old greek dude [ Evolution ]

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pilvikki
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old greek dude [ Evolution ]

Post by pilvikki »

and I mean, really, really old!

http://www.ancient-origins.net/human-or ... ory-001283

now, I can't in any way understand the way scientists think, nor how governments function, so I cannot for my life figure out what the friggin' big deal is here. one would think that new discoveries be happily accepted and discussed. you'd think the greek government would cheerfully embrace the conclusion of people originally having popped up in the greek mountains instead of Africa?

did they expect the 46 to just forget about the whole thing?

I don't get it.
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yogi
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Re: old greek dude

Post by yogi »

I read page one of the comments following the article, and that took nearly an hour to digest. The read is very in depth and reveals clearly how scientists think and come to conclusions. There are two main arguments in the comments. One is the classic question, "where did we come from?" There is the Out Of Africa group who feel all humanity originated in Africa and spread out from there. The opposing group says humanity sprang up in multiple places. The second argument, which is more of a paradox than an argument, centers around why the Greek government is against research into the matter. Neither question was answered, but the speculations are very interesting.

I'll let the experts figure out our origins, but I have some suspicions about why the government in Greece closed down the research. Until relatively recent times all things that were worth knowing were in the heads of religious leaders. They were in fact the only educated people for a long time. The Greeks, being Christian to an Orthodox degree, have a major stake in preserving the knowledge of their ancestors. Uncovering the truth would undermine credibility of religious based knowledge, and thus it's easy to see why attempts to find scientific evidence would be suppressed. There are economic reasons to support the attention received by such investigations, but I'm thinking religious beliefs trump science in this case. I'm just very surprised to see that Medieval kind of thinking still going on in the 21st century.
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Re: old greek dude

Post by Icey »

There's a huge amount of information to digest there, but I tend to agree with what Yogi's put.

My personal feeling is that it's wrong to suggest that all humanity originated in Africa. I could give a few examples of why, but suffice it to say, if we DID spring up in multiple places, it answers some questions as to why we should look so different (facial features and the colour of our skin, etc), but also leaves the big question of not only where we came from, but why and how.

We know from skeletal remains that some people were "giants", and some had mis-shapen or elongated skulls. At the moment, we can only surmise, but to get back to the topic, I agree with Yogi that you can see why the Greeks might want any evidence of knowledge of their ancestors suppressing.
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Re: old greek dude

Post by pilvikki »

fb has taught me to shun comments, so I didn't even realize the article carried on. when I went back to look at things, I saw that one could indeed dig very deeply into that subject.

and the comments I read were perfectly reasonable, even the irate ones presented in a polite enough manner.

amazing!

but like yogi said, there didn't seem any logical explanation to the handling of the case. all the school books are following the out of Africa model? so what? for almost 2000 years we followed the 'out of eve' theory before that was dealt with.
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Re: old greek dude

Post by Kellemora »

Oh my, going back SEVERAL CENTURIES when I was in SKEWL, we had this teacher we nicknamed Pyro, after he had a few explosive incidents in the lab.
He was a science teacher, not a chemistry teacher, but loved to mess around in the lab after school.

One of his hobbies was a scientific approach to history, and he came up with some of the wildest things.
If he said some of the things today he said to us back then, they would have him behind bars or strung up.

He was certain he figured out the source of every nationality on earth, where they began and how.
He did not believe in either creationism or evolution as being independent studies, he saw them as one in the same argument, just in different time periods of focus.
His argument was simply, everything had to have an unknown beginning from nothingness. What happened long after nothing became something is his field of endeavor.
Even back then, he said there is no way something can change from one thing to something else, it will always be the same entity and over time develop minor changes due to influences imposed on the entity.

One of his views about man was there have always been distinct features allocated to the different races. There is no proof or valid conjecture that man evolved from animal, fish did not become mammals, etc. All races of men appeared abruptly and possibly all around the same time. How that took place is not of my concern. What I am interested in is how each race developed over time to the present day.

Evolutionist fell for the Piltdown man hoax hook line and sinker. Some still refer to this hoax as being factual.
The Nebraska Man turned out to be nothing more than a tooth from a Pig.
Ramapithecus is what many believed to be the missing link. Turned out to be an Orangutan.
Both Australopithecus africanus and robustus were simply an evolutionary dead end - not ancestral to man. They were a Chimpanzee and Gorilla.

