Posts

Rising Star Burials Revised

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Longtime readers will remember my obsession with the discoveries in the Rising Star Cave in South Africa, where thousands of bones of a hominin dubbed Homo naledi have been recovered over the past dozen or so years.  By itself, that's not terribly shocking (there are lots of hominin fossils), but various features of the cave where they were found led researchers to suggest the bones were deliberately placed there.  More recently, there have been a series of claims and pre-prints that have introduced some fascinating new dimensions to the work ( fire , burials, tools, and engravings ), but there has also been criticism of these findings that reflect some of my own misgivings about a few of the claims .  Some of my concerns:  The claims of fire evidence remains undocumented, and it's been nearly two and a half years now.  I know in archaeology that it's somewhat common to make big announcements about discoveries with the research articles coming much later, but I...
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They're not dire wolves

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  They're not dire wolves.  Not even close. Time magazine has a cover story this week on Colossal Biosciences' latest research progress in de-extinction.  They claim repeatedly in the article that three recently born wolf pups are dire wolves, even as the article itself gives enough information to unequivocally dispute that claim.  I acknowledge that this is a cool research project and that these animals will exhibit traits that might resemble dire wolves and even that the technology they're developing will have important future applications.  But these animals they've produced are not dire wolves. Dire wolves are extinct canids that lived in North America, known from all over the continent, especially from the famed La Brea Tar Pits in California.  They were big animals, maybe twice the mass of the gray wolf, and they went extinct along with other big American predators like the American lion and the giant shortfaced bear.  And they were common....
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Scopes Trial Centennial Events

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  This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Scopes Trial, which took place right here in the historic Rhea County Courthouse, not two miles from the Core Academy offices. It's definitely a strange event all the way around. Part media circus, part legal showdown, part religious debate - and everyone's understanding of it is warped by Inherit the Wind .  Beneath all the mythology, though, the trial's issues are just as relevant today as they were then.  The prosecution argued that it was within the rights of the states citizens to decide what state employees were allowed to teach in the classroom.  The defense argued that the majority could not trample on the rights of the minority.  The trial devolved into a personal grudge match of agnostic Clarence Darrow vs. fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan, and the case of creation vs. evolution was hardly even litigated.  But the historical significance of the trial is enormous, as it set in motion a series of e...
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Cut marks and stone tools

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My last post elicited comments that some of the sites I included in my map were dubious or debatable.  And you know what?  That's true.  What's more, the mere fact that stone tools and cut bones occur together does not by itself indicate that humans were once present there.  We've known for a long time that other creatures can make tools that look kind of like Oldowan flake tools (like chimpanzees ).  In fact, I would expect that some early human traces would have a sort of dubious quality to them, where they just don't stand out enough from the background to be conclusively recognized. As I went down the Google Scholar rabbit hole looking up papers on the sites from my last post, I stumbled onto the fascinating world of automatic identification of tool marks on bones.  I've known about this new field for a while, but reading about some of the recent applications really grabbed my attention.  The techniques are fairly straightforward.  Researcher...
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Where did we come from?

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One of the perennially annoying things about the "historical Adam" discussion is theologians' obsession with Homo sapiens .  I've tried to explain on more than one occasion that looking for Adam at the base of the sapiens family tree is basically looking in the wrong place.  Other than William Lane Craig, I can't think of a single theistic evolutionist actively placing Adam deeper in the human family tree. For myself, I follow creationist research that extends back thirty years and indicates that Homo erectus is also human (probably some others too, but they have less evidence so I'll stick to erectus ).  There are lots of different reasons that creationists see things this way, including the sophisticated stone handaxes associated with erectus , the postcranial skeleton of Nariokotome boy, and the remarkable global mobility of these ancient people.  Homo erectus is the first hominin in the fossil record that's found in Europe, Asia, and Africa. If you ...
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Does Lucy Prove Evolution?

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 Last year was the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of the Lucy skeleton, and Paul Garner and I recorded a two-part episode of Let's Talk Creation discussing the skeleton and its interpretation ( part 1 and part 2 ).  In the second part, I tried to address the question of whether the Lucy skeleton constituted good evidence for human evolution, and even while I explained it to Paul, I thought, "This is not clear.  I'm going to get flak for this."  And sure enough, there were a few comments on the YouTube video that basically said my response was rubbish.  Fair enough.  Let's see if I can clarify my thoughts. My intention with that section of the video was first to notice that it's a massively loaded question.  As a scientist, I think about evidence and models in ways that aren't like the average person.  An average person hears "X is good evidence for a theory" as "X proves that theory is true."  Evidence, in common conception, is...
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Persuasion, Pluralism, Perseverance

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Let's Talk Creation debuted its 100th episode recently with a recording of the Creation Together event from last summer.  The episode presents a public meeting with me and Darrel Falk describing our relationship and differences and where things currently stand.  You might have read about this in our book The Fool and the Heretic .  Whenever we have an event like this or advertise what we've been doing, I always feel like the complexity and challenges of what we've done get reduced by the listeners to easy categories they're familiar with.  With those reductions come reactions that sort of cluster around one of two extremes: excitement or condemnation.  I'm always left feeling like people don't quite get it.  So let me see if I can put my thoughts into words, which will undoubtedly be misunderstood yet again, but I'll give it my best try. As usual, let me preface this by reminding readers that this is my own perspective, not Darrel's nor anyone else in...
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