Homo Sapiens Idaltu Gets Kicked Out of the Family

I visited a "Skeleton Museum" recently. It was a large and well-displayed collection of all sorts of bones. Among them were models of the skulls of Cro-Magnons and other hominids. Now you may or may not know that I take a narrower view of what is "human" than those who want to lump all kinds of different species under the "human" label. To me "human" = "Homo Sapiens."  For example, I think the Jebel Irhoud finds from 300,000 years ago are not those of humans, but rather examples of the mysterious Denisovans or what later become Denisovans. Never mind for now the reasons why I believe that, but because I do I thought until my museum trip that the oldest "human" fossils were Omo I and Herto where "Homo Sapiens Idaltu" was recovered. Basically the way Idaltu is named means it is considered a sub-species of our own. And it's dated to 160,000 years ago.

Omo I is said to be the older of the two, if correctly dated, and it was not in this collection, but the Idaltu skull was there, right next to a couple of Cro-Magnon examples, Neanderthal examples, an Erectus and even a sample of Homo floresiensis, the "Hobbit".

Until I walked into this museum, I agreed with the judgement that Homo Sapiens Idaltu was a member of our species, albiet a robust one with hefty brow ridges. It really is surprising how your perception can change between looking at pictures of a skull verses having a three dimensional model in front of you. After getting a close look at those samples side by side, I no longer believe that. Basically the back half of the skull has the globular shape of a modern human and as a result of this the dome of the skull is slightly higher than that of a Neanderthal, even one from over 100,000 years later. The mid-face does not protrude.Those are the parts that look human. The front of the skull however, is very primitive with brow ridges if anything more prominent than Neanderthals. There is a "bone line" from the outside corner of the brow ridge along the skull at an even lower angle than those neanderthal skulls and nothing like the Cro-Magnon skulls. The skull dwarfed those of modern humans in both overall size and robustness.

On the other hand, the Homo floresiensis skull looked a lot like what I would suppose a juvenile Idaltu would look like. That is, reduce the brow ridges and make it smaller and more "child-like" and it would look most similar to the "hobbit" skull. Now you may remember that there was a big dust-up when the "Hobbit" skulls were first discovered because of the claim that they were the skulls of diseased humans, and not that of another species. Over time it was realized that even though the skull had some Sapiens-like features, overall it was too different throughout the whole skeleton to be considered one of us. The hobbit skulls are not over 50K years old and probably much more recent than that. To me they look like a version of Idaltu which suffered from island dwarfism. They too are globular in the back but more primitive in the front of the skull. They too have a fairly small face which does not push forward as much as many hominids but unlike Idaltu, florensis has strong cheek bones.

:LATER EDIT- A recent find fits with Herto/Idultu even better, and that is Homo Longi from China 146,000 years ago. Except for a larger nasal passage- it lived in colder weather - there are a lot of similarities. Could they be regional variations of the same species?

I think what we are finding is that there are many composite hominids. That is they may well have some features consistent with modern humans but lack others. The modern looking feature will vary from find to find. These composites are not the same thing as true transnationals. An El Camino is not "transitional" between a station wagon and a pick-up truck. Its a composite which fully shares features of both, not a vehicle which is halfway between the two in all its features. In the same way a Monkey may have a less-projecting mid-face than a Chimp, but that doesn't mean its closer to us than a chimp. An orangutan may have a higher and less-sloping fore head than a chimp, but that doesn't mean its closer to us than a chimp. The same thing should be considered when we evaluate hominids and their "place in the family".

I am not sure what to make of all of this, but I would like a good look at a model of Omo I. So far I am inclined to say that the so-called Homo-Sapiens Idaltu is not really in the family.

The Case that Neanderthals were not Human- Genetics

Neanderthals were not like us. Though there is a lot of pressure to expand the definition of "human" as much as possible, the evidence suggests that no other hominid was like our species. If being "human" means being like us, then only Homo Sapiens are human. There are several categories of evidence for this, but I'd like to focus on the very strong genetic evidence which points to this conclusion after just one point from morphology.

Of course humans have been changing somewhat for a while. Our modern globular brain shape did not even work its way into our phenotype until after 36,000 years ago, a date which some would say was near or after the date Neanderthals went extinct. I am not even convinced that the physical brain is what truly makes us human. But to the extent that it is brain shape may be even more important than brain size. Hominid brain size did not change much in almost half a million years while what humanity has accomplished from the time modern brain shape occurred to the present is orders of magnitude greater than those of other hominid groups given that same amount of time with a similar brain capacity.

