In reality, the Garden of Eden was worldwide.
SIR ARTHUR KEITH, THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN
To Robert Braidwood, it seemed “unlikely that only one little region saw the beginning of the [human] drama.”20
Apparently Coon’s opponents were worried that polygenism could be taken advantage of by racial propagandists.*136 Yet I wonder why they were (and are) not so worried about what racists could do with their current reconstructions, like the Smithsonian’s and National Geographic’s highly publicized models of African hominids looking like a cross between gorilla and Negro. After all, those Miocene apes, “our closest primate relatives,” lived in Africa, and with Africa as the cradle, direct links must be found between apes and black Africans.
We are essentially elaborated African apes.
DONALD JOHANSON AND BLAKE EDGAR, FROM LUCY TO LANGUAGE
So I’d like to ask: What’s so politically correct about apes being the ancestors of African people? Why not deplore the racist H. F. Osborn instead of the humanist Coon? One-time president of the American Museum of Natural History, Osborn believed in the superiority of certain races; he was part of the eugenics movement and linked to the policies that gave rise to Hitlerism. Oh yes, there were close ties between American race scientists and those working in Nazi Germany.21 Darwin himself had culled (prejudicial) evidence to show that nonwhite races had “more apelike features.”22
But ever since Hitler, the subject of race has been closed down. Taboo. Throwing out the baby with the bathwater, anthropology—running scared of accusations of racism—not only dropped the idea of race (notwithstanding euphemisms like ethnic groups or even clans), but abandoned the first-rate, unbeatable work of Dixon, Hooton, Coon, and even Weidenreich. It was all too emotional, irrational. And it comes down to threat management—not science.
And it set the stage for revisions, such as the untenable monogenism of an African Garden of Eden, conforming, not to the evidence at hand, but to the pressure of (ill-informed) public opinion and nervous ideas of political correctness. Although anthropology sincerely hoped to purge its doctrines of any hint of racial supremacy, scapegoating Coon (and polygenism) was a disgraceful nonsolution.
The firestorm over supposed racism in anthropology led to egregious manipulation of the record. To put out the fire, it became necessary, for example, to change the date of Africa’s Kabwe Man from 40 kyr to 125 kyr—as ammunition against Coon’s position that “Africans remained at a Homo erectus level . . . at a time when Homo sapiens had already appeared in Europe.” Kabwe Man was then “adjusted” to cross the H. sapiens threshold earlier on. But could his bones really have been so old, with no traces of fossilization? Kabwe (aka Broken Hill, Rhodesian Man) was a tall and strong man with the modern loaf-shaped cranium, modern also in limbs, neck, and dental arch; yet his tibia was not like living Africans, and he abounded in pre-Neanderthal (erectoid) traits in his massive brow, skull proportions (only 1,280 cc), and prognathism. His was a long face, large upper jaw, enormous palate, and extremely sloped forehead. Kabwe’s tools (Acheulian) were rudimentary, and finally he was a cannibal.
Was Kabwe, this cannibal, the ancestor of all modern men? Was he Africa’s phylogenetic link from H. erectus (or H. ergaster) to H. sapiens? Hardly. His Neanderthaloid skull was synchronous with similar types in Europe, such as France’s La Chapelle-aux-Saints skull, Greece’s Petralona, and Italy’s Olmo II. “The Broken Hill Man,” thought Marcellin Boule, “is much more like Homo neanderthalensis than any other race.” Although originally dated 40 kyr, that was revised to 125 to 300 to 500 kyr! But he was found with extant mammal bones, and “their appearance is very fresh.”23 In fact, Kabwe may be a mere 33 or 11 or even 6 kyr, “startlingly recent times,”24 for the bones are not mineralized and his implements hardly differ from those of the modern Bushman.
Franz Weidenreich in Apes, Giants, and Man (1946) correctly concluded that “human forms preceding . . . modern man were distributed all over the entire Old World” [e.a.], which agrees with the Oahspe verse: “In all parts of the earth there lived ground people,”25 that is, H. erectus types. Weidenreich painstakingly showed how H. erectus, at many locations, not just Africa, preceded the modern type. Called polycentric evolution (but sometimes parallel evolution or convergence), this approach sees early man grading into the modern type in Europe, Australasia, China, and even the Americas. Not just Africa.
