Actually, current theory needs H. erectus to possess fire, allowing him to have made the great migration out of Africa; fire would have been essential for their widespread dispersal into colder regions. If H. erectus colonized Europe and Asia, how else could he have survived during the glacial winters there? Yet we cannot use logic alone to reconstruct history, especially presumptive logic. Although it has become fashionable to announce unambiguous evidence for controlled fires by H. erectus, it is by no means certain that they could actually start fires. Even if Peking Man did have fire, he may not have known how to start one: the depth of the hearth layers indicates he did not permit his fires to go out, which is the custom of even historical tribes who cannot start a fire. Today, African pygmies on the Epilu River do not know how to make fire; nor did the Andamanese and Tasmanians of the nineteenth century.
Regular fire use began in Neanderthal times39; only in later Neanderthal deposits are there signs that they ate cooked grains (bits found in their teeth). Neither were the Ihuans full-fledged carnivores until around 22 kya, while actual fire making in Africa is probably no older than 20 kyr.40 And in America, it was not until 18 kya, that their angel mentors taught the Ongwees how to cook flesh and fish to make them more palatable. And this was the first cooked food since the days of the flood.41 Similarly did the Greeks credit an unseen host, the god Phos, with their ability to control and use fire, just as the “advanced beings” (ABs) gave fire to man. It was also in this manner that the South American Tukano Indians learned the art of fire from their god Abe Mango, while the Kuikuru of Brazil say they had fire brought to them by the god Kanassa; likewise did the Aztecs have a fire god—Xiuhtecuhtli.
MAN THE HUNTER
Just as fire and cooking may in fact be more recent than current theory credits, man the hunter is not old enough to figure in the evolution of our species. Was H. habilis a “competent hunter,” thus setting humanness in motion? Anthropologists claim that H. habilis brought back meat to be butchered and shared. However, follow-up digs at Africa’s Olduvai Gorge uncovered additional H. habilis skeletons, which revealed that this “mighty hunter” was tiny (under four feet tall). Here, on the open savanna bristling with lions and saber-toothed tigers, H. habilis was likely spending a lot more time cowering in the trees. Cut marks superimposed over tooth marks indicate they were probably scavenging scraps of carcasses. Nor were the Neanderthals particularly organized hunters, but rather opportunistic ones, killing prey on an encounter basis—“rotten hunters” according to University of Chicago’s Richard Klein. Even the “great mammoth hunters,” as critics point out, may not have been hunters at all but marginal scavengers, at least until the late Mousterian. The much later people of Klasies River, and all other South African hominids for that matter, were not efficient hunters until 50 kya,42 long past the age of H. habilis.
Sherwood Washburn, who led the dubious school of causality claiming that culture shapes physiognomy (rather than vice versa), argued that the “success of this adaptation” (hunting) dominated the course of evolution, resulting in “our intellect . . . and social life.”43 This way of thinking includes, of course, the notion that our bigger brains were developed on savanna land, as the forests, with its many fruits, retreated. With the switch to hunting and meat eating, hominids required “even greater cooperation and longer hunts.” Or so they say. A great deal is made of this cooperation. Did early man hunt cooperatively? So what if he did; wolves, lions, hyenas, orcas, hawks, goatfish, and apes hunt cooperatively. Even one-celled animals form collectives; such grouping “appears very low down in the scale of development indeed.”44
In three short sentences, the clincher word evolutionary is used five times by an anthropologist pitching the importance of hunting and eating meat: “The incorporation of meat-eating in the diet seems to me to have been an evolutionary change of enormous importance which opened up a vast new evolutionary field. [It] ranks in evolutionary importance with the origin of mammals . . . it introduced a new dimension and a new evolutionary mechanism into the evolutionary picture.”45
But just the opposite, really: it was the vegetarian Ihins who were the real thrust of humanity; the sacred little people ate no flesh food, teaching that all life was sacred: “Neither killed they man nor beast nor birds nor creeping thing that breathed the breath of life.”46 Among their descendants, for example, the Atlantes people of North Africa, as mentioned by Herodotus, “ate no living creature.”
