So once again, you cannot just take a video as the last word in anything. The book was published in 2002; the video was made the next year. And you guessed it, in the 20 years since then, an awful lot of what the video says has been overturned. This is a loooong post so you can stop there or you can skim on down for the links to the new evidence. Or you could read the whole thing and shake your head.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_xTG6VXlIQ
Now. About minute 7:50 Wells makes a
classic misstatement. Humans did not evolve from apes. Humans and apes have a common
ancestor which was neither a human nor an ape. Once you have a life form with
the genetics of an ape, it is not going to develop the genetics of a human.
Secondly, that 50,000 year thing. That can't be true. The oldest identifiable human artifacts in the
Americas go back 20,000 years and they are in Pittsburgh, PA, on the other side
of the continent from either Alaska or California. Remember that about 1 hour
39 minutes into the video. Kennewick Man in Washington State goes back 9,000
years. Nowadays, we have remains showing that humans left Africa 60,000 to
90,000 years ago, almost twice what the narrator says.
Third, they were not superhuman.
I’ve observed birds for a long time and when it comes to food, they can be very
smart and very inventive. It’s a matter of life and death. Humans moved out of
Africa, not to prove they were super-human, but because they had used up the territory where they were.
At 20:39, he makes another
mistake. We have found the hyoid bone in Neanderthals, the first homo sapiens; it is the bone in our larynx that makes speech. We know that primates
use sound to communicate. Neanderthals have more than twice the brain capacity
of the nearest non-human primate. They had the FOXP2 gene that we have, which
is related to speech. They have a well-developed Broca’s region, and you don’t
get that without many generations of the same type of communication that modern
humans use it for. There’s little doubt that Neanderthals spoke, and Neanderthal
DNA has been identified in Africa. It’s not an issue of Europeans with
Neanderthal ancestry producing children with Africans. Instead, people migrated
back and forth out of and into Africa, before the migrations that carried
humans permanently into the rest of the world. When you realize that
Neanderthals lived 500,000 years ago, but humans didn’t leave Africa until
after 100,000 years ago, it only makes sense to say that Africans spoke long
before the existence of the Homo sapiens sapiens peoples called the San. Human
speech predates the San by 200,000 years or more.
At 22:50 there is another
mistake. All primates hunt. They use communications if they hunt cooperatively: to convene the group, declare what they’re after, tell where it is, and arrange
who does what. This is part of bonobo life, chimp life, and it was part of the
lives of early humans like Lucy and Rudolf. The real benefit of speech is
something hardly anybody thinks about and is part of a subject called oral
traditions studies. Without writing, information has to transmit by word of
mouth. In the earliest generations of humans, information could be demonstrated
by mother to child, teaching tool making and how to use the tools, a process
that was complete by the time the child no longer needed the mother to nurse it
or chew food for it. The more complex the tools become, the slower and more
careful the demonstrations have to be.
And along with the demonstrations,
the teacher says things like, “this is how my mother/father did it.” Then may
follow statements of other things the parent did. Each generation has another
generation in the past to tell about. It’s a sign of belonging to the family,
to know what the ancestors did. And extraordinary events go with this:
eruptions, earthquakes, floods, droughts. As culture gets more complex, the number
of subjects for these stories expands. They become fireside tales that
reinforce community. And at last they determine how every generation of that
culture is supposed to live. They become laws.
The founder of this study, AxelOlrik, knows that the Fjoort African tribe has a set of tribal lays. Roger Abrahams reveals that they tell these tales when they are sitting in judgment on
some violation of tribal behavior. The reason is to rehearse tribal customs so
as to know if the accused deserves punishment, and what punishment.
The same thing informed Jewish
behavior for thousands of years. The surviving tales were finally put into
writing during the Babylonian Captivity to keep them from being lost, as the
basis for existing court rulings that were later documented in Mishnah. And
then important court discussions were recorded as gemara, one set in the Holy
Land and one in Babylonia.
Culture like the Oldowan toolkit or use of fire, offers advantages over instinctive behavior. You don't have to wait for the genes to change; you change your behavior without that. Once the ancestral tale developed, culture took on
a new meaning. All humans of a given era might use the same toolkit, but every clan
had its own set of ancestral tales. Originally identical, they changed as
people left the homeland. But only the details changed. All
oral traditions share some of the same features as the Mwindo epic of Africa,
and those same features show up in Sumerian tales, Hindu tales, Chinese tales,
the Popul Vuh of the Americas, the Jewish Bible, Greek myth and German fairy
tales. That is what comes of Axel Olrik’s work. And even people working in the
field of oral traditions for the most part know only a fraction of what Olrik
said.
