Chapter 3 – Osteometrics of the Past - How to Get a Date

How to Get a Date

Prior to 1856 there is documented evidence of ancient bone and artifact finds. Westerners who were doing much if not all of the documentation were biased by religious beliefs and lacked methods to accurately date the material they were reviewing. Given these conditions I will remind the reader once again of Ussher’s dating process. Ussher used ambiguous information from the Bible, a suspect source for accurate scientific information and astronomical conditions. Ussher had reduced all of evolution to roughly 4000 years. Darwin who used things such as geological stratification had placed the date roughly 6 orders of magnitude greater. However, Kelvin the noted physicist showed with science of the time that Darwin was wrong. Dubois became a noted recluse over the dating of his fossils and perhaps what we find is the Biblical myth and Ussher are the most accurate of them all.

Certainly I do not believe that evolutionary origins began 4000 years ago. Significant scientific evidence exists to support a planet that has been around for more than 40 billion years. Furthermore, good scientific data demonstrates that animals have been on the Earth for eons far before the dinosaur. Man is only a recent addition to that evolutionary process. At best we have skeletal remains of Lucy. She has been well dated to 3.4 million years. But we have to ask the question is she human at all. The old model of evolution was based on limited understanding of human physiology and anatomy. Blumenbach as far back as the late 1700’s had done a wonderful job noting the differences in those on the planet at the time. It took a Darwin supporter like Huxley to realize the importance of the Neandertal find and he referred to him as an archaic form of human. So what is the origin? Osteomorphologically there are some differences between Lucy and present day Homo Sapien Sapiens.

Lucy is getting too far ahead of the story. Let us return for a moment to Genesis. God gave man domination over all other animals and invoked him to speak. With sin God made man unable to understand the speech of all other animals. Here is where the ancient Biblical myth meets Classical Greek Philosophy. Having dominion over other animals came because man was the favorite of all Gods creations. Clearly, the myth here is placing emphasis on the ability to represent abstraction with language. Language provides us the ability to reflect on past deeds, represent notions of the present and suggest thoughts on the future. This temporal understanding allows present day hominids to store food for bad times. It allows us to alter our environment for better living conditions. Our language enhances our life. Is that what makes us human?

If language makes us human, then it stands to reason that cranial capacity is the process that enables it to occur. Therefore it stands to reason the greater the intellectual ability or the ability to represent abstractions with words, the greater the dominion the individual will have over his environment. But language is more than the representation of thought with uttered sounds. Repeated studies have demonstrated apes and other animals communicate. The communications of these lesser order animals is more than location, and security. These communications are as complex as tool construction and problem solving. Apes transmit information such as emotions and social structure. More over research also suggests that these language processes are not limited to humans and primates but extend to animals such as Elephants, whales and even Horses and to varying degrees alligators. Science is even demonstrated that we can interpret the language and communicate with these animals to some degree. Walker makes the issue in his text that language by itself does not create humanness. More over the complexity of the language does not necessarily represent the level of the order of the animal. Reminding you of the section in this book the Right to Kill, we have in the past claimed our right by articulation. So we still must question what makes us human. The answer to this question explains why I think Ussher may have been the most correct of all.

The conundrum of determining humanness ranges from distinguishing humans from other classes of animals as well as stratification of human beings even within the Homo Sapien Sapiens classification. I believe recorded history has repeatedly demonstrated that racial classification has been the litmus test for this degree of humanness in the past. Keep in mind racial taxonomy has not always been limited to skin coloration and gross phenotypic differences. In the period that ranges from the pre-Middle Ages up to the American migration and economic ascendance of people from Ireland, the Celts were referred to as a race. Unlike the classification of matter which as continually grown into a more granulated specification process, racial classification has been reduced to a collective origin process. People from Ireland are in America grouped indistinguishably with people from England. Despite knowing through clearly recorded history that the people of England maintain Anglo-Saxon origins while the people of Ireland maintain origins of Celtic classification, we now group these two sets as both being white. An anthropological evaluation of these two groups through language studies demonstrates tremendous differences of the people. To the trained eye, the osteomorpholgy of these people is significantly different. Without a formal education in forensics even I can see the increased triangulation of an Anglo-Saxon face when compared to the rounder Celtic face. Furthermore, the mental eminence (chin bone) of the Anglo-Saxon is much more outwardly visible than reduced chin of Celts from Ireland, Scotland or even France. Interestingly enough the ostemorpholigical terminology alone – mental eminence – suggests a level of humanness based on intellectual abilities. As we see from this term alone, past ostemorphology correlated intellect, subsequently the articulation of abstraction, with phenotype. From a biochemical standpoint, if the research of Charles Murray is correct, this phenotypic classification has merit. Murry claims in his book The Bell Curve, that roughly 85 percent of intellectual ability is inherited. The Intellectual Quotient of an individual can only be modified by 15 percent based on environment. If in fact, the genome that creates an extended pointed chin is the same as the genome of the more intellectually gifted individual, then one could infer from the size and shape of the mental eminence the biochemical make up of the brain encased in that skull. Oddly enough the person responsible for creating intellectual testing (IQ and the Spearman g-factor) maintains the same sir name as myself – Spearman. Ironically Spearman was from Ireland not England.

Documentation prior to Blumenbach used the word race to discuss phenotypic differences based on much more subtle nuances than we use today. Seemingly if we review the OMB definition of race we see the classification process really has not changed since the ancient tribes of pre-recorded history. Recorded history from before the first century AD clearly demonstrates that people delineated races using phenotype. They used phenotype because the phenotype was indicative of relatively recent origins of isolation of those groups. This concept returns us the Center Edge Theory of the earlier discussion. The question still at hand is when did the isolated group have its origins. Is it the origin of the isolation of the group? Or is it the extended origins of the founders of the group before the isolation.

So what is the date of our origins? Perhaps Ussher is more correct than Dubois and other anthropologists after him. Perhaps the date of origins is roughly 4000 years ago. This position may seem counter intuitive to my discussions on Neandertal and Homo erectus but the thought is more complex. We must first define origin before we can determine the value of that origin. Following the fossil record back to the prosimian cross over point does not ensure that we have returned to our origins. We have recorded within this book that ancient understandings of origins were based on phenotype because phenotype was associated with isolation. However, there is another element that results from isolation. That element is culture. Since the OMB specifically stated (I believe technically incorrectly) that race is not associated with phenotype, then we should place our understanding of origins on culture. The culture has long been understood as a level of humanness, an extension of the intellectual ability of the group. As we will continue to see obtaining proper dates of our origins is more than the superficial obfuscations of radioactive, and thermal luminescent dating of the physical objects and bones. We must first understand the profundity of the word origins when it comes to understanding humanity.