TALKATIVE CHIMPS
Analysts would have us believe that humans improved their communication skills by hunting together; that we got our enhanced gray matter because we “had to obtain foods [large animals] that were even harder to find,” and therefore we cooperated and communicated more fully. Thus is it argued that “diet accounts for the different paths taken by humans and the apes.” This is how “humans became talkative chimps.”47 Believable? Even clear thinkers like Ashley Montagu and Ernst Mayr have turned causality toward agenda: “Speech . . . exerted an enormous selection pressure on an enlargement of the brain.”48 To get around the circularity of these arguments, they call it a “feedback loop”: brain develops language and language develops brain!
We are told that because greater resourcefulness was needed (in drying Africa), bigger brains were selected to deal with the problems, the challenges. This “need” thing blunders into the supposition that human speech came along as a response to “adaptive pressures” and “demands on communication”49 (in the movement away from the free-and-easy forest). Speech now arose because it was needed in the hunt; perhaps the threat of animal predators on Au led to such useful adaptations as “the evolution of increased vocalizations.”50 The need to share vital information on food sources is what “stimulated the development of fluent speech.”51 And these are the flimsy fictitious factoids taught today in institutions of higher learning.
Today’s interpreters, then, are saying that the Great Leap Forward was caused by our capacity for speech: “development in language . . . propelled early modern humans to cultural dominance.”52 This inverted causality is an affront to both reason and scholarship. Recent researchers have gone so far as to suggest the bizarre idea that “early human language evolved as a way to effectively groom several people at the same time. . . . Having a larger vocal repertoire allows you to have a more complex social set-up. . . . Language arose as a form of group grooming.”53 (The idea, of course, is based on reciprocal grooming as observed among apes). Once the group got larger, say these theorists, vocal exchanges replaced the bonding created by one-on-one grooming. And this moon-shine passes muster in today’s prestigious journals. Seeing that population levels increased at sites of early mods, Erik Trinkaus, for example, suggests that “larger groups inevitably demand [e.a., there’s that “need”] more social interactions, which goads the brain into greater activity . . . creat[ing] pressure to increase the sophistication of language.”54
Darwin believed that the “social feelings” were innate: “Most of our qualities are innate.”*115 Language, I would argue, is innate, too, hardwired into our brains, like thought. “The premise that cognition evolves [e.a.] . . . is not only unproven—there is actually no evidence for it.”†116 According to Noam Chomsky, the great MIT linguist and Nobel Prize winner, language was not acquired through natural selection, nor did it evolve. To Chomsky, “deep grammar” is built into the human brain only—not the ape brain. Indeed, Stephen J. Gould endorsed this “universal grammar.” Language is simply one aspect of big brain, not a cause of it, as argued by evolutionary scientist Christopher Wills: “the force that accelerated our brain’s growth . . . [includes] language, signs, collective memories.”‡117 But cognition cannot be “explained” by evolution; language, thought, and consciousness are givens—part of the intrinsic inheritance of the human being; we come thus equipped, hence, the hyperbolic myths of Krishna and Noah, who spoke as soon as they were born. The givens, irreducible and fundamental, do not need to be explained. They are self-evident, like the
Buddha’s “suchness of reality”: “Ours not to reason why.”
If you’ve had enough of the “experts’” wizardry, let’s see how speech really fits in the human picture.
THE MECHANICS OF SPEECH
When man first became widely diffused, he was not a speaking animal.
CHARLES DARWIN, THE DESCENT OF MAN
Darwin was right: Only fully upright man is a speaking man: the vertical column must be erect, not only to support his large brain, but to permit the mechanism of speech. It is for this reason that the talking birds (starling, raven, parrot) can utter words, for their larynx (voice-box) is vertical. Asu and Au, however, had the larynx rather high in the throat, limiting the range of sounds; you need a larynx low in the throat for humanlike articulation.
And man [Asu] was dumb, like other animals; without speech and xwithout understanding.
