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Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig. Today the Doctrine of Man, Part 14. For more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonablefaith.org Good morning.
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Welcome to Defenders. We're coming to you today from the safety of my hermetically sealed home office, and I'm glad that you can join us. The last time, I argued that the historical Adam and Eve actually existed, even though their stories are cloaked in the language of figuralism and mythology. And this raises the obvious question. If the biblical Adam was a historical person who actually lived, then the obvious question arises, when did he live? And we can turn to modern science in the attempt to answer this question. For scientists are vitally interested in a question which is empirically equivalent to our question, namely, when did human beings first appear on Earth? The historical atom may then be located around that time. First of all, however, we need to clarify some terminology. A hominid is the class of animals that includes orangutans, chimpanzees, gorillas and humans. They are all hominids. A hominin is the class that includes only members of the human lineage. And since its divergence from the last common ancestor with chimpanzees, the class of hominins includes not only modern man, Homo sapiens, but also archaic species of the genus Homo. It includes, as well, australopithecines, which were bipedal African apes. Ian Tattersall of the American Museum of Natural History points out that early individuals classed as Homo, such as Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Homo rudolfensis, and so on, all have in common remarkably small brains, hardly larger than those of the australopithecines. And this is in conspicuous contrast to Homo sapiens, which has a brain more than twice the volume. So we must not assume that organisms classed as Homo are therefore human beings. Rather, we need to specify certain conditions which are jointly sufficient for humanity. There is, in fact, a noteworthy consensus among scientists as to what these conditions are. We are, after all, familiar with ourselves as human beings and therefore know what a paradigmatic human being is. We know, for example, that any putative human being must be anatomically similar to ourselves. While a self conscious, rational extraterrestrial, or even a chimpanzee, would be a person, he would not be a human person. This necessary condition of humanness need not involve an exact anatomical match. There is a range of anatomical differences even between modern and archaic Homo sapiens that do not count against the humanity of the latter forms. By contrast, no one thinks that, given the significant anatomical differences to modern man australopithecines, for example, were human beings, despite their having some shared future with man, such as bipedalism, and they were simply bipedal apes of various sorts, with tiny brains somewhere around 460 cubic centimeters, that could not have supported modern human behavior. On the basis of our paradigmatic examples of humans, we can delineate certain features which, given anatomical similarity, are sufficient, if not necessary, for human personhood. What are some of these features? Anthropologists Sally McBricky and Allison Brooks list four characteristics of modern human behavior. Abstract thinking, that is, the ability to act with reference to abstract concepts not limited in time or space planning depth the ability to formulate strategies based on past experience and to act upon them in a group context behavioral, economic, and technological innovations and symbolic behavior, that is, the ability to to represent objects, people, and abstract concepts with arbitrary symbols, whether vocal or visual, and to reify such symbols in cultural practice. McBridey and Brooks observed that the standards for behavioral modernity they apply are, and I quote, universally recognized and and are frequently repeated in the literature. To deny the humanity of past individuals who were anatomically similar to modern humans and who exhibited such behaviors would be very problematic because first, it is implausible to think that such behaviors did not require the cognitive capacities of human beings, and secondly, to deny the humanity of past individuals exhibiting such behavior would permit one similarly to deny the humanity of people living today who share such behavior, which is not only implausible but morally unconscionable. The more difficult question is whether we can discern when such behaviors first appear in the prehistorical record. We can set boundaries for our quest for human origins by establishing an earliest possible point and a latest possible point for the first appearance of human beings. How far back can the first appearance of humans be extended? Paleontological evidence continues to push Homo sapiens further and and further into the past. The hominin fossils of Jebel Irhud in Morocco, for example, with an age of over 300,000 years, are the earliest fossils of Homo sapiens discovered to date. The brain volume of these individuals was large, between 1300 and 1400 cubic centimeters, which is comparable to that of modern man, 1100 to 1500 cubic centimeters. Although there are differences in the cranial shape of these archaic humans compared to modern humans, the archaeologists at Jebel Irhoud emphasize that already 300,000 years ago, and I quote, their facial morphology is almost indistinguishable from from that of recent modern humans. While such skeletal remains alone may not prove the humanity of such individuals, they make it at least possible that human beings date back to over 300,000 years ago. But what shall we say about earlier forms of Homo? Despite being classified as Homo, so called Homo habilis was, as I mentioned, almost certainly not human. Given its brain size of 550 to 687 cubic centimeters, many paleoanthropologists would like it to be renamed Australopithecus habilis. When we come to Homo erectus, the picture becomes less clear, especially given the lengthy history and geographical spread of this particular hominin. Specimens have been found throughout Asia and Africa over a span of nearly 1.5 million years, from around 2 million years ago, thus permitting an abundance of identifiable subspecies. It's possible that some late developing member of Homo erectus might be arguably human, even if more primitive members were not. For example, the very early fossils of Homo erectus from Dmanisi, Georgia, have a brain volume of only about 600 cubic centimeters, whereas later specimens from Java reach 1100 cubic centimeters, which touches the lower bound of modern Homo sapiens, which you'll remember is 1100-1500 cubic centimeters. By the time we get to Homo heidelbergensis and Homer nand of telensis, brain sizes are large enough to support human personhood. For Homo heidelbergensis, the brain case measured 1100 to 1400 cubic centimeters, and for Homo neanderthalensis, 1200 to 1750 cubic centimeters. The brain volume of Neanderthals was in fact larger than that of Homo sapiens, whose brain size has actually been shrinking over the last 10,000 years. So homo erectus provides us the earliest possible point for the origin of human beings. As for a latest point of human origins, the beautiful cave art at Lascaux 17,000 years ago, and Chauvet 30,000 years ago in France, was undoubtedly created by human beings. Just look at this picture of the beautiful horses painted on the walls of the cave in Lascaux. This was truly a sensitive and brilliant artist. And the paintings at Chauffe are even more stunning. Here is a clip of the lions that were drawn on the cave wall by the artist at Chauvet. The magnificence of these paintings can be appreciated when you ask yourself if you were called upon to draw a picture of a pride of lions on the wall, what would it look like? Truly, we have here a primeval Michelangelo at work. Viewing these paintings, we sense ourselves standing in the presence of someone who is one of us. The hand stencils, which are among the oldest forms of cave art yet discovered, seem almost to be reaching out across the millennia to touch us. For example, we have hand stencils from Sulawesi, Indonesia which date back to 35 to 40,000 years ago. These are the actual hand imprints of real people who actually lived. It is universally recognized that the people who produce such art possessed symbolic thought so as to be able to represent real animals and scenes via painted images. Any attempt therefore to deny the origin of human persons later than the earliest time of such cave art is excluded, thus giving us a latest point for the possible origin of humanity. Human beings in the full sense of the word therefore originated on this planet sometime between 1 million years ago at the earliest and 50,000 years ago at the latest. By pushing these boundaries inward if we can, we now want to try to determine more closely the point of this origin and that is the subject we shall explore next week. Until then, stay safe.
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The copyright for the preceding material is held by Dr. William Lane Craig. For more go to reasonablefaith.org.