The problem with being a devotee of a counter-factual superstition like creationism in order to feel important enough, is that reality keeps trying to intrude and make you wonder if you could be wrong and less important than you feel you should be. So, it's a characteristic of a creationist that they have to have a whole repertoire of mental gymnastics to continue to fool themselves into thinking practically every discovery by science isn't a problem, because, somehow, it isn't real.
One of these tactics is to tell yourself that you must be right because lots of others agree with you, regardless of the fact that even more people disagree with you, so you have to keep recruiting new members of your cult. In the childish belief that facts become truer the more people believe them, you have to plumb ever greater depths of dishonesty to fool gullible people into joining your cult by seeking out scientifically illiterate fools with a child-like thinking ability to misrepresents science to.
A fundamental counter-factual creationist belief is that a magic supernatural deity created everything out of nothing with you in mind, in just 6 days about 6,000 years ago, and all living species were created in one day without ancestors. And of course, it holds you in such high regard as the pinnacle of its creative ability that it did it all for you!
So, one of the problems you need strategies for dismissing is the evidence that Earth is several billion years old, there were tool-making hominins living on it several hundred thousand years ago every species, including modern humans, had ancestors. If you ever concede those facts, your entire counter-factual world disintegrates and leaves you not feeling important enough and feeling stupid for having been fooled into believing it in the first place.
So, to prick the pomposity of creationists again, here is solid evidence that hominins were creating stone tools in what is now Kent, in the UK, 300,000 years ago - some 294,000 years before Earth was supposedly created.
Since anatomically modern humans had not migrated out of Africa at that time and Neanderthals and Denisovans had not yet evolved in Eurasia, the descendants of an earlier migration, such as Homo heidelbergensis, H. antecessor or even H. erectus, must have made these tools.
These tools, some of the largest ever found in Europe, were discovered during a survey by archaeologists from University College London (UCL) of a site at Frindsbury, Kent on which it is planned to develop the Maritime Academy School.
More evidence that the Bible narrative is wrong by several orders of magnitude about the age of Earth, comes in yet another scientific paper showing that there were human ancestors living in Africa 1.45 million years ago.
And these hominids were also cannibals, judging by the cut marks found on their fossil remains, highly suggestive of the flesh being removed for consumption in much the same way that flesh was cut from the bones of other species.
The evidence comes from the work of three paleoanthropologists led by Briana Pobiner of the Smithsonian Institution's Human Origins Program, Washington, DC, USA. Her colleagues were Michael Pante of the Department of Anthropology and Geography, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA and Trevor Keevil of the Department of Anthropology, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA.
Briana Robiner discovered the cut marks when she was examining the specimen KNM-ER 741 for evidence of animal predation by, for example, lions and sabre-toothed cats that were living in the area at the time. KNM-ER 741 was found by Mary Leakey in the Turkana region of Kenya and was originally assigned to the Australopithecine species, Australopithecus boisei but has since been reclassified as the hominin, Homo erectus, making it a direct ancestor of modern humans as well as Neanderthals and Denisovans.
With several archaic hominids co-existing in East and South Africa at that time, the butcher(s) could be from a cousin species which would technically not be cannibalism, which requires the cannibal to consume members of its own species.
Their trio's research is described in a Smithsonian news release:
Something that creationists find puzzling, in their desperate search for certainty at the expense of truth, is how science continually reassesses and revisits what we think we know, and of course, how we change our collective mind when that produces new evidence.
An example of this was published recently in the journal Nature Communications, where a combined team of Laotian, French, Danish, American and Australian researchers showed the results of a reevaluation of the age of fossil early Homo sapiens, found in a cave in Northern Laos, and showed that early modern humans spread through the area, on their way into Southeast Asia and Australasia, much earlier than had originally been thought. This pushes the earliest Homo sapiens presence in the area back from 40,000 to 86,000 years ago.
The newer dating uses luminescence dating because Laotian law forbids damage to the specimens from what is a world heritage site.
As scientists continue to use the Theory of Evolution to explain the observable facts, oblivious to creationist claims that they are about to abandon it in favour of the childish creationist superstition involving an unevidenced magic supernatural magician, a research team led by Hugo Zeberg from Karolinska Institutet and Nobel laureate, Svante Pääbo from Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, have shown that Dupuytren's contracture is probably caused by genes inherited from Neanderthals.
Dupuytren's contracture, also called 'Viking disease' because it is relatively common in North European men with over 30% of males over the age of 60 developing the condition, is a painless but debilitating condition in which one or more fingers is bent across the palm and locked in position.
The researchers were investigating genetic risk factors for the condition and analysed the DNA of a large cohort from UK, Finland and USA so could compare the DNA of 7,871 sufferers and 645,880 healthy controls. Three of the 61 risk factors were in genes inherited from Neanderthals and two of these were the second and third most important risk factors.
The team have published their findings in an open access paper in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.
A news release from Karolinska Institutet explains the research:
News today that 'Lucy' was more human than we thought should increase the hatred creationists have for her.