Scientists tell us that all living Eurasians have an average of 1.5% of their genes from Neanderthals due to admixture events which occurred approximately 55,000 years ago. My own genome confirmed that this is the percentage in me. There is a caveat to this which I would like to address in a bit, but let's go with that number for now. The discovery of a 40,000 year old Romanian male [with somewhat more recent Neanderthal introgression seems to represent a genetic dead end who left no living descendants (else we'd find people with longer such gene segments than we do).

Indeed a comprehensive study showed that the lack of Neanderthal mtDNA (inherited from mothers) in modern Europeans despite thousands of years of the two living side by side indicated possible sterility problems between human males and neanderthal females and that the _maximum_ possible number of such hybridization events over 12,000 years was 120.

Other studies indicate fertility issues going the other way. The human Y-chromosome is lacking in the "Neanderthal" genes present in the rest of the genome. The researchers concluded [that modern human females and neanderthal males were not fully compatible The most parsimonious explanation was that such unions could not produced fertile male offspring.

Put the two studies together and the lack of Neanderthal genes in both mtDNA and Y-chromosome DNA is consistent with the idea that the only pairing that really "worked" was a male neanderthal mating with a human female and then only for producing female offspring.

I put the word "worked" in quotes because there is other evidence to show that it did not work well. This study concludes "Much of this Neanderthal DNA appears to be deleterious in humans, and natural selection is acting to remove it." The paper suggests that this was a consequence of their smaller group size- allowing more deleterious mutations to stay in the genome rather than a fundamental weakness in genes making the species jump. It bases this conclusion solely on their finding that these mutations were only weakly deleterious. That does not add up to me because the other studies showed that plenty of other mutations seemed to be strongly deleterious and thus are no longer around to be counted!

But even if the researchers got that right, it is still a consequence of humans having a sense of connectedness and sociability in a way that other hominids may have lacked. This helped us live in larger groups which helped keep weakly deleterious genes from fixing. What we know is that while these genes "worked" in producing fertile offspring in some cases, much of the load was at least mildly deleterious.

Now I say that the genes are being weeded out slowly over time, but it now appears that some of those genes which the OOA humans got from (presumably) Neanderthals was actually the ancestral condition of the gene in both species which had been lost in modern humans. IOW, the Neanderthals did not give them neanderthal genes, some of the 1.5% is simply the genes our species once had in common with them but lost being returned to us through these events. Either that or they were ours all along and returned to us through an earlier hybridization event. So even a large proportion of the "Neanderthal" genes we wind up keeping may not really have been exclusively "theirs" anyway. Thus whatever the true figure of percentage of neanderthal genome possessed by the average Eurasian, it is liable to be lower than the oft-cited 1.5%

So the scope of all the evidence indicates that successful human-neanderthal hybridization was a limited event which ended before humans obtained their present brain shape and the explosion of human culture around 36,000 years ago in the Upper Paleolithic Revolution.  IOW even if what we call humans 55,000 years ago had instances where the barriers to fertility were overcome and fertile offspring were the result there is no reason to think that living humans and neanderthals, if they could be brought back, could do so. The fact that the researches in the study I cited earlier said that they could not detect any evidence of such interbreeding in living Europeans from the time humans and neanderthals lived side by side in Europe for thousands of years shows that there was no repeat of what probably happened in the mid-east 55K ago.

If any group can think outside the box, even our own boxes, its this one. Something changed in humanity in the Upper Paleolithic, and that even changed the way they interacted with other hominids. Lions and tigers have about the same fertility issues that the research indicates that archaic homo Sapiens and h. Neanderthal had, and we all know they are not the same species.

Brought to you by the author of.....

Did Neanderthals Really Paint Cave Walls In Spain 66,000 Years Ago?

For some reason a lot of people are intent on "humanizing" Neanderthals and other hominid species. Since there is disagreement about what it means to be human, there is plenty of room to argue about it. But while what we define as "human" may be a matter of opinion, the things used to support our choice should be a matter of facts. I don't see that happening here.

One manifestation of this was the declaration that Neanderthals were responsible for "cave art" in Spain around 66,000 years ago. This headline blared "Neanderthal Artwork Confirmed." The Washington Post was more cautious, saying they may have been the artists.

The main reason to assume that Neanderthals were the artists is that uranium-thorium dating of calcite deposits on top of the lines of the red earth material they used for "paint" dated the finds in three caves to a time when it is thought Neanderthals were the only hominids around- 66,000 years ago in the case of the oldest date. Our species was not thought to have made it to Spain until 45,000 years ago. That date counts on the idea that the calcite deposit legitimately grew after the "paint" was applied instead of just an artifact of the "paint" having less ability to adhere to the surface of a crystal compared to limestone cave walls.

