Saturday, September 28, 2013

Human Origins

There's an interesting article at Salvo magazine on human evolution, or rather the lack of evidence for it. Casey Luskin reviews the current state of paleoanthropology and shows that the fossil record contains two kinds of hominin fossils - complete apes and complete humans. There are no transitional forms, or at least none that paleoanthropologists agree to be intermediates.

It's an interesting and informative piece. One scientist remarked that if we take the fossil record at face value it's as if there was a kind of Big Bang at the outset of the appearance of human beings. They appear suddenly, completely human, and very much different from apes.

Another observed that something quite remarkable happened when humans appeared and the novel developments weren't just in the brain.

This all runs counter to contemporary Darwinian assumptions about human provenience, of course, because in the evolutionary scheme of things humans unquestionably evolved from ape-like ancestors. Maybe they did, I certainly don't know, but Luskin shows that if they did there's no compelling evidence in the fossil record that they did. The reason why it's widely assumed that humans evolved from ape-like creatures is not because there's fossil evidence of it, but because it's assumed a priori that the Darwinian grand narrative must be true.