Creationists hate the fossil nicknamed by her discoverers, 'Lucy' because 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' by the Beatles was riding high in the pop charts at the time. Her scientific name is Australopithecus afarensis, so named because she was discovered in the Afar region of Ethiopia in East Africa. Their hatred comes from the fact that her existence refutes just about every creationist superstition, so, rather thn change their minds (something no self-respecting creationist can ever do), creationists try to change the facts or shout abuse at them till they go away.
So concerned are creationist frauds such as Ken Ham and Kent Hovind that they routinely lie about her and how she was discovered, claiming, amongst other things that it is the skeleton of a deformed chimpanzee and that the scientists constructed it out of the fossils of different animals from multiple locations, so it should be regarded as a forgery. Neither of these are true, of course.
Facial reconstructions of what the early hominin (human relative) Australopithecus afarensis may have looked like
Australopithecus afarensis is an extinct hominin species that lived between approximately 3.9 and 2.9 million years ago. The most famous specimen of Australopithecus afarensis is "Lucy," a remarkably complete skeleton discovered in 1974 in the Afar region of Ethiopia. The discovery of Lucy and other A. afarensis fossils has provided significant insights into the story of human evolution.
Lucy's discovery was led by paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson and his team. Her fossilized remains consisted of about 40% of her skeleton, making it an incredibly important find. The age of the fossils and their unique characteristics shed light on a crucial period in human evolution.
Australopithecus afarensis is significant because it is believed to be one of the earliest hominin species to exhibit a combination of ape-like and human-like features. It walked upright on two legs, like modern humans, but also possessed some primitive traits, such as a small brain size and long arms.
The discovery of A. afarensis fossils challenged previous assumptions about the course of human evolution. Prior to this discovery, the prevailing view was that early humans developed large brains before adopting a bipedal, or upright, walking style. However, A. afarensis presented evidence that bipedalism evolved before significant increases in brain size.
The existence of A. afarensis suggests that upright walking was a critical adaptation for our early ancestors. Bipedalism freed the hands for tool use, allowed for greater efficiency in movement across open landscapes, and may have played a role in the development of other characteristics associated with humans, such as increased social cooperation.
Additionally, the discovery of A. afarensis and subsequent research have helped bridge the gap between our common ancestry with other primates and the emergence of the Homo genus, which includes modern humans. It provides valuable evidence of our evolutionary journey and allows scientists to study the changes and adaptations that occurred over millions of years.
In summary, the discovery of Australopithecus afarensis, particularly the famous specimen Lucy, has been instrumental in understanding the early stages of human evolution. It has contributed to our knowledge of bipedalism, the timeline of brain development, and the evolutionary transitions that eventually led to the emergence of modern humans.
ChatGPT "What information do you have about the discovery of Australopithecus afarensis, and its significance for the story of human evolution?"[Response to user question]
Retrieved from https://chat.openai.com/
The most complete specimen is known to science as AL 288-1 which comprises about 40% of the complete skeleton.
Homo
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Australopiths
How exactly she fits into the human evolutionary tree is still the subject of debates with some placing her immediately on the Australopithecus side of what is an artificial line dividing Australopithecines from Hominins and so making her directly ancestral to the Homo genus, which includes modern humans and some placing her in a side branch, making her a sister species of our immediate Australopithecine ancestor.
The line dividing the Australopiths from the hominins is of course arbitrary because a slowly-evolving species does not cross an imaginary line at a defined time; in reality there is a smooth transition, as in the box on the right, but the reason 'Lucy' is not universally accepted as our direct ancestor is because there are other species competing for that position from South Africa - Homo naledi and Australopithecus sediba for example, and, given the tendency of hominid species to interbreed, it is always possible that the ancestor of the stem Homo could have been two or more Australopiths, and we will probably never know for sure.
But the story was given a little twist yesterday with the publication in Royal Society Open Science of the results of a new study which shows that 'Lucy' was fully bipedal, that is, she walked upright like we do.
The work was carried out by Dr Ashleigh L. A. Wiseman, of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK. A Cambridge University news release explains his research:
Digital modelling of legendary fossil’s soft tissue suggests Australopithecus afarensis had powerful leg and pelvic muscles suited to tree dwelling, but knee muscles that allowed fully erect walking.
Lucy’s muscles suggest that she was as proficient at bipedalism as we are
Dr Ashleigh L. A. Wiseman
McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK.
A Cambridge University researcher has digitally reconstructed the missing soft tissue of an early human ancestor – or hominin – for the first time, revealing a capability to stand as erect as we do today.
Dr Ashleigh Wiseman has 3D-modelled the leg and pelvis muscles of the hominin Australopithecus afarensis using scans of ‘Lucy’: the famous fossil specimen discovered in Ethiopia in the mid-1970s.
Australopithecus afarensis was an early human species that lived in East Africa over three million years ago. Shorter than us, with an ape-like face and smaller brain, but able to walk on two legs, it adapted to both tree and savannah dwelling – helping the species survive for almost a million years.
Named for the Beatles classic ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’, Lucy is one of the most complete examples to be unearthed of any type of Australopithecus – with 40% of her skeleton recovered.