But what does convergence really mean? Does it mean parallel evolution? I don’t think that’s possible. Ultimately, simply, and parsimoniously, it represents the mating of disparate types (AMH and Druk), occurring in all parts of the world.
Figure 11.2. Broken Hill (Kabwe) skull (top) compared to La Chapelle-aux-Saints Neanderthal (bottom).
“Convergent evolution is really a special kind of coincidence,” offered Richard Dawkins,26 apparently in an effort to offset the implausibility of evolution happening the very same way in lots of different places. Coincidence. But what exactly does Dawkins’s statement mean? Does it mean parallel mutations (the same accidental mutations, the same changes) miraculously and coincidentally, occurring in all the separate places where modern man arose? That would be a marvelous feat indeed!
Darwin’s own improbable monogenesis forced him to ponder: How on Earth have the same types managed to arise in unrelated parts of the world?*137 To answer this, evolution wed itself to pseudomigrations. How does one explain, otherwise, the parallels between the Paleolithic stages of India, Europe, and Africa?
Isn’t it wiser to allow the same types of early races to have mixed, interbred, in each of those different localities? The fact is that Darwin’s stubborn monogenism has been pretty much disproven—if only because a single origin forces the different races (Mongoloid, Caucasoid, Australoid, and so on) to evolve or rather diverge too rapidly. Yet now again, monogenism reincarnates in the illogical OOA theory.
THE GREAT EXODUS
Was Au “unique to Africa,” as is claimed and required by the OOA Garden of Eden? Since Australopithecus presumably evolved to H. erectus only in Africa, we should, of course, not be finding any Au elsewhere. And if we do, we must ignore or debunk it.
Rewind about fifty years: Au in Asia was actually common knowledge among paleo students until the latter half of the twentieth century, that is, before OOA became de rigueur. “Until recently [1973], it was thought that from forms like Australopithecus, which lived in Asia [e.a.], Pithecanthropus could have originated.”27 Au. robustus features were indeed evident in Java’s Sangiran VI and VIII specimens. And near Java, various Au traits were discerned in the amazing Flo (hobbit), who possessed both H. erectus and Au features—thick bones, Au-type wrist structure, pelvis, and stature, and very long arms.
I would not be surprised if australopithecine remains start turning up outside Africa.
DEAN FALK, THE FOSSIL CHRONICLES
Although Falk acknowledges that “australopithecines were thought to have lived exclusively in Africa,” she does remark that Indonesia’s “LB1 [hobbit] had arms . . . similar to those of the famous australopithecine Lucy . . . and closely resembled the little, short-legged and small-brained australopithecines. . . . The inside of [LB1’s] . . . lower jaws has a little ledge that was typical for australopithecines”; other features “harkened back to early Homo habilis.” Well, if hobbit branched off from H. habilis, that would have been before the great (part one) H. erectus exodus from Africa. And that’s a problem. But here is the solution: Flo’s “lineage left Africa before” H. erectus evolved, as suggested by anthropology professors Peter Brown, Mike Morwood, and William Jungers, Brown postulating that australopithecines “migrated out of Africa a very long time ago”!28
But Au were indigenous to each of their locales, their supposed move OOA even greater folly than making travelers out of H. erectus.
Isn’t it interesting that formerly Asia itself was called Asu-wa—for it was covered over with Asu man, the primeval race, the aborigines of Earth, who abounded in Central Asia (India)
during the Pleistocene. In Sri Lanka we have found his descendants, the extremely primitive, race of Nittevo. Were they ape-men? They walked on two legs and had short arms and very hairy legs, indeed a reddish “fur” over most of their bodies. Completely naked, they were a tree- and cave-dwelling people. Asia’s most spectacular tree climbers, the Nittevo were at home in the trees, with their powerful grasping hands (and “claws”). With Nittevo, we are almost back where we started—with Asu man, our very first (tree-loving) ancestor. In China, too, Asu man lived alongside H. erectus,29 contradicting the “unique to Africa” idea: Au teeth have been found in China at Hubei and Guangxi provinces. Teeth from China’s Longgupo cave, it was thought, “belonged to an ape,” this pre–H. erectus man dated to 2 myr.