This brings us to Lucy, A. africansis, still a tree climbing ape. Lucy's role as a "missing link" between chimps and humans is unfounded. Many more differences between humans and apes are found with each examination.

Once they found the species Homo erectus, and noted the differences, many more skeletons have been found. Turkana Boy, Peking Man, Upper Cave Man, Java Man, etc.

Neanderthal Man is one evolutionists like to use in an attempt to prove their side of the story. Trouble with this is, there are no present day offspring from the Neanderthal race to compare mtDNA to see whether Neanderthal Man was really human or was actually an ape. Neanderthal became a dead end.

I got too carried away here, and will have to continue tomorrow with the things our old teacher Pyro came up with. Ironically, some of the things he told has been proven in recent years as more accurate than what evolution teaches.
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Re: old greek dude

Post by yogi »

The arguments in the article's comments come from people with much more expertise than I'll ever have. They say the ties between the species are genetic. It's easy enough to trace it all back to a common source. 28% of Native Americans happen to have segments of Neanderthal genes, and such genes are spread out around the world in various proportions. It''s not difficult to see what happened at the DNA level. Among scientists there is no question about evolution. It's a demonstrable fact. The question seems to be whether it all started in Africa or not. Apparently the Greek government has a reason to not find out, and I'm guessing it's a theological agenda.
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Re: old greek dude

Post by Icey »

I should say so as well.

As for us all starting out in Africa, no, I don't believe it.

Neanderthal man was widely distributed, and so when countries and continents were closer together or joined up, it's not surprising that we find traces of the same DNA all over the world, but if humans've all evolved from the same source, then we'd all share similar characteristics. We don't, except for basic ones in that we all have the same amount of limbs, 2 eyes, 2 ears and so on.
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Re: old greek dude

Post by pilvikki »

but now the latest I've read is that Neanderthals were history and died out without any links to us. (although looking at a few people...?)

what i'd like to know is why we all have such very distinctly different features if we all sprung from - say lucy?

I school I was told the dark pigment and curly hair was to protect from the sun.

REALLY?

that makes no sense, for said curls were black and we all know better that to slap on a black hat in the midday sun! curly hair would also get tangled in the jungle, yes?

meanwhile, the people in the north could have used the thick, curly and black mop to protect from the cold winds...

and then.... the "yellow" people? what advantages would that bring compared to a blue/green undertone?

the Zulu are fairly tall people, same as the dutch. the pigmies not so much. for no obvious reason again.
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Re: old greek dude

Post by Icey »

Surprisingly, dark pigmented skin IS better protected from the sun than pale skin because of the eumelanin in it, but equally as strange is that people with dark skin're liable to get skin cancer more than their pale counterparts. Those with dark skin're going to be generally blessed with dark hair (unless they're albinos). Perhaps the tight curls help to prevent the sun's rays from penetrating to the scalp so easily? In other words, it's not so much the colour of their hair, but the texture.

Originally, perhaps tribes living in the jungle were also born with dark skin to camouflage them? It can be very dark under the canopy of forests, and, just like animals, might it been a way of hiding them from opposing tribes or predators?

It's something we'll probably never know, but by the time Neanderthals disappeared, it's quite possible that they'd bred with humans. They weren't as backward as some'd have them made out, since they devised types of calendars, had burial rituals and made cave drawings.

There must've been other species, because if we all come from the same stock, when Neanderthal man went, we'd have ALL gone - or left a few ... Neanderthals.

As Gary said, I think everything had, and has, its own place on the earth. I don't think we came from fish, and I don't think we came from monkeys, but I'm not against the idea of evolution in single species.
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Re: old greek dude

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I closed with Neanderthal being a dead end, because there is no mtDNA associations between living humans and the Neanderthals.

I also got way off-track of where I attempted to go when talking about old Pyro.

Climate had little to no bearing on the development of the races.
As I said previously, he is neither creationist nor evolutionist, mainly because of the data he has studied, there really is no missing link between species because there is none to find.

His study was more concerned with how the different races came about.
Did they develop these traits through mutations, or evolving naturally within the human race over time.

