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Post by OasisNZ on Oct 27, 2006 11:48:07 GMT 12
Great reading, evolution based, put's forward the idea that the less intelligent, but more brutal Cro-Magnons all but completely wiped out the cleverer Neanderthals.
Ronald Wright thinks a few Neanderthal genes did actually make it into the present gene pool, based on the skull structure he talks about in the book, and describes himself as having such, methinks I'm a Neanderthal too! LOL ;D ;D ;D
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Post by doggitt on Oct 27, 2006 14:57:49 GMT 12
You wouldn't be agreeing with evolution would you?
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Post by OasisNZ on Oct 27, 2006 15:34:32 GMT 12
You wouldn't be agreeing with evolution would you? Hahaha, NEVER! lol Just goes to show that a Cro-magnon is/was as much a human being as a neanderthal is/was, and if either were still around (well, they are really, just assimilated into what we know now as homo sapien sapien) they would still be able to breed with a modern day human. It all just seems so simple to me, sorry for always coming across as an arrogant toss-pot on this subject. Yes, things have changed a lot, and some species have died out all together, but they haven't changed into other species, in my humble opinion. A horse is a horse, a dog is a dog, and so on... Put it this way, lets say all but a few humans were suddenly wiped off the face of the earth, I've heard it said that all that would remain would be about 3 fossilised humans, such is the rarity of fossils. So let's say one is a big black african person, one a pigmy, and one a deformed human. In a few thousand years they will be trying to fit the fossils into their evolutionary tree. Things change, (quicker than they reckon, I reckon) and species adapt, but they don't change into completely different species. But... the book is a very interesting read, I'll post a couple of exerpts from the book later...
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Post by doggitt on Oct 27, 2006 16:27:07 GMT 12
So where did horses come from if they weren't here before?
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Post by OasisNZ on Oct 27, 2006 17:23:07 GMT 12
They evolved from a clump of space snot, just like the rest of us? lol
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Post by doggitt on Oct 27, 2006 18:00:51 GMT 12
I think we have almost identical viewpoints, that everything is either probably impossible or everything is not quite possible. They are almost the same viewpoint.
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Post by OasisNZ on Oct 27, 2006 18:49:00 GMT 12
The following is an exerpt from A Short History Of Progress by Ronald Wright.... (not sure if I'm still breaking the law even by attributing the blokes work, any legal person please let me know...) In the previous chapter, I raised three questions asked by Paul Gauguin in his great 1897 painting, entitled, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? At a practical level, anthropology has answered the first two: we now know that we are the remote descendants of apes who lived in Africa about 5 million years ago. Modern apes, which are also descended from the same original stock, are kin, not ancestors. Our main difference from chimps and gorillas is that over the last 3 million years or so, we have been shaped less and less by nature, and more and more by culture. We have become experimental creatures of our own making. This experiment has never been tried before. And we, its unwitting authors, have never controlled it. The experiment is now moving very quickly and on a colossal scale. Since the early 1900s, the world's population has multiplied by four and its economy - a rough measure of the human load on nature - by more than forty. We have reached a stage where we must bring the experiment under rational control, and guard against present and potential dangers. It's entirely up to us. If we fail - if we blow up or degrade the biosphere so it can no longer sustain us - nature will merely shrug and conclude that letting apes run the laboratory was fun for a while but in the end a bad idea. We have already caused so many extinctions that our dominion over the earth will appear in the fossil record like the impact of an asteroid. So far, we are only a small asteroid compared with the one that clobbered the dinosaurs. But if the extinctions continue much longer, or if we unleash weapons of mass destruction - I mean the real ones kept in huge stockpiles by the great powers - then the next layer of fossils will indeed show a major hiatus in this planet's life... What a great author, I really like his style. I still think the numbers are wrong, knock about three zeros off the above boldened quotes, I reckon
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