Does “Full Humanity” Predate Homo Sapiens? (Part 2 - Neanderthals)
(Lesson learned if you have a WordPress blog: This is my second writing of this. First time, I was in the process of posting it. I interrupted the publish however because I forgot to assign categories. But, it had published enough already that it was showing up on the blog. So, I then opened a second window to delete what was posted. I then came back into my first window, picked my categories, and then published, and then whoosh. The post was gone, and hitting the back button showed a blank post. Apparently, I deleted my post out from under myself. Argh. I will never do that again. As embarrassing as that is, I publish my stupidity so that you may learn from my mistakes. Now, on to the blog…)
In my post, Does “Full Humanity” Predate Homo Sapiens? (Part 1 - Altars), I concluded that the discovery of altars is a reasonable criterion for deeming a species fully human. It’s no slam dunk argument, at least not for most, but a person (i.e., Glenn Morton) would be reasonable for concluding it. Here is the specific evidence presented by Morton, which I did not quote properly in my last post:
There is an even earlier altar, which is not controversial, found at Bilzingsleben, Germany. The excavators, Dietrich and Ursula Mania have found a 27-foot-diameter paved area that they say was used for “special cultural activities” (Mania et al,1994, p. 124; See also Mania and Mania, 1988, p. 92). Gore writes:
“But Mania’s most intriguing find lies under a protective shed. As he opens the door sunlight illuminates a cluster of smooth stones and pieces of bone that he believes were arranged by humans to pave a 27-foot-wide circle. “‘They intentionally paved this area for cultural activities,’ says Mania. ‘We found here a large anvil of quartzite set between the horns of a huge bison, near it were fractured human skulls.’” (1997,p. 110)
I would contend that the symbolism here, if found in a modern village, would be enough to cause one to turn and flee for his life. Such an arrangement of objects would immediately be interpreted as evidence of religion, and a hostile religion at that. And Bilzingsleben dates to around 425,000 years, not the mere 24,000 years that Ross prefers for the oldest evidence of religion.
Now, to properly consider this, one must consider the ramifications, because Homo Sapiens originated in Africa about 200,000 years ago, and this altar originated in Germany 225,000 years before that, a time and place corresponding with Homo Heidelbergensis, which is believed to be an ancestor of Homo Sapiens. In other words, to accept altars as evidence of full humanity is to say that Homo Heidelbergensis was fully human. Is that palatable to you? Well, it could be. After if we ultimate trace back to them, then why not?
The sticking point is that most of the altars cited by Morton actually came from Neanderthals, which are not direct ancestors of Homo Sapiens… or are they?
In his article Neanderthal mtDNA, Morton discusses an interesting physical feature of Homo Sapiens, the mandibular foramen.
This is a weird type of hole in the jaw where the nerve goes through. There are two types of this foramen: normal and H-O. The H-O foramen is described by Wolpoff and Caspari,
” “The mandibular foramen, for example, is an opening on the inside of the vertical part of the mandible for the branch of the mandibular nerve that reaches the teeth. This is the uncomfortable spot a dentist tries to reach with a nerve block for the mandibular teeth. In the H-O form the rim of the opening has an oval shape with the long axis of the oval oriented horizontally. Alternatively, in the normal form the rim may be broken, along with its lower border, by an unbridged vertical groove. The broken rim is the usual form in living populations. “The horizontal-oval mandibular foramen is virtually unique to European fossils. It is found in almost no other remains, including Late Pleistocene Africans and the Skhul/Qafzeh sample, the putative alternate ancestors of the post-Neandertal Europeans. But the horizontal-oval foramen has a significant frequency in the subsequent post-Neandertal populations of Europe and only decreases to rarity in recent Europeans. The exact form of the foramen opening is an example of nonadaptive equivalents. It is important that the foramen be there (the nerve must enter the mandibular body), but it makes absolutely no difference which form its rim has.”~Milford Wolpoff and Rachael Caspari, Race and Human Evolution, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), p. 296-297
In order to explain this without Neanderthal genes in the population of Europe, one must assume that the H-O form arose by mutation a second time, only in European fossils. This is not found in non-European populations!