The key points he loved to talk about had little to do with origins and how people changed over time, and more about how he could prove such was not the case.
There are two reasons he does not want to follow the unproven evolutionary trails is it would place different races on different levels along the evolutionary time line.
The other reason is all races appear to have their origins within the same time time period.

He won't argue about what creatures came first, middle, or last, because he claims nobody knows for certain.
Was man here from the beginning along with all the other creatures, or did they come later. If they did come later, this becomes a whole other field of study, outside of what he is attempting to prove.

One thing he says to disprove evolution is simply, why did our most ancient known peoples quit evolving, and stay stuck with the bone structures they still present to this day?

He always tried not to discriminate against any race, by placing them on an equal plane with all other races, by saying they all appeared within the same time period. But if you were to look at it from an evolutionary point of view, why have the indigenous African population not evolved in bone structure when everyone else did?
For the simple reason evolution is not how man developed.

Evolutionists used the shape of skulls to claim the chain of evolution over thousands of years.
Yet there is no change in skull shape over the many millennium in any species. Each species has a unique and unchanging build. It is demoralizing to say humans came from apes, because in so doing, they must place an African on an early evolutionary scale. The shape of the skull falls between ape and human, but much closer to human of course.
But then you have to ask, where are the skulls between those of apes and those of other human races? There are none because there never were any. Each race is unique, and all of roughly the same age from an unknown point of origin.

He was most fascinated with the Oriental and Australian peoples than with Europeans.
Many believe the Europeans were first, while he believes everyone started at the same time.
He also thinks that within that same time period when humans developed on the earth, however that may have been, that Orientals were slightly ahead of the Europeans, but still within the same time period.

Today's science has pretty much proven the Aborigines moved from Africa to Australia, because they find no Polynesian DNA. However, he believes they do have their roots in Oriental or Asian origins. Too many features of the Aborigines align with Orientals, and too few features with an African heritage. And perhaps they were there from the time period when everyone else appeared too.

Remember he is usually talking about early eras, the dawn of man, not in what may have happened after humans began to migrate from one area of land to another. Once that happened, everything changed, and only confuses the issue of who was where first or when did they get there. All he is interested in is how the races were formed, and to disprove they came about through evolution.

As an aside, he also tries to disprove creationism, even though he finds everything must have had a beginning, something from nothing. But whatever is causing creation is not a one time event, it is ongoing, and has not yet ceased. It could be by something we call God, or it could be by natural forces we have not yet discovered, and if by natural forces, those forces are still in affect and still creating, within time frames or cycles longer than a thousand of our generations.

How does a molten mass hurled into space suddenly have plantlife, then suddenly have fishes, birds, and mammals. The time frame is not long enough for evolution to be the answer, nor is there a single shred of evidence to support such a theory. If creation is the answer, where did the creator come from? Something from nothing is more likely a natural event that took place due to who knows what. Nothing rubbing against nothing created a spark? Some day we will know more, or maybe we will never know. But some day, the cycle with appear again, and we will have something new on our planet that was not here before. Evolutionists will claim an evolutionary warp, religious fanatics will claim their creator has come, and everyone else will just take things day to day as they have since the beginning of time.
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Re: old greek dude

Post by Icey »

Well .... as for Neanderthals, In December 2013, scientists reported, for the first time, a high coverage genome of a Neanderthal in a bone that was just 50,000 years old.

Then you get this: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014 ... -on-humans

I think that humans've evolved intellectually, if not physically, but I don't think that we all came from the same beginnings. It looks as though you're right about Aborigines hailing from Africa though, because of DNA testing in 2013 on a hair which was donated quite a few years ago, and which pointed to the connection.

However, how did these primitive people travel thousands of miles across the ocean and arrive at Australia? Apparently, water's always separated the 2 continents, and it's a feat that even by today's standards'd be hard to emulate (using the same materials for boats as would've been used back then).

I feel that we'll never know for sure, or at least until science fully understands all genome sequencing.
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Re: old greek dude

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Personally, I never studied or got into those kinds of things. But when you are in a class with a teacher who makes it his obsession, and talks about it continually, it can be interesting.
Nobody ever thought he was very accurate in his theories, but those who tried to prove him wrong, never found anything that would.