Lucy’s ability to walk upright can only be known by reconstructing the path and space that a muscle occupies within the body. We are now the only animal that can stand upright with straight knees. Lucy’s muscles suggest that she was as proficient at bipedalism as we are, while possibly also being at home in the trees. Lucy likely walked and moved in a way that we do not see in any living species today.
Australopithecus afarensis would have roamed areas of open wooded grassland as well as more dense forests in East Africa around 3 to 4 million years ago. These reconstructions of Lucy’s muscles suggest that she would have been able to exploit both habitats effectively.
Without open access science, this research would not have been possible.
Muscle reconstructions have already been used to gauge running speeds of a T-Rex, for example. By applying similar techniques to ancestral humans, we want to reveal the spectrum of physical movement that propelled our evolution – including those capabilities we have lost.
Dr Ashleigh L. A. Wiseman.
Wiseman was able to use recently published open source data on the Lucy fossil to create a digital model of the 3.2 million-year-old hominin’s lower body muscle structure. The study is published in the journal Royal Society Open Science.
The research recreated 36 muscles in each leg, most of which were much larger in Lucy and occupied greater space in the legs compared to modern humans.
For example, major muscles in Lucy’s calves and thighs were over twice the size of those in modern humans, as we have a much higher fat to muscle ratio. Muscles made up 74% of the total mass in Lucy’s thigh, compared to just 50% in humans.
Paleoanthropologists agree that Lucy was bipedal, but disagree on how she walked. Some have argued that she moved in a crouching waddle, similar to chimpanzees – our common ancestor – when they walk on two legs. Others believe that her movement was closer to our own upright bipedalism.
Research in the last 20 years have seen a consensus begin to emerge for fully erect walking, and Wiseman’s work adds further weight to this. Lucy’s knee extensor muscles, and the leverage they would allow, confirm an ability to straighten the knee joints as much as a healthy person can today.
Lucy was a young adult, who stood at just over one metre tall and probably weighed around 28kg. Lucy’s brain would have been roughly a third of the size of ours.
To recreate the muscles of this hominin, Wiseman started with some living humans. Using MRI and CT scans of the muscle and bone structures of a modern woman and man, she was able to map the “muscle paths” and build a digital musculoskeletal model.
Wiseman then used existing virtual models of Lucy’s skeleton to 'rearticulate' the joints – that is, put the skeleton back together. This work defined the axis from which each joint was able to move and rotate, replicating how they moved during life.
Finally, muscles were layered on top, based on pathways from modern human muscle maps, as well as what little “muscle scarring” was discernible (the traces of muscle connection detectable on the fossilised bones).
These reconstructions can now help scientists understand how this human ancestor walked.
Dr Wiseman's paper is published open access:
Abstract
To understand how an extinct species may have moved, we first need to reconstruct the missing soft tissues of the skeleton, which rarely preserve, with an understanding of segmental volume and muscular composition within the body. The Australopithecus afarensis specimen AL 288-1 is one of the most complete hominin skeletons. Despite 40+ years of research, the frequency and efficiency of bipedal movement in this specimen is still debated. Here, 36 muscles of the pelvis and lower limb were reconstructed using three-dimensional polygonal modelling, guided by imaging scan data and muscle scarring. Reconstructed muscle masses and configurations guided musculoskeletal modelling of the lower limb in comparison with a modern human. Results show that the moment arms of both species were comparable, hinting towards similar limb functionality. Moving forward, the polygonal muscle modelling approach has demonstrated promise for reconstructing the soft tissues of hominins and providing information on muscle configuration and space filling. This method demonstrates that volumetric reconstructions are required to know where space must be occupied by muscles and thus where lines of action might not be feasible due to interference with another muscle. This approach is effective for reconstructing muscle volumes in extinct hominins for which musculature is unknown.
Workflow diagram outlining the process for the current study. Comparative data were collected from a male human, in which MRI data from [22] were used to guide muscle LoAs, segmental and inertial properties. The bone geometries were poor quality, necessitating these parameters to be scaled to high-quality CT data (data from [11,47]). For both the human and AL 288-1, joint centres and axes were created. A convex hull was created of each body segment of AL 288-1, of which the centre of mass and inertial properties was corrected following Coatham et al. [48]. A polygonal muscle approach was implemented [18], producing muscle LoAs which were implemented into the biomechanical model of AL 288-1. Note: while [22] included the M. psoas major (visualized here), it was excluded from the current study due to uncertainty over thorax reconstructions. LAR, long-axis rotation; FE, flexion/extension; ABAD, abduction/adduction. *[22]; **[11,48].
Figure 2.
Here, Brassey et al. [27] reconstructed pelvis (shown in purple) was modified (shown in grey), in which the sacroiliac and pubic joints were rearticulated. Specifically, the distance between the ischiopubic ramus was reduced and both Os coxae were internally rotated, thus improving sacroiliac articulation.
Figure 3.