The other thing is, no remains of either us or them have been found at the sites in question. Scientists think that modern humans did not come along until later, but how many times have we heard recently that humans were in one place or another earlier than what was previously thought? And since Spain is practically connected to North Africa its not like a human presence there would have to start from the Mid-east or Eastern Europe as it appears happened with the wave of human occupation which "stuck".

 But that is speculation. Let me get to the evidence. The most elaborate "painting" they found was a box within a box like so...

Now it turns out that there are 32 symbols that true modern humans used in cave art for at least 30,000 years. This indicates that these where not random drawings but each symbol communicated something across many generations of time over a vast geographic area.

Now I want you to compare the picture above, which contains what they claim is something painted by Neanderthals in a cave in Spain some 60-odd thousand years ago to the examples of "Spanish Tectiforms" in this link.  which was undoubtedly painted by our species in a cave in Spain ...

It sure looks like the earlier cave art is an formative example of one of the 32 symbols known as a "Spanish Tectiform". So are they suggesting that Neanderthals in Spain made cave art 66,000 years ago that looked just like one of the 32 enduring cave art symbols that modern humans used later from the moment of their arrival? This even though no Neanderthals anywhere else made anything close to it in the following 25,000 years of their existence?

As if that wasn't enough in itself to make one question if the earlier art was made by a separate species, there is the issue of the negative hand prints. We have never seen a Neanderthal hand in the flesh, but if you go by the size of the last little bit of bone on the end of their fingers, they must have had hugely thick fingertips compared to humans. Perhaps double the thickness.

But the hand prints found look like they are within the range of normal human proportions.

Look here and in particular the upper left one here to see what I mean.

I think there is a story here, but its not that Neanderthals made cave art. It is that some group of humans, H. Sapiens, occupied Spain long before we thought that they had. (UPDATE: If that is even so, Reasons.org has an article up casting doubt on the dating processes by which it was determined that the art was really 64,000 years old).

Also: The genetic case that Neanderthals were not like us.

Acts 17:26 vs. Genesis 2:1: VIDEO Were there Humans Already Outside the Garden?

GET THE BOOK: USA * UK

* Canada * Australia * India

(More videos on the Christ-centered model of early Genesis)

(Twenty-five Theses on Early Genesis)

The dominant view of Adam in the Christian church today is that his role in scripture is to be the sole father of the human race- that he is the genetic progenitor of mankind. The Christ-centered model makes the case from scripture that his true role is to be the progenitor of the line of Messiah, not all of mankind. Adam is a figure or pattern of Christ (Rom. 5:14) not the father of mankind. There were already other humans around when Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden.

This video takes the most cited scripture used to support the idea that Adam was the sole progenitor of humanity and measures it up against one of the many scriptures supporting the idea that there were already other humans outside the garden. TRANSCRIPT OF VIDEO FOLLOWS...

Hello friends my name is Mark Moore I'm
the author of the book early Genesis the
revealed cosmology it's available on
Amazon and other places. I believe
there's a link to it in the description
of this video down below and the e
version is of no charge if you have
access to a Kindle Unlimited account.

I want to put scripture against Scripture -
Was Adam the sole progenitor of the
human race? Everybody thinks 'oh yeah
sure that that's who the Bible says Adam
is'-  but does it?

What is the one scripture
that you would most think of to confirm
the idea that Adam is the sole father of
the whole human race? Not just the line of
Messiah but the whole human race? Put
that up against one of the scriptures
which indicate that Adam wasn't the
father of the whole human race, that God
made a host of people here right from
the beginning and that's what I'd like to
do today. I'd like to put those two
scriptures up against each other
break them down and see where we get the
most accurate picture and I want to
start with the scripture the go-to
scripture for the "Adam as Father" view.

 If you went to most people
that were familiar with the Bible and
say show me the scripture that says Adam
is the sole progenitor of all mankind
most people would point you to acts
17:26 so let's take a look at acts 17:26
and see what it says and then we're
going to look at Genesis 2:1 and see
what it says and break these two verses
down.

Acts 17:26:  what it says depends on what
version you're reading from if you're
reading from the NIV it says from one
man he made all the nations of the earth
in which case Adam was the sole
progenitor of the human race but the
King James Version says hath made of one
blood all nations of men a different
word and the American Standard says
he made of one every nation of men. 