OAHSPE, BOOK OF INSPIRATION 7:2–3
Lucy, an Au, was not much of a speaker, judging from the air sacs attached to her hyoid bone. Neither is articulate speech possible without a fairly flexible neck. This flexion at the cranial base is missing in early man; the bottom of their skulls, the basicarnia, is flat, limiting production of vowels and consonants. The Au palate and pharynx, in addition, are unsuited for articulation. Early hominids in general had shorter pharynges; one needs a longer pharynx to modulate the vibrations produced in the larynx.
But the modern vocal tract is not why humans can speak, it’s how. The spoken word did not make us human, for speech is part of humanity, inseparable from brain power, an aspect of brain power.
Let us pause and ask if language, as claimed, was the cause of improved culture and complex social organization. Can we agree with today’s experts who reckon that man’s command of language triggered the cultural explosion of the Upper Paleolithic? We cannot, judging from the Kebara find in Palestine: a Neanderthal that came after AMHs in the Near East and that had an anatomically modern larynx*118—yet Neanderthals never did make that Great Leap Forward.
The Max Planck people made big news with their “astonishing find” of Neanderthaloid El Sidron (Spain) specimens who share with mods a version of the gene called FOXP2, which contributes to language ability: “they possessed some of the same vocalizing hardware as modern humans.”55 Neanderthals also had a modern hyoid bone, enlarged thoracic spinal cord, and a Broca’s area (even H. habilis had Broca’s area, a feature of the AMH brain).
True to the record, in Hopi myth, the First People could not talk. The Maya Quiches also say the antediluvian race was without intelligence or language, for when Gucumatz and Tepeu first attempted to fashion human beings, the result was a dumb creature who could not speak or worship their creator. Neither did H. P. Blavatsky’s third root race have spoken language: they lived, like the ground people, in pits dug into the earth. Even after the flood, the ground people had little speech (ca 21 kya).*119 As late as the nineteenth century, the Sri Lankan Nittevo, now extinct, had speech reportedly like the twittering of birds, while other eighteenth-century travelers mentioned Madagascan “manimals” who apparently did not speak any language. Even in our own day we hear reports of throwbacks, such as the cryptid Jacko, caught in British Columbia in 1884 (see chapter 12), who spoke in a half bark, half growl.
But have our paleoanthropological experts got it backward? Thinking that speech ability led to larger brains and modern behavior?: “Articulate speech . . . opened up whole new vistas . . . [and stimulated] brain development”56—the idea probably inspired by Darwin’s strange logic: that speech, in time, helped perfect the mind.
Having found mod features in the vocal tract of hominids who possessed neither the culture nor the intellect*120 to go with it, theorists had to save the day, somehow. Thus it is that Tattersal and Schwartz posit the vocal tract as a feature prepared in advance—its downward flexion traceable all the way back to some members of H. heidelbergensis, 500 kya. However, no symbolic or linguistic or cognitive behavior is evident before 50 kya. This 450-kyr gap is then explained by something called exaptation (or preadaptation)—a desperate gambit, inventing something that lay “dormant” in the genome until needed for some new purpose.
Such features, as the argument goes, were present in the ancestor, but they were doing something else initially, say breathing, and later were put to a different purpose, say eating or speaking. Thus may a population be “adapted in advance . . . a good example of a human exaptation is speech,” the necessary structures having been in place “well before” language actually arose.57 The modern vocal tract “must have been acquired in another context, possibly . . . a respiratory one. . . . Our ancestors possessed an essentially modern vocal tract a very long time before they used it for linguistic purposes.”58 Nonsense—it appears only because of genes inherited from early AMHs. Exaptation has become a convenient catchall solution, or as cosmologist Sir Fred Hoyle ventured, a “rubbish bag for all evolution’s awkward odds and ends. . . . Talking about pre-adaptation is simply a way of avoiding the issue.”59
This pseudo-explanation called “exaptation” now crops up in zoological evolution: In the case of saurians “evolving” into birds for example, the morphology of proto-wings is a “crucial flight feature [that] evolved long before birds took wing. It’s an example of . . . exaptation: borrowing an old body part for a new job. . . . Bird flight was made possible by a whole string of such exaptations stretching across millions of years, long before flight itself arose.”*121 Rubbish. Feathers, allegedly, had evolved long before they were used for flight—which only came later as a by-product of dinosaur arm-flapping and gliding to balance themselves as they made fast turns. Eventually the flapping evolved into the repetitive strokes of wings. Yeah, right; just like the giraffe got a long neck from repetitive stretching for the golden apple. This exaptation is craft, not science.