Completed views (ventral, dorsal, lateral and medial) of the polygonal muscle modelling approach in AL 288-1, in which 36 muscles were created per lower limb—this total does not differentiate between muscles composed of multiple heads (i.e. the M. extensor digitorum longus). The polygonal muscles of AL 288-1 are shown in comparison to three-dimensional muscles of the human which were segmented from MRI scan data. Intrinsic muscles of the foot were not modelled; rather, only ‘foot' muscles which crossed the ankle joint were included due to the sparsity of preserved foot material. See electronic supplementary material, S2 for a diagram illustrating muscle origin and insertions in which the colours correspond to the muscle colours used here. Full muscle configurations shown here, refer to electronic supplementary material, S3 to visualize deep musculature.
The significance of this, and something creationists will need to dismiss for whatever reason they can settle on, is that it shows full bipedalism had evolved in an Australopithecine before the Homo genus was on the scene. This means one of two things: either it had evolved in a common ancestor from which A. afarensis and the Homo genus evolved, or A. afarensisis the ancestor of Homo.
Of course, this doesn't settle the question of exactly where A. afarensis fits in the ancestry of Homo sapiens but is does help understand how and when what is now a uniquely human trait evolved.
And of course, Dr Wiseman shows no doubt at all that his findings have an explanation in the Theory of Evolution or that it requires a supernatural magician to explain it. And all this evolution took place millions of years before creationists believe Earth existed.
This is beginning to look like another bad week for creationist frauds.
Close on the news that archaeologists have discovered how agriculturalists and pastoralists migrated into what is now Morocco, thousands of years before Earth was created by magic out of nothing, according to what they tell their dupes, comes news that a Franco-Israeli team have unearthed musical instruments that are some three time older than creationist fools are told Earth is.
The normal creationist tactic for coping with the cognitive dissonance the scientific evidence keeps on producing in their minds, is to:
Ignore it and hope it'll go away if ignored for long enough.
Dismiss it as a conspiracy - the scientists are lying because they want to turn you away from God (Oops! gave away the fact that creationism is religion, not science, there, but needs must...!)
Claim the dating methods are wrong so the flutes must be much younger.
Claim that 'historical science' is all speculation because no-one was there to see it - aka. the "My great grandparents never had sex. Prove me wrong!", argument.
Assert that the facts must be wrong because they don't agree with the Bible narrative, which must be true because it says it is in the Bible.
Shout at it and stamp their foot to make the facts behave and comply with their requirements.
Sadly for creationists though, none of those tactics have worked, and the evidence is still that people in the Middle East were making musical instruments 12,000 years ago. Even more embarrassingly for creationists who believe humans have always believed in their god and are all descended from a couple it created without ancestors and from a handful of related survivors of a genocidal flood a few thousand years ago, there is evidence that these Bronze Age people, like the Egyptian, Indians and Chinese (to name but a few) had a religion that appears to have had nothing to do with the religion of the Bible. The flutes may have had some ceremonial role in that early religion.
To add insult to injury, this discovery was made in the part of the world where creationists like to image the tales in the Bible were set and yet the Bible has no mention of people having a religion involving birds and rituals involving bone flutes. It's exactly like the authors knew nothing of their own history.
The findings are described in a news release from Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS):
As modern humans migrated out of Africa, they came into contact with the descendants of an earlier hominin migration - Neanderthals and their cousins the Denisovans. This period of interbreeding probably lasted about 10,000 years until the last Neanderthals disappeared about 40,000 years ago.
Some have recently proposed that interbreeding may have resulted in the relatively small population of Neanderthals being absorbed into the larger and growing population of Homo sapiens. Proponents of this idea have pointed out that there is more Neanderthal DNA around nowadays, in the form of 1-4% of the genome of people of non-African origins, than ever existed when Neanderthals were alive.
According to recent research by a team of scientists from several institutions, including Cornell, some of those genes are still active and influencing human traits including several with a significant influence on the immune system.
The study and its findings are the subject of a press release by Cornell, and an open access paper in eLife:
The first anatomically modern Homo sapiens to migrate out of Africa were almost certainly hunter-gatherers. This much can be deduced from the fact that agriculturalists tend to be relatively sedentary and tied to the land. Our early ancestors, however, were migrants who spread relatively rapidly and one of the best habitats for hunter-gatherers is the coast where food in the form of shell-fish is abundant.
It is often assumed that these migrants travelled up the Nile or the Red Sea coast to the Middle East, and dispersed from there, but there is an alternative coastal route once they arrived at the Horn of Africa.
It is a short sea journey from there to what is now Yemen in Arabia and from there either up the Hijaz to the Middle East or along the south-east coat to what is now Oman. From Oman it is again a short sea-crossing at the Gulf of Hormuz, or even up the Arabian Gulf coast, into what is now Iran. From there, the whole of south and south-east Asia is accessible by coastal spread, as is Mesopotamia and then Central Asia either by going round the Black Sea coast, or the more difficult rout through the Caucasus mountains between the Black Se and the Caspian Sea.
Even Australia could be reached via land at a time when sea-levels were much lower than today at glacial maxima.
