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Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig today the Doctrine of Man, Part 16 for more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonablefaith.org welcome to Defenders.
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I'm glad that you could join us for this podcast. In our last few sessions, we've been looking at the scientific evidence for the date of the origin of humanity and in order to determine when plausibly the historical Adam might have lived. As we've probed the evidence for human origins, the evidence has pointed us again and again to the progenitor of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals as the fount of humanity, the mysterious Heidelberg man. What do we know of him? In 1907, the lower jaw of a hominin was discovered at the Grafenrein sand and gravel quarry in Mauer, Germany, in the vicinity of Heidelberg. Dating from about 600,000 years ago, the jaw appeared to belong to a previously unknown species of early hominin. The following year, the name Homo heidelbergensis was bestowed by Otto Schuttenzak upon this species. In 1921, a nearly complete skull appropriate to the Maurer mandible, along with a shin bone, was unearthed in a metal ore mine in Broken Hill, Rhodesia. Initially classed as belonging to a new species, Homo rhodesiensis, the new find eventually came to be classified as an instance of Homo heidelbergensis. Although the brain case was relatively long and low compared to that of modern man, it was higher and more expansive than that of Homo erectus and had a capacity about 800 to 1300 cubic centimeters, thus overlapping the modern average, which is about 1100 to 1500 cubic centimeters. The man at Broken Hill is estimated to have stood about 6ft tall and to have weighed around 160 pounds. Since the discovery at Broken Hill, a number of finds have been made and have been identified as belonging to Homo heidelbergenses, including remains from Box Grove, England Arago, France, Bilsingsleben, Germany, Petrolona, Greece, Bodo, Ethiopia, Kapthurin, Kenya, and Elandsfontein, South Africa. Ian Tattersall calls Homo heidelbergensis a truly cosmopolitan hominid species, which may lie at the origin of the European and African lineages that eventually led to Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. The origin of Heidelberg man himself is shrouded in antiquity. He may have originated in either Asia or Europe or Africa and then migrated to the other regions. The date range for the last common ancestor of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens has been pushed back by analysis of of the Neanderthal genome. On the basis of a complete genome analysis of the Altai Neanderthal in Russia. The best estimate for the divergence of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals is now between 765,000 and 550,000 years ago. Recent protein analysis of a tooth from Grandolina, Spain, led the researchers to infer that the hominin in question, called Homo Antakesar, was, and I quote, a sister group to the group containing Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans, thus implying that they all share a common ancestor. The researchers note that this is consistent with the accepted date of the divergence of Homo sapiens and Neanderthal Denisovan lineages between 765 and 550,000 years ago. The researchers did not address the identity of the last common ancestor, but if it is Heidelberg man, as is usually thought, then Heidelberg man could be regarded as as the last common ancestor of all these species. Homo antakesar has a remarkably looking modern face. The positioning of a Homo antakesar as one of our sister species sharing a common ancestor implies, in the words of the researchers, that a modern like face must have a considerably deep ancestry in the genus Homo. So Adam may have looked very much like us. Here is an artist's recreation of Heidelberg man from the frontispiece of Sprenger and Andrews book. I like that the artist pictures Heidelberg man holding a spear like those found in Schoningen, Germany. And I think you'll agree that you know people today who look rather like this. Of course, now this painting is the creation of the artist's imagination. We have no idea of Adam's skin color, for example. Still, I think you can see that we're not dealing here with some slumping ape man, but rather with someone who could pass amongst us without raising too many eyebrows. Moreover, with a brain capacity of 1260 cubic centimeters, well within the modern range, Heidelberg Mann is appropriate. As the author of Cognitively Modern Behaviors, Robert Fortney sums it up beautifully. He writes, the tendencies toward large brain size were carried further while the social habits, tool making and all the paraphernalia attached to hunting and gathering tribes were added piece by piece until you can say of the creature standing before you, ecce Homo. Behold the man. Adam, then, may be plausibly identified as a member of Homo heidelbergensis living perhaps sometime earlier than 750,000 years ago. He could even have lived in the near east, in the biblical site of the Garden of Eden, though vastly earlier. Of course, his descendants are migrated southward into Africa, where they gave rise to Homo sapiens, and westward into Europe, where they evolved into Homoatokesar, Neanderthals and Denisovans. Eventually these separate lines of his descendants began to interbreed, leaving their genetic signatures in our DNA. Paleoanthropologists debate whether modern man emerged through a gradual multi species development or by a sudden mutational event occurring within a single species. Francesco Derico and Chris Stringer explain and I quote Some authors consider that a genetic mutation in the functioning of the brain is is the most probable prime mover and have argued that such a mutation leading to a sudden diffusion of modern traits must have occurred approximately 50,000 years ago among African anatomically modern humans. Others assume this neurological switch between 60 and 80,000 years ago and associated with a cultural innovation recorded at this time and in southern Africa. In contrast to this view, Darrico and Stringer explain Partisans of what could be called the cultural model argue that the cognitive prerequisites of modern human behavior were already largely in place among the ancestors of Neanderthals and modern humans, and cite social and demographic factors to explain the asynchronous emergence, disappearance and re emergence of modern cultural traits among both African modern and Eurasian archaic populations. According to this scenario, modernity and its corollary, cumulative culture is is the end product of a cultural evolution within human populations that were to a large extent cognitively modern. It should be evident, I think, that these two views are not mutually exclusive. One can imagine a scenario in which a regulatory mutation, perhaps divinely caused, occurs in a member or members of a population belonging to Homo heidelbergensis, which effects a change in the functioning of the brain that results in significantly greater cognitive capacity. Some behavioral outworkings of this increased cognitive capacity would be immediate, but others would emerge slowly over time among this person's descendants through gene cultural co evolution. This is in line with the cultural model. We are to imagine both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens as heirs to the cognitive capacity for modern behaviors already present in Heidelberg Man. And in line with the first model, this increased capacity as itself the result of a crucial mutation in some ancestral individual belonging to Homo heidelbergensis. These individuals could have been Adam and Eve. Their descendants multiplied and then became the human race, and the rest, as they say, is history.
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The copyright for the preceding material is held by Dr. William Lane Craig. For more go to reasonablefaith.org.