A Timely Article Proving My Point

MY COMMENTARY ON THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE:   I found this article online recently, and it pertained exactly to what my previous post discussed.  October is obviously the month of "delving into our origins" on this blog ;).  Here's what I found fascinating about the article:  SO.... 75,000 YEARS AGO, our ancestors were already infinitely more advanced intellectually than even the most "evolved" animal today. They formed tools using sophisticated techniques, and created jewelry and art. We were HUMAN, and far and away different than animals. 2.6 MILLION years ago - before homo sapiens, in the prehistory before the human body was even fully developed in the form it is today, our ancestors were making stone tools, in the Oldowan Industry. So even multiple MILLIONS of years ago, our lineage demonstrated more intellect than even the next most intelligent animal then OR today. We are DIFFERENT from animals, even if our bodies evolved over time in ways similar to other animals. Chimpanzees (sharing greater than 98% of our own DNA) might today be able to take a rock and and bash something with it, and science might call that the use of "tools", but there's vast difference between that and fashioning a tool for a specific purpose, using multiple-step techniques, and then sharing those techniques with others and handing down the knowledge. How far back do we have to go to believe that we are "mere" animals? This is not arrogance. It is objective fact. We bear the image and likeness of God, and were made by a Creator. Evolution might give us a glimpse of HOW our bodies changed over time, HOW God used the natural processes He set in motion to mold and shape us. But on it's best day, it cannot even begin to explain (although it tries) why we are so fundamentally different and MORE than animals. To me, this parallels closely each individual's own human development. We begin as a single cell, a gift from our father and mother united. That single cell multiplies, morphs, changes. At first it looks nothing like the human it is going to become. It looks like a blob. Then a lizard. Then an animal. But it is still a HUMAN. It becomes more and more complex, it's capacity grows, such that when it is born, the newborn infant is the world's most sophisticated unprogrammed computer. A baby may not SEEM intelligent, but all the potential is there - it just needs to grow, and experience the world. Eventually the baby transitions from all fours to upright, learns language, written communication. It is no less human as a single cell than it is as a full-grown adult. Did we evolve from monkey's? I think not. Did we evolve from human predecessors, and did our bodies change over millenia to make them what they are today? I believe so. And yet, we always were what we were meant to become --- human. Regardless of what we looked like.   Separate and unique because we were created in the image and likeness of God Himself. 
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EARLY HUMANS' WEAPON-MAKING SKILLS SHARPER THAN EXPECTED
Livescience.com

A delicate, sophisticated way to craft sharp weapons from stone apparently was developed by humans more than 50,000 years sooner than had been thought.  The finding could shed light on what knowledge people were armed with when they started migrating out of Africa.

The artful technique is known as pressure flaking. Early weapons' makers typically would use hard blows from a stone hammer to give another stone a rough blade-like shape, then would use wood or bone implements to carve out relatively small flakes, refining the blade's edge and tip.

When done right, pressure flaking can provide a high degree of control over the sharpness, thickness and overall shape of sharp tools such as spearheads and stone knives, said researcher Paola Villa, an archaeologist at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History.

Pressure flaking has long been considered a fairly recent innovation, with the earliest examples seen roughly 20,000 years ago in the Solutrean culture in France and Spain. Now, however, researchers say Blombos Cave in South Africa yielded what seem to be 75,000-year-old spearheads made by anatomically modern humans using pressure flaking.
"We did not expect to find evidence of this very skillful method for shaping and retouching stone artifacts at such an early time," Villa told LiveScience.
In addition to these sharp points, the site yielded other evidence of modern human behavior, such as artwork in the form of shell beads. These are all linked to the so-called Still Bay industry, a Middle Stone Age tool-manufacturing style that was adopted roughly 76,000 years ago and may have lasted about 4,000 years.
"This finding is important because it shows that modern humans in South Africa had a sophisticated repertoire of toolmaking techniques at a very early time," Villa said. "This innovation is a clear example of a tendency to develop new functional ideas and devices. It adds to the complex of novel behaviors already documented at the site, and shows that the Still Bay was a time when novel ideas and techniques were rapidly developed."
The stone points were made of silcrete, or quartz grains cemented by silica, which needs to be heat-treated before pressure flaking. To confirm that was how the newfound artifacts were made, Villa and her colleagues analyzed microscopic details of 159 silcrete points and fragments, 179 other retouched pieces and more than 700 flakes in Blombos Cave from the Still Bay industry.
The removal of flakes from unheated silcrete produces scar surfaces with a rough, dull texture. However, the surfaces of silcrete that was treated with heat have a smooth, glossy appearance. The researchers concluded that at least half of the ancient, finished points at Blombos Cave involved pressure flaking with heat-treated silcrete.
The scientists also experimentally crafted stone points using both heated and non-heated silcrete chunks collected from outcrops roughly 20 miles (32 km) from Blombos Cave. They found that unheated chunks could not be pressure flaked, while blocks of heated silcrete yielded points very much like the ones discovered.
Villa and her colleagues speculate that pressure flaking was invented in Africa and proved crucial to survival when Homo sapiens migrated from the continent about 60,000 years ago, leading to the technique's widespread adoption in Europe, Australia, North America and later Africa.
"More technological studies like ours, based on experimental replication, microscopic studies and detailed analysis of stone artifacts, supported by statistics, should be applied to other archaeological assemblages in South Africa and in other regions," Villa said. "It is important to understand if there are precursors or antecedents in older industries. It is also important to understand if the method was used in the following period — that is, on the backed blades of the Howiesons Poort, a South African culture dating to 65,000 to 60,000 years ago, thus establishing continuity and cultural transmission between social groups in South Africa.
The scientists detail their findings in tomorrow's issue (Oct. 29) of the journal Science.