Time line is important, so we must ask: Why did South African Au live at the same time as Far Eastern H. erectus? Au, according to theory, is supposed to have evolved into H. erectus before the latter moved OOA and on to the Far East. But Au led to H. erectus “not necessarily”30 in Africa alone, his remains noted in the Jordan Valley, China, Indonesia, Southeast Asia, and Java, the last referring to G. H. R. Von Koenigswald’s 1952 discovery of Meganthropus, a creature older than H. erectus and possessing some Au traits.
H. habilis–like industries (more archaic than those of H. erectus) are found in Pakistan: these 2-myr chopping tools of the habiline type don’t exactly fit with 1-myr or 1.6-myr or even 1.8-myr H. erectus as our first migrant OOA to fill an “empty” world. And then there is the Zinj-like Dmanisi Man, in the Caucasus: How was this pre–H. erectus (outside of Africa) handled? By coining another wave of migration, of course. I’d get rich collecting a toll for every imagined journey OOA.
Be suspicious of a theory if more and more hypotheses are needed to support it, as new facts become available.
FRED HOYLE AND N. C. WICKRAMASINGHE, EVOLUTION FROM SPACE
This odd Dmanisi race was christened when six specimens with some Au traits (like upper-arm anatomy) were found in the Caucasus and tentatively assigned to early H. erectus, if only because of the time frame. But at 1.8 myr, he was older than most African H. erectus, such as Kenya’s Turkana Boy at 1.6 myr; and Dmanisi’s brain was smaller than Turkana Boy’s (which was 900 cc). Dmanisi was smaller (in both height and brain) than H. erectus, his brain H. habilis–sized at only 600 to 750 cc. Don’t such habiline traits prove other Gardens of Eden besides Africa?
Complicating matters, Dmanisi’s feet and body were of more modern proportions than H. habilis. On the other hand, his prominent canines were almost Zinj-like (robust Au). Described as a hodgepodge, this Dmanisi race had skulls exhibiting a splendid mosaic of features—obviously a mixture of races.
Discovered in a medieval Georgian town, Dmanisi had huge primitive canines; the point is Dmanisi actually looked ancestral to Africa’s H. erectus. Uh-oh. But not to worry: the fire was put out by changing his name to H. ergaster. But some of them had traits that predate H. ergaster (a predecessor of H. erectus), and crazier still, Africa’s Turkana Boy was also labeled an H. ergaster! What a mess. Immediately after noting these uncomfortable facts, Fagan nonetheless declared that “Dmanisi has strong African associations.”31 On what basis? He did not go on to elaborate.
Dmanisi’s mixed and archaic morphology (and its date) was so troublesome to OOA that one scientist said flat out that they ought to put it back in the ground! Said archaeologist Chris Hardaker in The First Americans, “If there was ever an equal to Olduvai’s Zinj [an Au], the Dmanisi discovery was it.” Here was yet another early type, too early, found “aberrantly” outside Africa. Did this pea-brained creature travel from Africa, thousands of miles over new ground (three thousand miles from Olduvai)? Hardaker cries in the wilderness: “How could they have done it without at least some of the Upper Paleolithic [mod] qualities and faculties . . .?”32 Besides, what were these naked “émigrés” doing in the cold Caucasus, when the presumed route*138 of travel OOA was along the warm southern rim of Asia?
Overall, scientists regarded Dmanisi’s brain as way too small for such an ambitious undertaking, his huge canine teeth indicating a very primitive hominid, indeed more archaic than the first H. erectus supposed to have made the great migration. Dmanisi was not inclined or constructed for migration. Instead of giving up OOA, the response was to declare that something even more apelike than H. erectus probably made the great exodus OOA: “leaving Africa didn’t require a big brain. . . . They took a long hike, and they made it.” But their rudimentary tools, of the most primitive type, don’t jibe with the tool kit of travelers.