27:46 is an expression of
something supported by Stephen Jay Gould. Gould
could never quite grasp that you can’t have a complete paleontological dataset
on a world where life forms decay when they die and then the chemical traces
are subjected to geological activity. In fact there is a phrase used by
paleontologists that I paraphrase. Paleontologists say natura non facit saltus, nature makes no
leaps. When you find a fossil, any fossil, you know that millions of
generations stand behind it, and just because they left no trace in the fossil
record does not mean they didn’t exist.
My paraphrase is cultura nonfacit saltus. There is no cultural evidence that does not have generations
of humans behind it, and just because we don’t have every generation of stone
tools from Oldowan to American Clovis points doesn’t mean that humans suddenly
stopped using tools at some point, then invented a whole new style out of
nothing. It doesn’t happen. Even Newton and Einstein stood on the shoulders of
older researchers, as Bill Gates stood on the shoulders of Ada Lady Lovelace. So
when a professor babbles on about a dark ages in a given culture, it’s not that
nothing was happening. It’s just that the interim products were destroyed in
various ways – wars, fires, burials, and so on.
At 30:40 the narrator repeats the
old Victorian idea that all food came from hunters. This is disproven by modern
human physiology. We still don’t need to get more than 12% of our calories from
animal food to be healthy. Chimps and bonobos likewise have a mostly plant
diet. Females don’t sit around and wait for heap big hunter to come home. They go
out with the kids and pick fruit, dig up tubers, find nuts, and so on. When
they come across termite mounds they can exploit them. When they come across
bird nests, they can exploit them. Anything that doesn’t eat them first and
doesn’t poison them, they eat.
So you have humans moving in and
out of Africa. The evidence is in the caves at Carmel in Israel; there are millennia
of layers of remains and dirt, and we find Neanderthals there as well as more
modern types, one layered over the other. Humans had already been doing this
for the history of Neanderthals and it continued after Cro magnon man
developed. Just because we don’t have evidence
of every last settlement doesn’t mean they weren’t there. Pretending otherwise
is a case of the false argument from silence.
There is a true argument from
silence. If you have a complete dataset, you can say that X did not exist. If
you have a bus schedule and there are blanks on it, you know there will be no
bus at that time. The bus company has a complete dataset which says there’s no
bus at that time. But paleontology and archaeology and history don’t work like
that. They have gaps. Any time a professor says that X didn’t exist at some
point in past time because we don't have samples of it, challenge that statement.
And so the idea that somehow humans
flew from Africa to Australia is ludicrous. The question “how did they do it”
shows that the narrator is not thinking logically.
38:00 And in fact there’s an
answer for why the Australians say they originated there. It’s in Axel Olrik’s
work. When people migrate, the stories they tell change. The old stories don’t
apply any more and they dissolve out of the tradition. The new stories that
reflect the new environment take over and record the new culture. This applies
both to Australians and to the Native Americans later in the video. Over the millennia
since speech began, billions of people told billions of stories, and most of
them dissolved before anybody wrote them down. It’s the same thing as physical fossils.
The surviving stories record the surviving cultures. That is not equivalent to
science which is based on mathematics and physical evidence.
52:35 The data in the video is misleading.
The crossing happened, therefore it must have been possible using artifacts of
the times. The fact that it happened 50,000 years ago refutes the narrator’s
timing claims and puts the migration out of Africa closer to 90,000 years ago.
As you now realize, the fact that no remains of watercraft have been found is
irrelevant. It’s a case of a false argument from silence.
Now look at the success
percentages in the Results section of the following paper. Each of those
percentages is for one person in one year. You have a chance for a thousand people
to cross in a thousand years. If they can see Sahul, the name for ancient
Greater Australia, and they want to find out if they can live there, the
crossing would be intentional not random, and once one person succeeds and
brings back word, others can try it. The Discussion section gives an estimate
of 1300 people minimum, intentionally crossing, before 50,000 years ago. They didn’t
do it because they were adventurous. They did it thinking of food.
55:35. There’s a misstatement.
Animals were not pushed out of Africa by drought due to the Ice Age. Animals
evolve to survive in a given environment. If animals were pushed out of Africa,
why are there no chimp remains in Sinai and Arabia and so on, which were
moister and had more food? Again, that’s a false argument from silence. Instead,
what happened is that people migrated farther than their normal feeding grounds
– say, 30 miles instead of 15 – and in the new place they found food. The
further they got away from the Ethiopian homeland the less familiar the animals
were, but that makes little difference since they ate 3/4x as much plant food
as animal food. As long as the strange animals didn’t eat them first or poison
them, the humans ate them. There were elephant-like animals in Europe during
Neanderthal times – but they weren’t mammoths of the Ice Ages. And they existed
in the Middle East, where we know Neanderthals lived – and hunted these same
animals. So humans did not leave Africa “following their game animals”. They
left Africa and found different game animals to eat.