And now, a team of Australian researchers led by Raymond Tobler and Yassine Souilmi, of the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia, have found genetic evidence of a 30,000 year period of evolutionary adaptation to a colder environment, probably in Arabia of the immediate area, prior to a rapid dispersal across Eurasia as far as Australia. Functional targets in the genome include multiple interacting loci involved in fat storage, neural development, skin physiology, and cilia function, with associations with multiple modern Western diseases.
The team’s findings were published recently in PNAS, sadly behind a paywall, although the Abstract is published open access.
Three of the team have also written about their research and findings in an article in The Conversation. There article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency:
View of the village of Kuboes, on the border of South Africa and Namibia. DNA samples were collected from Nama individuals who have historically lived in the region.
New research confirms what had long been suspected - that early Homo sapiens interbreeding with Neanderthals and Denisovans in Eurasia was not the only place and time that hominins had interbred with other related species.
The research co-led by Professor Brennan Henn, professor of anthropology and the Genome Center at the University of California Davis and Simon Gravel of McGill University, has now shown that early hominins interbreed with other hominins in Africa before spreading to Eurasia and then to the rest of the world, so the world population of H. sapiens does not have a single ancestor but is the result of hybridization and remixing of diverged populations.
Creationists insist that humans were specially created separate from the other mammals as a special type of 'life’ and point to unique characteristics as evidence of this claim, not realising that having unique characteristics is what defines any given species. Elephants, for example, could claim to be a special form of life because they have unique characteristics that distinguish them from, say, giraffes or hyenas.
A unique characteristic of humans often cited by creationists is language - in other words, our ability to combine simple sounds into complex words and words into meaningful sentences. So, it will come as something of a shock to creationists to learn that this ability is not a uniquely human ability and that chimpanzees also have that ability, so it was very probably an ability of the last common ancestor of human and chimpanzees that lives some 6 million years ago.
The discovery was made by a team of researchers led by Maël Leroux of the Department of Comparative Language Science, University of Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland, and including researchers from Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands, the Budongo Conservation Field Station, Masindi, Uganda, the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Language Evolution (ISLE), University of Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland, and the Department of Psychology, University of York, York, UK.
Their findings were published open access a few days ago in the journal Nature Communications.
The University of Zurich news release, explains the research and its significance:
One of the associated dogmas of creationism, with its slavish adherence to Bible literalism, is the legend of Adam & Eve as a single founder couple of the human species without ancestors, together with a genocidal flood 4000 years ago in which the human population was reduced to just eight octogenarians who were the incestuous ancestors of all living humans.
In order to sustain that belief, creationists need to ignore all the evidence that shows several lines of uninterrupted mitochondrial DNA (female) history going back hundreds of thousands of years and several uninterrupted lines of Y chromosome (male) history.
This same genetic evidence also shows that the last common female ancestor and the last common male ancestor of all living humans could not even have lived contemporaneously, let alone met and committed the 'original sin' that we are all supposedly guilty of and need the vicarious redemption by the blood sacrifice of an innocent person to be saved from being punished for by an invisible, mind-reading sky man.
Another major problem for creationists is the evidence that non-African Homo sapiens all carry evidence not only that there never was a severe bottleneck in evolutionary history but that we interbred with at least two other hominin species, especially Neanderthals, so that non-African humans carry something like 1-4% Neanderthal DNA.
Some paleoanthropologists have even suggested that Neanderthals never died out but were simply absorbed into the growing Eurasian Homo sapiens population to the extent that there is now more Neanderthal DNA in the human population than there ever was in the total Neanderthal population.
So, not only not a founding couple who could have committed the original sin, but not even a single founding species!
In what would embarrass creationists if their cult beliefs were based on real-world evidence, a team of geneticists has shown that there were two waves of migration from the northern coastal region of China into North America, tens of thousands of years before creationists believe the entire human population of Earth was reduced to just eight individuals in a genocidal flood. The team, led by Yu-Chun Li, together with colleagues at the Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kunming, Yunnan, China and the Department of Biology and Biotechnology “L. Spallanzani”, University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy, published their findings yesterday, in an open access paper in Cell Reports.
In normal, intellectually honest people, with the humility to allow their opinions to be led by the evidence, having a basic belief refuted would be a reason to change their mind; for a creationist however, it's a reason to find a strategy for dismissing the evidence and retaining a counter-factual belief, because the mere thought of being wrong is an existential threat to a creationist.
To arrive at their conclusions, the researchers analysed mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) in thousands of ancient samples:
The far right in politics have never been bothered about truth.
They have no concerns about the scientific validity of the claimed scientific basis for their belief in their superiority over other peoples. It's whatever excuse they think they can get away with that's importan,t and more often than not, religion provides that excuse for them.
So, while simultaneously appealing to the Christian fundamentalists who reject Darwinian evolution on doctrinaire grounds, they sell the notion of white supremacy and male superiority over women based on Darwin's social ideas, so-called social Darwinism, that Darwin got from the Christian culture he grew up in.
While Social Darwinism has been rejected by the egalitarian left in politics as having no scientific basis, it is ironic that this is the only aspect of 'Darwinism'; that the far-right embraces, but it's closeness to Christian fundamentalism makes it doubly attractive to them.