Copyright © 2010 LiveScience.com. All Rights Reserved.

Related articles

• Early Humans' Weapon-Making Skills Sharper Than Expected (livescience.com)

Humanity

There seems to be a gaping hole in the logic of those strict evolutionists who deny the involvement of a higher power.  There may be a trail of fossils and bones that implies the development of the human body as we know it today.  But there does not seem to be ANY trail of "gradations" of humanity.  There doesn't appear to be an evolution of the human intellect - a time when humans were only partly human, and partly animal.  From the earliest record, from cave drawings - we see an appreciation of beauty, of art.  We see a recognition of a higher power and religious rituals.  We see a social structure.  We see the use of tools - even if rudimentary.  It seems to me as if mankind today can claim no more "intelligence" as a species than that of our ancestors.  We are simply building on an accumulation of knowledge... we "know" more because we've been around longer and have the benefit of the discoveries and wisdom of those who came before.  If you think about it, this is really a paradigm shift for those who have unconsciously believed in the "progress" of evolution.  I didn't even realize that I was a member of this group until I started reading in depth the writings of the early church, and more specifically, Saint Augustine.  It struck me so profoundly that he, before his conversion, was really no different than ME, or many of the other people I knew.  2000 years may be a drop in the bucket, evolutionarily speaking, but if you go back to Abraham, go back to Moses... 6,000 years or more, and it becomes apparent that, even if the culture is different, the people are the same.   When atheists claim that humans "invented" religion  to explain that which they did not know, I am struck by the intellectual arrogance of such an argument.  Do we ASSUME that people in the distant past were stupid?  That they were far less intelligent than we are today?  Why then are we today baffled by the marvels of the pyramids?  We can't explain how the monuments of Easter Island were built, and are just now determining how the ancient Greeks carved their columns.  WE are no smarter than THEY were.  And quite frankly, they had the advantage of QUIET, and the advantage of interacting in a very real way with nature.  They knew about God because they FELT and HEARD Him every day.  In our busy lives today, it is so easy to tune out the reality of the world around us, and just as easy  to tune out the reality of a higher power.  There is not a race, a civilization, at tribe of people, in the history of humanity, that did not believe in an unseen reality beyond what their eyes saw.  Part of being human is being SPIRTUAL.  And that is in absolute stark contrast to even the most "evolved" animal.
When I think of intellectual evolution, I wonder why humanity is the ONLY species that would theoretically undergo such an evolution.  A stone-age dog is not supposed by archeologists to be any more or less smarter than a dog of today.  The same is true with chimpanzees, repitles, sharks.  Why ONLY humans, if such an intellectual evolution is possible?  Our brains grew bigger with time.  There are other animals with brains far bigger than ours - they  do not even remotely approach the sophistication of humans.  So the question becomes not how our bodies came to be the shape they are, but what made us HUMAN?  And that is something that science can't even begin to grapple with, because it can only be answered by something outside natural processes.... it is the stamp of God, His image on us.  We are fundamentally different from animals, as I wrote about here.
Science can't disprove God, because God is the author of  science.   The Bible can't disprove science, because the Bible is the Word of God, and God would not disprove his own handiwork.  The only thing that can be in error on either side of the argument is our INTERPRETATION.

Evidence of a Creator

A Thought:




Watching a Nova special on the “beginnings of humanity”, talking about the evolution of man from chimpanzees. The fossil record is blank for 500,000 critical years – essentially there is a “missing link” in the evolutionary chain. Yet scientists are finding rocks deemed “tools” during this missing era, and are assuming that THIS is when “apes became human”. How do they know they’re tools, and not just odd-shaped rocks? “The way we know this is a tool instead of just a rock is because it was broken in a very particular way…. There is a method behind how this rock was broken into a tool, and it is not a random method.” This made me go “HMMMMM” big time. Don’t many of us look at the world in much the same way, in order to come to the conclusion that it has a Creator? That we see order, and perfection, and balance, and know that this could not have been “random”? Science will make the assumption that a rock was fashioned into a tool by a “creator” based on it’s deliberateness, but refuses to acknowledge the same argument in regards to the creation of our Earth.

Check out this Site!

I've always wanted to visit historical biblical places, to put something concrete to what I've always imagined in my head.  I just found a virtual tour of St. Peter's tomb and the necropolis at the vatican!  Totally cool. 
http://www.vatican.va/various/basiliche/necropoli/scavi_english.html