Given that ones survival does not depend on whether one has the H-O form or normal form, it is highly unlikely that evolution would have produced the H-O form in separate homogeneous populations. The implication? That Neanderthals occasionally bred into the Homo Heidelbergensis populations. To support this conclusion, consider also the following…
In his article The Homo erectus Genes in Us, Morton discusses the gene for red-hair. It seems that one can determine for how long a given gene has been in existence by estimating the number of mutations in that gene, and then calculating how long it took for all of those mutations to arise.
The mutations are counted by comparing the gene across disparate populations, and counting their differences. The more samples you can find, the more accurate your count. Now, common sense tells me that you don’t add the number of differences, but that by comparing you can determine the average number of mutations per modern sample; that detail is not clear to me. Then, if you then make the likely assumption that all of the samples trace back to a common ancestor that had none of the mutations, and if you know the likelihood of mutations in general, you can predict when the common ancestor was alive. As Morton reports:
There are two alleles which have a date of origin of 100,000 years. This might not seem important until it is recognized that these two are the red-hair genes. Red hair is only found in two places on the earth–Europe within the former territory of the Neanderthals and Papua New Guinea (but Harding seems to think that the Papuan example is a case of demographic history rather than selection (Harding and Rees)).
Now recall from above that Homo Sapiens originated in Africa 200,000 years ago, a full 100,000 years before the red hair genes originated. Given the absence of this gene in Africans and the fact that it never spread throughout the world, it would seem most likely that it entered the Homo Sapien population when they invaded Europe around 35,000 to 40,000 years ago. Morton concludes:
So where did it come from? One hundred thousand years ago, the only people in Europe were the Neanderthals and most observers of this gene have drawn the conclusion that the red haired gene is from the Neanderthals.
So, do Neanderthal altars prove Neanderthals were fully human? Well, combined with their ability to interbreed with Homo Heidelbergensis, it would seem so. But then, exactly how many times did God impart full humanity on the world? This would certainly be easier for me accept that answer was a resounding “ONE”. I mean, there was only one Adam in scripture, right? Well, it turns out Morton has an answer to this one, too.
Back in Morton’s mtDNA paper, it turns out that since they have arisen, homo sapiens have accumulated 24 gene sequence differences in their mtDNA. Compared to Neanderthal DNA, there are 27 differences, suggesting that a common branch diverged first into Neanderthals, and then later into Homo Sapiens. This point of commonality is computed to be about 600,000 years ago, suggesting that Neanderthal and Homo Sapiens ultimately derived their humanity from a common ancestor, which may have been discovered already, as pointed out by Morton:
Finally, there is a morphological intermediate between Neanderthal and archaic Homo sapiens in the Atapuerca people I mentioned on some posts about the earliest burial. They lived about 600kyr ago and are at the perfect time for the split between the lineages. If those people are the ancestors of Neanderthal, and they were human, with burial rites, then their descendants, the Neanderthals, also would have to be people.
Wikipedia has links to additional reading on Atapuerca.
In conclusion, Morton’s treatment of the evidence appears to be reasonable, and non manufactured. It is only his interpretation that seems open for debate, and to be honest, and I have seen no arguments against him any stronger than, “it can’t be”, or “you’re just a fanatic”, or “cite your sources” (when he happens to leave it out). As I continue tracing his reasoning, back to the 5.5 mya mark (which is when he believes Adam and Noah’s Flood occurred), my first question will remain, “Is he being reasonable?” In that area, so far so good. I may not be an expert, but the experts do not appear to have any stronger evidence to counter his views.
My second question is, how does Morton deal with scriptural difficulties arising from his view? Well, one difficulty that is answered above is the fact that we have always assumed Adam was a Homo Sapien, and that only Homo Sapiens have ever been fully human. Well, I think showing that Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens inherited the propensity to build an altar from a common ancestor is pretty good evidence that humanity predates the Neanderthal, and was inherited by them and us.
The last question I have then is, how far does humanity trace back? I will tackle that in the future. I understand how Morton traces humanity back as far as 600,000 years… I cannot wait to see how it traces back 5.5 million!