MUTATION: DUMB LUCK
Structural and chemical complexity reduces the chance of evolution by mutation to near zero. . . . The chance mutation of genes causing a series of concerted, appropriate behaviors would be more than a miracle.
BALAZS HORNYANSZKY AND ISTVAN TASI, NATURE’S I.Q.
The fortuitous character of evolution by mutation is certainly a coincidence of the highest order. Mutations, after all, are errors that occur during cell division. They are copy mistakes made by DNA, sometimes producing striking deformities. To get “good” evolution, you need a thousand favorable copying “errors” all in the proper order and in the right direction. How likely is that?
The mutation argument for evolution was famously debunked by the great cosmologist Fred Hoyle, who quipped that a living organism emerging by a series of chance events is about as likely as a tornado in a junkyard assembling a Boeing 747 from the materials therein. What a singular stroke of luck that out of the chaos of blind forces emerged this prince of beings—man!
By what trick of mesmerism have we fallen under the spell of such intellectual sorcery—making haphazard mutations the cause of order and design? Most new mutations actually become extinct because they only happen once; besides, some of these “mutations” may actually be recessive traits coming out!
The laws of probability rule out advantageous random changes on any but the smallest, most insignificant scale. A finely graded series, all stages heading in the same direction, is not only implausible in the highest degree but also absent in the fossil record. Evolution teaches the improbable; that the great diversity of life is due to atypical, aimless deviations from a norm—the vanishingly small chance of accidental design features (itself an oxymoron, for design means plan)—that still, somehow, add up to superb system and order! This blind random process, “a giant lottery,” in Michael Denton’s words “is one of the most daring claims in the history of science.”60 Fred Hoyle, for his part, could not believe that chance (or even any earthbound theory) could produce genes capable of writing the plays of Shakespeare.
Figure 9.3. Ray Palmer—“Planets hold to orbits, day follows night; the seasons progress in f
ixed order. Everything that lives and grows does so by a process that is consistent and not haphazard.” Ray Palmer was editor of Amazing Stories, Fate, Mystic, and Search magazines, as well as publisher of Amherst Press and the 1960 edition of Oahspe.
The belief in randomity, the faith in it, as against system and purpose, is very much a piece of philosophy, not really science. It is my understanding that the deeper a society (like our own) falls into anomie (a form of rootless alienation), the quicker it embraces unhinged notions of randomity and purposelessness, utterly losing sight of the universe with all its grand order and design. Even the evidence is against it, as geneticist Ronald A. Fisher put it: For mutations to afford evolution, one must postulate mutation rates immensely greater than those that are known to occur. Or as Gould saw it: “mutations have a small chance of being incorporated into a population.”61
Genes are a powerful stabilizing mechanism whose main function is to prevent new forms evolving.
FRED HOYLE AND N. C. WICKRAMASINGHE, EVOLUTION FROM SPACE
When lab manipulations aim for eyelessness in fruit flies (Drosophila), it does indeed produce a strain of sightless flies. But given enough generations, some force seems to step in and once again the offspring have eyes. Called reversion, this response betrays genetics as the machinery of stability—not change, not innovation, not evolution. And “to observe a mutation” in the laboratory, thought French biologist and Nobel Prize winner Jacques L. Monod, “is a very far cry from observing actual evolution.”62 Yet so many evolutionary claims depend on experimental breeding programs with insects and little animals. Can we extrapolate from fruit flies to human beings? Do you really think that bombarding fruit flies with X-rays is a good way to find out about the history of man’s evolution? Even mutated fruit flies are still fruit flies—eyes or no eyes—and have not speciated to some other critter.
Mysterious Origins of Hybrid Man Page 31