56:20 The Chinese were not the
first peoples in China. The Denisovans were discovered 8 years after the book
was written. They were related to but not descended from Neanderthals. They
interbred with the later people who brought in the classic Chinese features,
but they never migrated into Sahul. There is no Denisovan blood in Australian
aborigines.
57:10 is false. Neanderthals
lived in Europe 500,000 years ago as far north as Kent in England.
57:35 is also false. The
ancestors of the people who built Stonehenge, and of the Basques, left
northeastern Anatolia about 8000 BCE or 10,000 years ago. They did not speak
Indo-European languages; they probably spoke ergative languages descended from
some ancestor that also produced the ergative Hurrian and Sumerian languages.
In the millennia between the Carmel Caves and this migration, humans in the
Middle East were exploiting grain and harvesting it with sickles. By 7800 BCE one
variety of wheat could no longer sow itself; people had to sow it. By 4000 BCE
wine grapes were domesticated, and this is about the time that the earlier
emigrants reached the extremes of Europe.
58:30 in 2018 Neanderthal art was
discovered in Spain that dated back nearly 70,000 years. This used radioactive
dating, not just stratigraphy, so it’s a firm date.
https://www.sapiens.org/archaeology/neanderthal-art-discovery/
59:00 There was almost no
physical difference between Neanderthal and Cro magnon. The one was not stout
and stooped and the other thin and tall. People in Africa were not thin because
of a genetic predisposition; it was because getting food was thermodynamically
expensive. Despite resting more than half the time, they still worked off every
calorie they ate. The adaptations to cool weather were cultural and took
thousands of years to develop as Neanderthal and Cro magnon migrated back and
forth through the Levant. There was no need to develop large body size to
survive, unlike animals which don’t make or wear clothing. The guy who reached
over six feet up to do a cave painting, could have been standing on somebody’s
back or sitting on somebody’s shoulders.
1 hour 2. another falsehood. Blacks can get skin cancer; dark skin does not protect against UV.
What dark skin protects against is the body making too much vitamin D. Too
little and soft bones bend. Too much and brittle bones break. You can’t perform
sustenance activities with broken limbs; you can die from broken ribs. You can’t
eat when you have a broken jaw. That woman should have been ashamed of herself
for spouting an old wives’ tale. 5700 years ago a woman in Denmark still had
dark skin, although she had blue eyes; she was part of that migration from NE
Anatolia I wrote of just now. Again, this discovery was made in 2019.
1 hour 10. The Siberian R1 Y chromosome haplogroup genetic
contribution is real. A Siberian wave swept west, into Europe – well part of
it. It washed up in the Basque region. It penetrated down into Greece. Its
descendants were the Mykenaeans who built the Palace Culture, used Linear B,
and form the characters of the Iliad. But it did not affect the Minoans; it did not get down into Italy. The
low percentage of this DNA in Italy could well come from Greeks who settled
Sicily and Sardinia. The Greek language is the descendant of the Siberian wave – but Latin
is not. But this was not a delay in migration. It was a substantial genetic contribution
after the ancestors of the Basques but before the Indo-European migration. The
Anatolians were still domesticating wheat at the time.
1 hour 27 that woman is back
again with another of her myths. The abstract alone proves she’s wrong.
1 hour 35 the estimate of original
population is too low.
The Na-Dene and Inuit populations
have a different haplogroup from other tribes.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100622001311/http://www.genebase.com/tutorial/item.php?tuId=16
If you get a sad feeling that academics
don’t have any common sense, you’re right. If you have a feeling they never
learned any logic, you’re right. About the time that Immanuel Kant showed that
Aristotle’s categories were not a priori or inherent in the world, but
an artefact of Greek culture, it went out of fashion to study logic. It only
picked up again in the second half of the 1800s when symbolic logic developed.
But that’s higher mathematics; few people in the liberal arts study that. I
only learned probability calculations because I saw it would help me prove something I had wanted to prove for 40 years. And damned few academics know
when they are committing fallacies. As I know from reading their work. But the
narrator is a scientist and for him to go down the rabbit hole of illogic is
really sad.
When I write these critiques I constantly say, we can’t blame somebody for what nobody knew until after their work was published. But I also keep saying that these videos are always a starting point for research, not something to rely on forever, and what you just read is a perfect example that I’m right.
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