Charles Darwin, who trained for the priesthood as a young man before turning to biology, was a man of his age and took it as established fact that there was a racial hierarchy in the world and that men were naturally superior to women, because that was the reality he saw, but the reality he saw was the result of 18 centuries of Christianity. Rather than question those basic cultural assumption on which English and European imperialism depended, and which seemed to be borne out by its success in dominating the world, he looked for a scientific basis for them in the framework of the evolutionary biology he and Wallace had identified as the explanation for biodiversity and the origin of species.
Darwin was right about a great deal, but fundamentally wrong about the biological superiority of white males. Indeed, given that all species, and all races have been evolving for the same length of time, and the process of evolution has no goal but is shaped by the prevailing local environment, it makes no sense at all to talk about one species or race being more highly evolved than another. All living organisms are more or less perfectly adapted by natural selection to fit their evolutionary niche and when their environment changes, the pressure to adapt changes. There is no pinnacle; no supreme achievement of evolution. All species are liable to find themselves less than perfectly adapted to a changing environment in different places at different times and to evolve accordingly.
But Darwin saw a hierarchy, both racial and sexual - and a hierarchy that the Christian religion he was raised in accepted as the natural order and promulgated it as the right and proper form of society, much as white supremacist Christians do today, so he saw his task as explaining what he saw rather than explaining why the 'natural order' was an illusion created by circumstance. In the words of the Anglican hymn, written in 1848, just 11 years before Darwin's Origin of Species was published:
The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them high and lowly,
And ordered their estate.
The circumstance was, as Jared Diamond points out in his book, Guns, Germs and Steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years due to the good fortune of Europeans having several domesticable animals in Eurasia so Europeans had horsepower for work whereas much of the rest of the world never had more than manpower. Europeans also co-evolved with a range of viruses, mostly acquired by living in close proximity to domestic animals, so when they came into contact with the rest of the world, their germs devastated their societies and weakened their resistance to colonial powers.
As Diamond points out, had Bantus been able to domesticate rhinoceroses, imaging the consequences for history if Roman legions had come up against Bantu cavalries mounted in rhinoceroses. We would probably now have far right Africans trying to justify their colonization and Africanization of Eurasia and carrying off millions of white West Europeans into slavery in Africa where their descendants were being treated as a social underclass, as proving the biological superiority of the black races and why the 'white lives matter' campaign is dangerous radical extremism aimed at overthrowing the God-given order (the god being some West African local god which featured in their origin myths). White sports people would be being taunted with monkey noises and thrown bananas while thanking the West African god for their sporting success.
And enlightened scientists such as the author of the following article would be campaigning for an end to the pervading black supremacist thinking in science and decrying the influence of a black evolutionary biologist who, 170 year ago wrote a book explaining why black men were the superior form of the species and why black culture was superior to the primitive cultures of the pale-skinned races.
The author is Rui Diogo, Associate Professor of Anatomy, Howard University. His article from The Conversation is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency.
Racist and sexist depictions of human evolution still permeate science, education and popular culture today
Human evolution is typically depicted with a progressive whitening of the skin, despite a lack of evidence to support it.
Systemic racism and sexism have permeated civilization since the rise of agriculture, when people started living in one place for a long time. Early Western scientists, such as Aristotle in ancient Greece, were indoctrinated with the ethnocentric and misogynistic narratives that permeated their society. More than 2,000 years after Aristotle’s writings, English naturalist Charles Darwin also extrapolated the sexist and racist narratives he heard and read in his youth to the natural world.
Darwin presented his biased views as scientific facts, such as in his 1871 book “The Descent of Man,” where he described his belief that men are evolutionarily superior to women, Europeans superior to non-Europeans and hierarchical civilizations superior to small egalitarian societies. In that book, which continues to be studied in schools and natural history museums, he considered “the hideous ornaments and the equally hideous music admired by most savages” to be “not so highly developed as in certain animals, for instance, in birds,” and compared the appearance of Africans to the New World monkey Pithecia satanas.
Science isn’t immune to sexism and racism.
“The Descent of Man” was published during a moment of societal turmoil in continental Europe. In France, the working class Paris Commune took to the streets asking for radical social change, including the overturning of societal hierarchies. Darwin’s claims that the subjugation of the poor, non-Europeans and women was the natural result of evolutionary progress were music to the ears of the elites and those in power within academia. Science historian Janet Browne wrote that Darwin’s meteoric rise within Victorian society did not occur despite his racist and sexist writings but in great part because of them.
It is not coincidence that Darwin had a state funeral in Westminster Abbey, an honor emblematic of English power, and was publicly commemorated as a symbol of “English success in conquering nature and civilizing the globe during Victoria’s long reign.”
Despite the significant societal changes that have occurred in the last 150 years, sexist and racist narratives are still common in science, medicine and education. As a teacher and researcher at Howard University, I am interested in combining my main fields of study, biology and anthropology, to discuss broader societal issues. In research I recently published with my colleague Fatimah Jackson and three medical students at Howard University, we show how racist and sexist narratives are not a thing of the past: They are still present in scientific papers, textbooks, museums and educational materials.