The American Standard
translation leaves it open so that's a
good hint that we need to go back in the
Greek and when we go back to the Greek
what do we find out? The American
Standard is most
correct - He made of one every nation of
men it does not say one man it just says
'of one'.  Interesting isn't it?  When you go
to the Greek the case is not nearly as
clear-cut as you may have been led to
believe. There's a blank there
and the translator has to fill in the
blank when with their own biases.

It could be of 'one man
God made every nation on earth' in which
case acts 17:26 is the scriptural proof
you need to show that Adam was the
father of a whole human race, but the
Greek doesn't say 'one man' nor does the
Greek say 'one blood' as the King James
translated it. The most accurate or
closer to the Greek would be the
American Standard Version where it just
says 'of one God made every nation' and
that word for nation is ethnos which is
where we get our word ethnicity so there
is a blank there and you fill in the
blank.

 If you fill it in with one
ethnos andGod made every ethnos you keep
the brotherhood of man, you keep the idea
that God created all humans, but you
don't keep the idea that Adam was the
sole progenitor of the human race. That
just doesn't say that in the Greek . In
fact if you look at another verse where
it says one man and ethnos and uses the same
three words and you see how the Greek does it
you'll see the Greek is different. When
it wants to say one man it says one man
one anthropous. 

So in the Greek of them it says 'of one
he made every ethnos' from which we get
our word ethnicity on earth the man or
the blood or whatever you build in the
blank is simply the translator putting
something in the blank.  It's not what the
text said. It could be saying of one
ethnos God made every ethnos on earth. In
other words the brotherhood of man is
kept, God as the creator of all mankind,
those ideas are kept but it's really not
saying anything about Adam being the
sole progenitor of the human race it's
just not in the real text.  It's something
that's been inserted by some translators
but not others-  a terrible thing to base
a doctrine on what one translator has
decided to put in a blank.

Compare this to the Greek in John 11:50. When the
text wants to say one man in relation to
the word ethnos it says one man or one
anthropos. John 11:50 has the same three
terms in it a very similar
structure but there it says one
anthropos and ethnos.  In acts 17:26 it
does not say anthropos in that place.

That is a look at the main verse of
scripture that can show that Adam was
the sole progenitor of the human race
and really you see that it doesn't
 say that. Now what about the
other side of the equation what verse
shows that Adam was not the sole
progenitor of the human race, that God
made many people and Adam was just made
to bring line of Messiah? 

Well there are
a lot of them- there are too many to
share in this video most of them are in
the book not not even all of them there
but the one I want to focus on today is
Genesis 2:1 I'm just gonna use one of
the many verses I could use and then
show one verse near it to show that what
I'm the context that I'm saying it sin
is the correct context so let's take a
look ......(rest in video)

***

Interlinear translation showing the Greek in Acts 17:26

Interlinear translation showing the Hebrew in Genesis 2:1

Lutherans Against Luther on Death Before the Fall

I think the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church is the best denomination in America right now due to their Law and Gospel format, emphasis on the five Solas, and refusing to change their format to a business model where the experience is the product. It's still about truth there.

Now they do give great respect to Martin Luther, which is no surprise. But what is surprising is that virtually the whole denomination seems to hold to the view that there was no physical death before the fall of Adam.  Now, a lot of conservative denominations in the United States lean that way these days, so you may wonder why I find it surprising that they do. The reason is simple: Martin Luther himself did not hold that view. Today's Lutherans are against the teachings of Martin Luther, and seem to prefer Ken Ham's view of things to that of the founder of their denomination!

Here are some examples (from here) of things Luther wrote which pertain to the subject of death before the fall of Adam...

 “…man[, unlike “cows, pigs, and other beasts”] is a creature created to inhabit the celestial regions and live an eternal life when, after a while, he has left the earth. For this is the meaning of the fact that he can not only speak and form judgments (things which belong to dialectics and rhetoric) but also learns all the sciences thoroughly”  

Page 46 Luther’s Works, American Edition, volume I, or AE I 

But it gets better, and more explicit.... 

On Page 92 he posits that the Tree of Life was put in the garden to keep Adam and Eve in “full bodily vigor, free from diseases and free from weariness”. This fits what I said in "Early Genesis, the Revealed Cosmology". Freedom from physical death was not baked into the cake of the world before the fall, it was something available due to access to the Tree of Life. 

