© 2004 Ken Glasziou
© 2004 The Brotherhood of Man Library
| Error in the Urantia Papers—Life on Urantia | Volume 11 - No. 4 — Index | 48 Chromosomes? Or Jumping to Conclusions! |
¶ Summary
The Urantia Papers have it that about one million years ago, twins named Andon and Fonta, became the founders of the human race. It appears highly likely that this is a “frame in which to think” type of story for there is no fossil evidence to indicate that modern man emerged earlier than about 200,000 years ago.
¶ Content
Conventional wisdom on the origin of the human species is that, 4 million years ago in Africa, a little creature just over a meter tall emerged from the evolutionary melting pot, and stood up.
The first such creature to be discovered received the name “Lucy”–later changed to Australopithecus afarensis. Lucy had knee joints that allowed her to straighten her legs. Also she made footprints that confirmed that she stood up. Dating of fossils beyond 200,000yrs old is not easy. It is generally done indirectly by dating the ground where they are found–for Lucy at about 4 million years B.P. (before the present). (Note: radio-active dating has since been revolutionized by the discovery of zircon technology)
Lucy had a skull more ape-like than human and was probably no smarter than the average ape. Fossil remains of two other primate-like species found in Africa, Paranthropus boisei and Paranthropus robustus are thought to have been evolutionary dead ends. Supposedly Lucy and her buddies gave rise to the next step, named Homo habilis (handy man). H. habilis was a tool maker, may have appeared about 2.5 million years B.P., looked something like Lucy, but had a larger brain. He/she was about 1.5 meters tall, under 45 kg, probably a scavenger, and supposedly gave rise to the next evolutionary jump called Homo erectus. This guy was more advanced so is measured in feet and inches–5ft 6in. to be precise. He was almost indistinguishable from modern man except for a flattened forehead, prominent brow ridges and no chin. Conventional wisdom has him originating in Africa around 2 million B.P. He was supposed to have taken a long time to get out of Africa and to migrate to Java (1 million B.P) and Peking. When Java man was re-dated to 2 million B.P. in 1970, the work was at first ignored. New dating puts two Java fossils at 1.8 and 1.7 million B.P., is probably reliable, but was unwelcome as it did not fit conventional wisdom.
How does this tie in to Andon and Fonta (about 1,000,000 B.P.) or Adam and Eve (37,898 B.P.)?
Many (most?) readers think that the Urantia Book claims that Andon and Fonta were the sole ancestral parents of all of us. In fact, it does not. It says: “Even the loss of Andon and Fonta before they had offspring, though delaying human evolution, would not have prevented it. Subsequent to the appearance of Andon and Fonta, and before the mutating potentials of animal life were exhausted, there evolved no less than seven thousand favorable strains which could have achieved some sort of human type of development. And many of these better stocks were subsequently assimilated by the various branches of the expanding human species.” (UB 65:3.4).
¶ So how and where did mankind arise?
There appears to be little doubt that the origins of mankind were in Africa for there is to be found there, a group of hominid fossils belonging to the genus Australopithecus, any one of which may have been a forebear of the genus Homo–the one to which we belong, and fossils from which is also widely represented in Africa.
The Urantia Book informs us that man arose just under 1 million years ago, and denies that it had a direct African ancestry. Also it places the origin of the modern types of simian–monkeys, baboons, chimpanzee, and gorilla–in the vicinity of one million years ago, and not in Africa but on a Mesopotamian peninsular. Science places this divergence as occurring in Africa about 5 to 6 million years ago.
There are two main schemes for human ancestry, one, the ‘out of Africa alone’ hypothesis, the other ‘the multi-regional’ hypothesis, meaning that the ancient ancestors of various human groups lived where they are found today. Included is the possibility that the so-called Neanderthal man, a specialized form of man well adapted to the climate of an ice-age, could interbreed with modern man. An extreme view is that the Neanderthal was the progenitor of modern man.
Both main theories had their deficiencies. For the ‘out of Africa’ theory there was a big hole in the African fossil record extending from between 300,000 and 100,000 years ago–in which period the transition to morphological modernity was expected to have occurred.
New light was thrown upon the origins of man with the publication in June, 2003, of a paper in Nature by T.D. White et al. that describes three skulls, reliably dated at nearly 154-160,000 years old, and said to be the earliest near-modern humans on record.
Found at a site called Herto in Ethiopia, these fossils exhibit such modern traits as a globular brain case equal in volume to our own, but also retaining ancient features, a prominent brow ridge, for example. Given the sub-species name Homo sapiens idaltu, this species forms a link between earlier African archaic forms and later fully modern ones–and so provides strong supporting evidence that Africa was the birthplace of our kind.
These Herto hominids are also indicative of whether the Neanderthals were the forebears of modern man. Whereas the ‘out of Africa’ theorists contend that such archaic hominids as the Neanderthals did not contribute significantly to the modern human gene pool, many multiregionalists have argued that they interbred with or merged with modern humans.
The Neanderthals were around from about 200,000 years ago until around 27,000 years ago when they disappeared. The fact that these near-modern Herto humans were already present in Ethiopia while the Neanderthals were still developing their distinctive characteristics in Europe is indicative that, at most, only trivial amounts of Neanderthal genetic material would have ‘leaked’ to the modern human.
Further evidence that the Neanderthals contributed little to the gene pool of modern humans comes from mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) studies from two early modern European fossils that were shown to be markedly different from the mtDNA sequences recovered from four Neanderthal specimens. Nor is Neanderthal mtDNA closer to that of Europeans than it is to a 2000-persons sample from around the world.
[Plant and animal cells contain large numbers of mitochondria, the ‘factories’ that break down sugars and provide the cell with energy. Each has its own piece of DNA that is independent of nuclear DNA. Offspring inherit their mitochondria from their mother only, and are copies of themselves. Variation comes from mutation only.]
Herto man (pictured above) is dated to 154-160,000 years BP, and is the earliest fossil evidence for someone approaching the modern type of human. Andon and Fonta lived close to 1,000,000 yrs BP. The story of Andon and Fonta does not fit well to modern anthropological thought but is certainly adequate as a ‘framework for thinking.’ (UB 115:1.1)
¶ External links
- Article in Innerface International: https://urantia-book.org/archive/newsletters/innerface/vol11_4/page5.html
| Error in the Urantia Papers—Life on Urantia | Volume 11 - No. 4 — Index | 48 Chromosomes? Or Jumping to Conclusions! |