From museums to scientific papers
One example of how biased narratives are still present in science today is the numerous depictions of human evolution as a linear trend from darker and more “primitive” human beings to more “evolved” ones with a lighter skin tone. Natural history museums, websites and UNESCO heritage sites have all shown this trend.
The fact that such depictions are not scientifically accurate does not discourage their continued circulation. Roughly 11% of people living today are “white,” or European descendants. Images showing a linear progression to whiteness do not accurately represent either human evolution or what living humans look like today, as a whole. Furthermore, there is no scientific evidence supporting a progressive skin whitening. Lighter skin pigmentation chiefly evolved within just a few groups that migrated to non-African regions with high or low latitudes, such as the northern regions of America, Europe and Asia.
Illustrations of human evolution tend to depict progressive skin whitening.
Sexist narratives also still permeate academia. For example, in a 2021 paper on a famous early human fossil found in the Sierra de Atapuerca archaeological site in Spain, researchers examined the canine teeth of the remains and found that it was actually that of a girl between 9 and 11 years old. It was previously believed that the fossil was a boy due to a popular 2002 book by one of the authors of that paper, paleoanthropologist José María Bermúdez de Castro. What is particularly telling is that the study authors recognized that there was no scientific reason for the fossil remains to have been designated as a male in the first place. The decision, they wrote, “arose randomly.”
But these choices are not truly “random.” Depictions of human evolution frequently only show men. In the few cases where women are depicted, they tend to be shown as passive mothers, not as active inventors, cave painters or food gatherers, despite available anthropological data showing that pre-historical women were all those things.
Another example of sexist narratives in science is how researchers continue to discuss the “puzzling” evolution of the female orgasm. Darwin constructed narratives about how women were evolutionarily “coy” and sexually passive, even though he acknowledged that females actively select their sexual partners in most mammalian species. As a Victorian, it was difficult for him to accept that women could play an active part in choosing a partner, so he argued that such roles only applied to women in early human evolution. According to Darwin, men later began to sexually select women.
Sexist narratives about women being more “coy” and “less sexual,” including the idea of the female orgasm as an evolutionary puzzle, are contradicted by a wide range of evidence. For instance, women are the ones who actually more frequently experience multiple orgasms as well as more complex, elaborate and intense orgasms on average, compared to men. Women are not biologically less sexual, but sexist stereotypes were accepted as scientific fact.
The vicious cycle of systemic racism and sexism
Educational materials, including textbooks and anatomical atlases used by science and medical students, play a crucial role in perpetuating biased narratives. For example, the 2017 edition of “Netter Atlas of Human Anatomy,” commonly used by medical students and clinical professionals, includes about 180 divs that show skin color. Of those, the vast majority show male individuals with white skin, and only two show individuals with “darker” skin. This perpetuates the depiction of white men as the anatomical prototype of the human species and fails to display the full anatomical diversity of people.
Textbooks and educational materials can perpetuate the biases of their creators in science and society.
Authors of teaching materials for children also replicate the biases in scientific publications, museums and textbooks. For example, the cover of a 2016 coloring book entitled “The Evolution of Living Things”“ shows human evolution as a linear trend from darker "primitive” creatures to a “civilized” Western man. Indoctrination comes full circle when the children using such books become scientists, journalists, museum curators, politicians, authors or illustrators.
One of the key characteristics of systemic racism and sexism is that it is unconsciously perpetuated by people who often don’t realize that the narratives and choices they make are biased. Academics can address long-standing racist, sexist and Western-centric biases by being both more alert and proactive in detecting and correcting these influences in their work. Allowing inaccurate narratives to continue to circulate in science, medicine, education and the media perpetuates not only these narratives in future generations, but also the discrimination, oppression and atrocities that have been justified by them in the past.
Rui Diogo, Associate Professor of Anatomy, Howard University
Revising Our View of Why Humans Evolved an Upright Stature
Artistic rendering of the open woodland habitat reconstruction at Moroto II with Morotopithecus bishopi vertically climbing with infant on back and juvenile below.
Here we have another example of scientists challenging the accepted consensus which, unlike my last example which concerned a fundamental model of cosmology, this time concerns conflicting ideas of hominid evolution.
Not, as creationists like to delude themselves, by rejecting the whole concept of evolution in favour of their magical superstition, but the precise mechanism by which we, or rather our ancestors, evolved an upright stature and a bipedal gait. That this is an evolved feature is beyond doubt.
The scientific consensus is that human ancestors evolved an upright posture as a result of a combination of factors, including the need to adapt to an increasingly savannah-like environment, as well as the need to free up the hands for tool use and other activities.
One theory suggests that the shift to bipedalism allowed early hominins to better see over tall grasses and detect predators, while also freeing up their hands for tool use and other tasks. Another theory proposes that upright posture evolved as a means of thermoregulation in hot environments, allowing early hominins to better dissipate heat through a smaller surface area exposed to the sun.
There is also evidence to suggest that the development of bipedalism was a gradual process, with multiple adaptations and changes in anatomy occurring over time. For example, the pelvis and lower limb bones of early hominins gradually became more elongated and robust to support bipedalism.
