “fully confirmed” field reversal 10,000 years ago44; or twelve pole flips have happened in the last 5 myr. Take your pick!
A GEOLOGICAL NIGHTMARE
Earth’s crust and ancient beds, it is well known, may be distorted by faulting and folding and redeposited gravels, or material carried from elsewhere: newer stuff can get wedged in the gap of an older rock layer. When a hominid fossil is labeled intrusive, that means it has been accidentally reburied in some other deposits. Louis Leakey’s 1-myr Oldoway (Olduvai) Man, for example, turned out to be a modern H. sapiens accidentally buried less than 20 kya in older deposits, which had been scrambled by faulting.45 Workers know Olduvai Gorge is a place that has seen recurrent faulting and deformation. Even older than Olduvai Man, touted as the world’s earliest H. sapiens, was Kanjera Man, another Leakey exploit in East Africa, which also turned out to be a modern human buried somehow in older sediments.
Neither is river plain a good stratigraphical context: sediments are so mixed up by flowing water. Many important fossils were recovered in river plains, Java’s famous H. erectus man found right at the edge of a river. Alkaline washing, too, gives dates much older than they should be; some of the carbon-14 necessary for accurate dating is apparently removed by exposure to such treatment, thus deepening the age of the sample. In Africa, many of the key Kenyan fossils are from dry streambeds. Turkana Boy, found in a riverbed, was long dated to 1.6 m
ya. In Europe, an early dated Neanderthal type, Steinheim, was found in river gravels and dated to 300 kyr.
With many geologists frankly doubting that sedimentation rates are uniform, nineteenth-century uniformitarianism has been seriously challenged. So many factors can affect the transportation of Earth materials: speed of flow, roughness of channel, temperature, type of material carried, direction and volume of flow, depth, slope, and chemicals present. And most fossil bones are indeed found in sedimentary rock.
In places like Ethiopia where Tim White discovered what he trumpeted as “5.5-million-year-old hominids,” the setting is nonetheless a “geological nightmare. You have a patchwork quilt of different aged sediments on the surface.”46 White’s old partner in East Africa, Donald Johanson, said: “At Hadar the minerals in some of the volcanic ash layers we normally use to date fossil-bearing formations had been altered or contaminated by later geologic processes.”47
Ethiopia’s now-famous Ardi was discovered in a rainy region. Torrential downpours wash up traces of ancient stone and bone from different eras; remains as old as 5.7 myr can get mixed up with stuff as recent as 80 kyr. And that’s just the point: We will return to these dates in chapter 10, where that figure, 80 kyr, is proposed as the oldest possible date for man. Extended pluvial periods in East Africa complicate the reading of deposits; here dating is surrounded by “clouds of dust.”48
Mysterious Origins of Hybrid Man Page 22