They Weren’t So Stupid, After All

The scientific world got a shock recently when archaeologists discovered cave art that could only have been made by Neanderthal people. Although their brains were actually a little larger than our own, it was Settled Science that Neanderthals were “primitive.”

But that’s nothing!

Now they’ve got art that was produced by Homo erectus–known as the “Java ape-man” when I was a boy–and it’s knocked a lot of settled theories for a loop (https://www.livescience.com/48991-homo-erectus-shell-tools.html).

What we’ve got is fossil clam shells with abstract designs carved on them, dated to 540,000 to 430,000 years ago. Young Earthers, stay with me: there is not supposed to be any such thing as Homo erectus art, no matter what the age.

So… what was Homo erectus? An ape-man? A missing link? Here’s a skeleton:

This was once a 12-year-old boy in East Africa, now known as “the Lake Turkana boy.” In life he would’ve been on his way to six feet tall–no stooped, crouching ape-man here. From the neck down, only an expert can tell that this is not a modern human skeleton. But the head is shaped differently from ours.

Were these people, or something else? It wasn’t so long ago that Western scientists were debating whether modern Africans were people. It’s like, they’ve gotta look like us or they’re not human. You could find a carved ivory chess set clutched in the skeleton hands of a deceased Homo erectus, and some still wouldn’t accept him as human.

As for, “Well, Homo erectus simply Evolved into more modern forms of pre-humans, until finally the real human threshold was reached”–fap! There were erectus men and women living at the same time as “modern” humans and really “primitive” characters like little-bitty Homo habilis.

So now we’ve got erectus art. Never mind the dating: it makes certain persons uncomfortable.

But I think it’s cool!