References:
Lovejoy CO. The origin of man. Science. 1981 Jul 24;213(4506):341-50. doi: 10.1126/science.211.4480.341. PMID: 17748254.
Richmond BG, Jungers WL. Orrorin tugenensis femoral morphology and the evolution of hominin bipedalism. Science. 2008 Mar 21;319(5870):1662-5. doi: 10.1126/science.1154197. PMID: 18356526.
Aiello LC, Wheeler P. The expensive-tissue hypothesis: the brain and the digestive system in human and primate evolution. Curr Anthropol. 1995;36(2):199-221. doi: 10.1086/204350.
Carrier DR. The energetic paradox of human running and hominid evolution. Curr Anthropol. 1984;25(4):483-95. doi: 10.1086/203165.
However, a minority view is that it evolved because it made it easier for our ancestors to collect fruit in forests. It is this minority view that researchers from the University of Michigan are challenging. They believe they have found evidence that it evolved in open woodland in which the diet consisted of leaves.
The University of Michigan news release explains the finding and its significance for anthropologists and the human evolutionary story:
Figure 3 (a) SEM photo of cord fragment, (b) 3D Hirox photo of cord fragment, (c) schematic drawing illustrating s and Z twist; (d) enlarged Hirox photo with cord structure highlighted, arrows indicate location of photos e and f; (e) SEM photo of bordered pits (circled in red); (f) SEM photo of bordered pits.
Here's some of that scientific evidence stuff that creationists must dismiss somehow to remain a member of their anti-science, counter-factual cult. It's the news that Neanderthals were making string 40,000 years before they believe the Universe was created. The cult exists despite the overwhelming evidence that it is wrong by many orders of magnitude, and that magic was not involved, so one little piece of ancient string is hardly likely to change their minds.
As a piece of archaeology, however, the fact that Neanderthals had the technology to make string - one of the foundational technologies of human technology - is surprising and unexpected. Making string, which involves extracting long fibres from plants (in this case, the bast fibres from the bark of a conifer), twisting them together to make longer strands, then twisting those strands together with the opposite twist to lock the fibres in place, is a complicated and labour-intensive process.
Four different Australopithecus crania that were found in the Sterkfontein caves, South Africa. The Sterkfontein cave fill containing this and other Australopithecus fossils was dated to 3.4 to 3.6 million years ago.
Because of the hominin remains found there, the system of caves at Driefontein in Gauteng, South Africa is a designated world heritage site, known as 'The Cradle of Humankind'. It is believed by some to be where modern Homo sapiens evolved out of ancestral hominins.
Driefontein is a cave system located in the Cradle of Humankind, a World Heritage Site in Gauteng, South Africa. The Cradle of Humankind is a paleontological site that is home to some of the world's most important hominid fossil finds, including the fossils of "Mrs. Ples" and "Little Foot."
The Driefontein cave system has been of particular interest to paleontologists because of the discovery of early hominid fossils there. The fossils found at Driefontein date back over 2 million years, and include specimens from several species, including Australopithecus africanus and Paranthropus robustus.
One of the most notable discoveries made at Driefontein was that of the "Little Foot" skeleton, which was found in the Sterkfontein Caves in 1994. Little Foot is an almost complete Australopithecus skeleton, estimated to be around 3.67 million years old, making it one of the oldest hominid fossils ever found.
The Cradle of Humankind is a significant site for the study of human evolution and the history of life on Earth. Its importance has been recognized by UNESCO, which designated it a World Heritage Site in 1999.
ChatGPT.(6 Apr 2023) "Tell me about the Driefontein 'Cradle of Humankind', in South Africa, with references." Retrieved from https://chat.openai.com/chat
"Mrs. Ples" and "Little Foot" are two important hominid fossils found in the Cradle of Humankind in South Africa.
"Mrs. Ples":
"Mrs. Ples" is the nickname given to a fossil skull discovered in 1947 by paleontologist Robert Broom at the Sterkfontein Caves, which are part of the Cradle of Humankind. The fossil is officially known as StW 5, and is believed to be around 2.05 million years old. "Mrs. Ples" is believed to be a member of the species Australopithecus africanus, and is one of the most complete early hominid skulls ever found.
"Little Foot":
"Little Foot" is the nickname given to a nearly complete Australopithecus skeleton discovered in the Sterkfontein Caves in 1994. The fossil is officially known as StW 573, and is believed to be around 3.67 million years old, making it one of the oldest hominid fossils ever found. The discovery of "Little Foot" is significant because it provides important insights into the evolution of bipedalism, or walking on two legs. The skeleton is also notable for being nearly complete, which is rare in the field of paleoanthropology.
ChatGPT. (6 Apr 2023) "Tell me more about the fossils 'Mrs Ples' and 'Little Foot', with references, please." Retrieved from https://chat.openai.com/chat
In the following article, reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license, Tim Forssman, Senior lecturer, University of Pretoria, South Africa, explains the significance of the site in the story of the evolution of modern humans.
The article has been reformatted for stylistic consistency.
