What is the current theistic explanation for archaic human fossils?

[DeMotts]

There's quite a body of fossils that exist that illustrate a variety of archaic humans, from australopithecines to Homo rhodesiensis, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo naledi, Homo ergaster, Homo antecessor, and Homo habilis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_h ... on_fossils

For the theistic anti-evolutionists on the board: how do you explain such a variety of human fossils? What are australopithecines? How do they fit in with the creation story of the bible? Do you believe these fossils are legitimate or forgeries?

[EarthScienceguy]

[Replying to DrNoGods in post #138]

I was pointing out (post 106) that many (most) things on Earth are not "dirt", and you respond with a list of things that have water in them! How about a list of things that have "dirt" in them? That would be more relevant if you can show that most/all things on Earth are made of this substance. Of the liquid stuff that fills the oceans, what percentage of it is dirt?

What? I am not understanding why you are saying this. Dirt is nothing more than weathered rock. Everything on this planet is made from dirt. Dirt is rock and rock is dirt.

[EarthScienceguy]

[Replying to DrNoGods in post #139]

Only in degree when it comes to intelligence. My dog is intelligent compared to a goldfish, but not compared to a human. Homo erectus was evidently smarter than my dog, but not as smart as Neanderthals. It is our degree of intelligence (or capacity for it) that sets us apart as far as intelligence in animals, but that fact alone does not make us "different" in any other special way.

How are you quantifying intelligence? There is no consensus on how to quantify intelligence. The goldfish can do things that the dog cannot do. Bees do some miraculous things.

With continued visual experience, honeybees can learn to use non-elemental processing, including configural mechanisms and rule learning, and can access top-down information to enhance learning of sophisticated, novel visual tasks. Honeybees can learn delayed-matching-to-sample tasks and the rules governing this decision making, and even transfer learned rules between different sensory modalities. Finally, bees can learn complex categorisation tasks and display numerical processing abilities for numbers up to and including four. Taken together, this evidence suggests that bees do have a capacity for sophisticated visual behaviours that fit a definition for cognition, and thus simple elemental models of bee vision need to take account of how a variety of factors may influence the type of results one may gain from animal behaviour experiments.

https://journals.biologists.com/jeb/art ... f-bees-why

So are bees intelligent? What is intelligence?

A Homo sapien from 200K years ago may well have had the capacity to learn just as much as we do today if it had an identical brain, but human knowledge was so limited they'd never pass a 6th grade math test. This doesn't mean they were less intelligent ... just not able to utilize the capacity they had for learning because so little was known in subject areas we consider indicative of requiring "intelligence" today (complex language, math, science, biology, etc.), and no ability to disseminate knowledge beyond word of mouth.

How are you quantifying intelligence? That is the problem. The bee can do things that humans cannot do. Does that make them more intelligent?

Does a larger brain make something more intelligent?

Using a large dataset and controlling for a variety of factors, including sex, age, height, socioeconomic status, and genetic ancestry, scientists found that people with larger brains rated higher on measures of intelligence and educational attainment. Size was far from everything, however, explaining only about two percent of the variation in smarts. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... attainment.

[DrNoGods]

[Replying to EarthScienceguy in post #151]

Everything on this planet is made from dirt.

So all the water in the oceans is actually dirt? The word "everything" includes ... well ... everything. This all started with your claim that humans are made of "dirt." That is what I am challenging.

[EarthScienceguy]

[Replying to DrNoGods in post #147]

I think you were the one that asked this question. I pulled it out because I thought it was a good question.

I've only been trying to find out what you define as sufficient intelligence to consider something "human", and if you only consider Homo sapiens to be human. No answers yet, so I'll ask again ... what level of intelligence do you require to allow something to be called human? You must have some criteria.

This is an evolutionary question, not a creationist question. A creationist would consider this question to be a morphological question. Which fossil species would be considered a modern man or even a neanderthal? Because creationists consider neanderthals to be modern humans that were created in the likeness of God. Your question assumes an increase in intelligence over time. Some creationists would consider man's cognitive ability to have decreased over time because of the fall. Although I would say that would be hard to prove through observation.

So there is no level of intelligence because man was created with probably more cognitive ability than we have today.

[DrNoGods]

[Replying to EarthScienceguy in post #152]

How are you quantifying intelligence? That is the problem.

It's not a problem ... it is the very point I am making! Intelligence covers a wide range from low to high and everything in between. Just because birds and bees can fly and my dog can't, has nothing to do with their relative intelligence levels. Oxford Languages defines intelligence as "the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills." So having a higher level of intelligence would mean a greater ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills, and a lower level of intelligence would mean a lesser ability.

Modern Homo sapiens are highly intelligent as a group, but a typical human walking around today knows a lot more than a Homo sapien from 200K years ago because of the accumulation of knowledge over that time and the ability to disseminate it widely. So while we may be "smarter" now than 200K years ago, we may not have more capacity to learn than the earliest Homo sapiens if their brain was morphologically the same.

Part of this thread has concerned using intelligence level to determine whether something could qualify as "human" or not. IQ tests attempt to measure intelligence level, but the results depend on the nature of the questions and problems presented. Obviously, a Homo sapien from 200K years ago could not attempt a modern IQ test because they could not even read the material, and a completely different method of testing would be required to estimate their level of intelligence. All we can do today is make estimates from artifacts left behind (tools, etc.), and from measurements of brain case volume and other information that can be inferred from analysis of their fossils.

[DrNoGods]

[Replying to EarthScienceguy in post #154]

So there is no level of intelligence because man was created with probably more cognitive ability than we have today.

I suppose that is the creationist's view, but science tells us that humans evolved over several million years from a great ape ancestor, and we can measure a general increase in brain volume over time coinciding with more complicated tool use, structure building, hunting and food preparation advances, etc. Putting 2 and 2 together implies that along the evolutionary path intelligence levels did increase over time.

But the accumulation of knowledge and the ability to disseminate it widely is what has allowed us to advance from a Homo sapien of 200K years ago to the humans of today. The 200K years old version may well have had roughly the same intellectual capacity as we have today ... but had an infinitely smaller knowledge base to draw on to educate the population. So you have to distinguish between raw intelligence capacity, and accumulated knowledge.

[Clownboat]

Remember post 94 (and 122) where I asked and you refused to respond?:
Neanderthals have contributed approximately 1-4% of the genomes of non-African modern humans, although a modern human who lived about 40,000 years ago has been found to have between 6-9% Neanderthal DNA
What is a theistic explanation for this?

[Difflugia]

Well, if someone is going to go with this "higher IQ = human" thing, then an obvious question is....is a newborn baby a "human"? If so, what's it's IQ?

If "newborn" means the moment of its birth, then infinite.

Newborns are superhuman. They're gods. Checkmate, evolutionists.

[EarthScienceguy]

[Replying to DrNoGods in post #153]

So all the water in the oceans is actually dirt? The word "everything" includes ... well ... everything. This all started with your claim that humans are made of "dirt." That is what I am challenging.

Yes, I know so if there is water in dirt than yes humans could be made of dirt just like the Bible says and there is no need for the water in the oceans.

[DeMotts]

[Replying to DrNoGods in post #153]

So all the water in the oceans is actually dirt? The word "everything" includes ... well ... everything. This all started with your claim that humans are made of "dirt." That is what I am challenging.

Yes, I know so if there is water in dirt than yes humans could be made of dirt just like the Bible says and there is no need for the water in the oceans.

But clearly humans are at least 80% "not dirt"