The last field season at Dmanisi (1991) confirmed these were the oldest hominid bones ever found in Eurasia. Which made analysts wonder if this Homo georgicus evolved separately from African hominids and if “Homo erectus evolved from this primitive Dmanisi stock somewhere in Asia,” painting in yet another handy scenario, “and then moved back to Africa. Maybe there were multiple migrations back and forth.”33 Lotta maybes and ad hoc journeys in this highly subjunctive out-of-Africa dictum. Better look to Asia, some thought.
MOTHER ASIA—AND BEYOND
In 1997 a primatologist told the National Geographic writer Rick Gore: “The idea that all hominids originated in Africa is a myth created by people working in Africa. Sure, they’ve found a lot there, but if we’d invested that much time and money in Asia, we would find fossil hominids just as old there, too.”34
MtDNA analysis, called in to support OOA, came up with a notably small number of mutations distinguishing the living races of men; it was then (gratuitously) assumed that everyone must have descended from a single ancestral root population. But since it is hard to get DNA from fossils older than Neanderthal (ca 35 kya),35 how can such a judgment be made about people of much earlier times (the modern African dispersal, part two, is said to have begun some 80 kya or even 133 kya)?
Craniometric surveys have found that the little (Bay of Bengal) Andamanese people, though black skinned, actually have more affinities with Asians and Polynesians than with Africans. Blood groups, antigens, and proteins relate these Negritos to Oceanic and Asian populations, not Africans. So how can anyone say the Andamanese or Australians or Javanese are descended of migrants who left Africa? Neither are Australian Aborigines Negroid in type, but a mix of Caucasian and Melanesian genes. “Although dark in skin color, neither the Australians nor the Wadjak [Javanese] skulls are ‘Negroid.’ We still have a very great deal to learn in these matters,” cautioned Robert Braidwood.36
Very early art in northwest Australia (at Jinmium) has been dated to 75 kya (twice the age, incidentally, of the earliest known cave paintings in France). This discovery presented a problem to scientists who “have long assumed that Homo sapiens lacked the seafaring technology to have reached Australia before about 50,000 years ago.” By now you can probably guess what the simple solution was: perhaps “modern humans were on the move much earlier.”37 On the move? Or there all along?
The there-all-along idea (which is polygenism) garners support from burials found at Lake Mungo, Australia, where gracile types are much older than the primitive Kow Swamp type. The Lake Mungo Specimen 3, dated 60 kyr, is AMH, “a challenge to current opinions on human origins,”38 as is WLH50, a very early Australian Caucasoid. Was there high culture here so long ago? (Appendix D charts a dozen Oceanic sites indicative of advanced engineering and architecture in a long-forgotten lost horizon.) But because Australia’s later Kow Swamp people (10 kyr) were robust and erectoid, theorists postulated—you guessed it—separate waves of migrations. But there were two strains living there all along, not two separate migrations or colonizations.
Maybe Prince Regent River offers a clue to the puzzle of early mods (like Lake Mungo Man) in Australia, people who lent their Caucasian genes to today’s Aborigines, for here are singular cave paintings depicting European types, the men bearded, the women delicate; behind them is a snake, which is the Aborigines’ symbol of the most remote past: Dreamtime. Of equal interest are Australia’s huge limeston
e pillars near Roper River, attributed to members of a white race—the site boasting streets and polished walls. Are they the same people depicted as bearded Caucasians in the rock art of central Australia near Alice Springs? Might they also be the ancestors of the Murrian people of south and southeast Australia, possessed of a Caucasoid skull form, light skin, beards, and narrow noses? Australian archaeologist Vesna Tenodi is on record stating that much of her country’s protohistory has been suppressed by the Australian Archaeological Association (AAA), which “has turned into a political body whose main concern is to please Aborigines. Thanks to the AAA, fossilized human remains were destroyed. These included remains from pre-Aboriginal time, which proved the existence of highly developed pre-Aboriginal races before the arrival of the ancestors of the current Aboriginal tribes.”39
The archaic whites of Australia were of a similar cast to the Japanese Ainu, both of whom have nothing to do with Africa, but do represent an aboriginal white race of the Far East and beyond. Indeed, Dixon had these proto-Australians in the region before proto-Negroids ever wandered OOA. DNA studies seem to corroborate this, finding at least one Lake Mungo lineage that is deeper than African Eve.40
Mysterious Origins of Hybrid Man Page 37