One problem with RNA and DNA is it breaks down rapidly, so technically is impossible to extract from anything over lets say 10 thousand years old, although they claim to have had some success with preserved bones from 50 thousand years ago. Not very long ago compared to the earths age and first humans.

I did read a book once about the development of the food chain. Although it made some sense, it overlooked some important things, such as the needs and requirements for certain plants which can only come from animal sources.
I don't remember now what specific plants were mentioned that cannot thrive without nutrients only available from animals. Did learn of some that parasites were necessary for them to replicate, which pretty much proved things came about in very quick succession, not spread too far apart.

In our modern era, we know beneficial plants can be rapidly choked out by weeds. Or worded another way, plants providing food for animals can be overcome by weeds, or die if not trimmed by animals feeding on them.
Dinosaurs could be the goats of the world, devouring the overabundance of plant life, keeping things thinned out enough so plant life did not become self-destructive. It seems there is a harmony to everything, and when disrupted, things go from bad to worse real fast.

I know from working with aquatic life, certain fish can live in 600 ppm nitrate water with no problems, but you cannot introduce a fish from low ppm nitrates to that environment, it will kill them within hours.
We know from the poison vents in the ocean floor that some species have not only adapted, but live in an environment that is deadly to all else. They can no longer survive outside that deadly environment. So their are physical changes which do take place over time to allow same. It is still not evolution, as they did not change their species, they only adapted over time to the environment they live in. Yet none of their organs are different than their counterparts in other safe environments, so what gives?

It will be interesting to learn how things really came about. All theories are probably wrong, hi hi...
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Re: old greek dude

Post by Icey »

You're right Gary. Theories are no more than that, and can't be proved 100% accurate even when everything points to the science being correct.

It's natural in today's world that people want to find an answer for everything, but outside of the small boxes, they open into very big ones. We know more than we did in the past, and yet basically know very little at all.

I'd like to see pieces of the jigsaw fit properly. I'm as curious about origins as anyone else, but perhaps we'll never know because we're not MEANT to know - or certainly not in this life, anyway.
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Re: old greek dude

Post by Kellemora »

Someone on another website brought up something most interesting.

"Why is it people think such complex life forms such as people evolved from animals, when there is no evidence of evolution in lesser complex life forms. Plants, insects, fish, birds, etc. each are missing the link from one species to another. It is only logical that if evolution exists, it would be seen in all life forms long before being found in more complex life forms. After all Cockroaches have never changed."


Made sense to me!
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Re: old greek dude

Post by Icey »

Makes sense to me as well. Humans're humans. Animals're animals - and so it goes on.

When I speak of insects and other creatures showing signs of having evolved, they have in a way - to suit habitats and feeding habits - but the basic thing remains as it's always been.
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Re: old greek dude

Post by pilvikki »

what about that bit about an embryo going through all the stages of it's parent's evolution? sprouting people sure look like we once were tadpoles and chickens...
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Re: old greek dude

Post by Icey »

I'm not quite with you on that. OK., so embryonic cells are just a mass of division once they've been fertilized - by the tadpoles, LOL! - but it's not evolution in the sense that it's going to turn into a kitten. Human embryos're going to turn into human babies, and kitten embryos into eventual cats.
This is what Gary's saying - that he doesn't think that humans evolved from apes or anything but humans, and I agree with that. Apes and whatever else're separate species.
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Re: old greek dude

Post by Kellemora »

A Tadpole sprouting legs and moving to land as a Toad, is NOT evolution, it is the natural life cycle for that creature.

It's not a Fish turning into a Mammal.

Almost all of the example in Darwin's early studies turned out to be the natural life cycle of the species he originally misclassified as different species.
As our ability to test things like RNA, DNA, mtDNA, etc. increases, we are finding many mistakes on the taxonomic tables and making corrections to them.

To the best of my knowledge, without doing some heavy research, I don't think there has been a single instance where a link between two species has ever been found, at any level. Many mutations have been discovered, but no change of genre.

TTUL
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Re: old greek dude

Post by Icey »

Human and chimp DNA's 96% the same, so we're very similar, BUT, chimps are chimps and we are human. I don't know why some people insist that we all came from something else!
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pilvikki
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Re: old greek dude

Post by pilvikki »

well, here's an interesting theory:

http://higherperspective.com/2015/02/sp ... o&ts_pid=2
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