On page 57.."“Adam was not to live without food, drink, and procreation. But at a predetermined time, after the number of saints had become full, these physical activities would have come to an end; and Adam, together with his descendants, would have been translated to the eternal and spiritual life. Nevertheless, these activities of physical life – like eating, drinking, procreating, etc. – would have been a service pleasing to God; we could also have rendered this service to God without the defect of the lust which is there now after sin, without any sin and without the fear of death. This would have surely been a pleasant and delightful life, a life about which we may indeed think but which we may not attain in this life….” 

and also on that page "“Adam had a twofold life: a physical one and an immortal one, though this was not yet clearly revealed, but only in hope”

There is more, but surely that is enough to make my point. Martin Luther did not believe in the doctrine that there was no physical death before the fall. I implore Lutherans to consider the Christ-centered model for early Genesis as described in this book......

Human Brain Shape Fully Emerged Only 35K Ago

This article from PHYS.org cites a study showing that the globular brain shape of modern humans did not emerge until after 35K ago. There are a number of example of skulls which have brains the same size as ours, and which have facial features much like ours. But how that brain is organized seems to change around 35K ago- just when there is a "big bang" of creativity in human art culture.



"The Homo sapiens fossils were found to have increasingly more modern endocranial shapes in accordance with their geological age. Only fossils younger than 35,000 years show the same globular shape as present-day humans, suggesting that modern brain organization evolved some time between 100,000 and 35,000 years ago. Importantly, these shape changes evolved independently of brain size—with endocranial volumes of around 1,400 milliliters, even the oldest Homo sapiens fossils from Jebel Irhoud fell within present-day variation of brain size. "The brain is arguably the most important organ for the abilities that make us human," says Neubauer. But modern human brain shape was not established at the origin of our species together with other key features of craniodental morphology. Neubauer adds: "We already knew that brain shape must have evolved within our own species, but we were surprised to discover just how recent these changes to brain organization were."




Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-01-modern-human-brain-emerged.html#jCp"

Past Generations of Christians Knew Christ was the Image of God

The Christ-centered model for early Genesis takes Adam from his non-biblical role as father of the whole human race and instead regulates him to his scriptural role as a figure of Christ, and thus federal head of our kind. I have been privy to several online dialogues of late where this principle is accepted, but they get tripped up over the "image of God" language in Genesis 1:26-27. "When did men outside the garden get the image of God?" they ask. "What is meant by the Image of God?" they inquire of one another.

In the Christ-centered model the answer to the question is simple. Christ is the image of God. And God has no other image accessible to man. Therefore to be "in the image" is to be in relationship with Him, just as Adam was in the garden. When Adam lost the relationship, he lost the image. So the assumption that humans are presently all "in the image of God" is a flawed one based on a misunderstanding of Genesis chapter one and 9:6. Humans are not born in the image of God.

The church used to know this back when the leadership was actually trying to make disciples instead of reducing things to the lowest common denominator in order to "increase market share" in a business-oriented "church" model. Didn't the protestants get their start protesting the Catholic church running their outfit like a business? Now the evangelical churches are rushing to do it too. Making the "experience" of the "believer" the product can collect a lot of itching ears, but its not good at making disciples because that's not even what its trying to do. But I digress.

I did some research on the classic Christmas hymn "Hark, the Herald Angels". It turns out it was written back in 1739. And it had forth and fifth verses, since cast aside. The last verse was...

Adam's Likeness, LORD, efface,
Stamp thy Image in its Place,
Second Adam from above,
Reinstate us in thy Love.
Let us Thee, tho' lost, regain,
Thee, the Life, the Inner Man:
O! to All Thyself impart,
Form'd in each Believing Heart.

So here I am listening to a bunch of highly educated and extremely intelligent people, some of whom have been churched all their life, go on and on wondering about whether the humans outside the garden were "in the image of God like Adam was." Meanwhile the average believer 300 years ago understood that Adam was not in the image of God outside of a relationship with God. Humans are not in the image of God until God stamps us with the image of His Son and we are conformed to that Image more and more via sanctification.

In 1758 George Whitefield edited a more enduring version of the song. The last verse was shortened to say:

Adam's Likeness now efface,
Stamp thy Image in its Place;
Second Adam from above,
Work it in us by thy Love.

Again they understood what scripture said about our being born in the image of Adam, our federal head in the natural, and that upon salvation and re-birth we received a new image from our new federal head. He is the One called Jesus Christ and the scripture refers to (1 Cor. 15) Him as the "second Adam".

The version of the song we most often sing today was not even composed until 1961. It was a greatly shortened version, with the last two verses removed. A lot of theology has been taken out of Christian hymns. In a very real sense "Early Genesis, the Revealed Cosmology" is not teaching a new theology. A lot of it is independently discovered old theology which has been massaged out of the church over the decades as part of an effort to remake the Church of God in Wall Street's image.

Get the book