We Are the Children of the Stars (25 page)

But
– they never learned to pick up or use such tools except by sheer accident. And their opposable thumb did not launch them on the road to intelligence, as with Man.

As an escape from this opposable-thumb theory failing to account for intelligence, some experts say that it was a combination of ground-dwelling
and
a tool-grasping hand that sparked the growth of Man's big brain.

True, the other primates are tree-dwellers and were so in the past – except the baboon. That is, though living mainly in the treetops, baboon tribes will often forage for food on the ground. And they have learned the simple trick of using a handy stick as a sort of “tool” to pry up tasty roots and grubs.

Now, there we have the pregnant situation of another primate who spent much time on the ground and used his hand with the opposable thumb to wield at least a simple nonshaped “tool.”

Just as early Man did.

Why didn't this ground life of baboons first of all lead to upright walking and, second, to intelligence? Baboon species
existed up to 20 million years ago, before Ramapithecus, the earliest Hominid, and therefore had more than an even chance to develop an intelligent brain
ahead
of the Hominids.

It never happened.

According to Evolution and natural selection, it
should
have happened. That is,
if Man's brain in the first place is a result of natural selection.
Ergo, natural selection by earthly evolutionary rules and conditions did
not
produce the sapient brain of Man.

How many “exceptions” can the evolutionists expect to bring forth if humans
are
an exception to their rules? All the creatures who walked on hind legs and had their forepaws free; the creatures with opposable thumbs; the primates who became part-time ground-dwellers; the primates who were users of basic “tools” or pretools (including the chimp) – a couple of dozen species who, by rights, should have gone on the road to intelligence.

Yet they never did.

They are the “exceptions” to the rule that two-legged, thumbhanded, ground-dwelling, tool-using species “should” gain a big brain. Only Hominid man somehow “fortuitously” sprang ahead of the pack and developed his intelligent brain.

If Evolution works for one, why doesn't it work for all?

The zoologist quoted before typifies the expediency employed by experts in regard to the development of Man's brain. In connection with early Hominids, he says

First, he had to hunt if he was to survive. Second, he had to have a better brain to make up for his poor hunting body. Third, he had to have a longer childhood to grow the bigger brain and to educate it. Fourth, the females had to stay put and mind the babies while the males went hunting. Fifth, the males had to cooperate with one another on the hunt. Sixth, they had to stand up straight and use the weapons for the hunt to succeed.
¹³

He then modifies his “timetable” by saying, “I am not implying that these changes happened in that order; on the contrary they undoubtedly all developed gradually at the same time, each modification helping the others along.”

It all sounds quite “logical,” except for the plain fact that species do
not
change that readily, nor that rapidly – nor that radically – not in a short one or two million years. The opossum, for instance, has changed hardly at all for at least 75 million years. And Man has supposedly evolved from the apes (or a common ancestor) in a fiftieth of that time.

True, the opossum is not to be taken as a standard. To be fair and unbiased, we will quote another authority, who points out: “In the horse, a rather rapidly evolving type, average [time required] in change from one genus to another was . . . well over 5 million years.”
¹⁴

Now a change of
genus
is quite a change, whereas the appearance of a new
species
within a genus happens more often. A change of species occurred in the horse in only 500,000 years.

But the same authority then states “rates of evolutionary [change] . . . vary enormously. . . .
And the fastest of them seem very slow to human
[changes].” (Italics added.)

No matter how swiftly some animals evolve into new species and then into an entire new genus, Man's seven-league-bootjumps up the evolutionary ladder are unrivaled. No animal can match it.

The horse is still a horse, not a thinking animal. His brain grew larger in jumps, but only because his body grew larger in jumps from tiny dog-sized
Eohippus
to the modern horse. Brain size merely kept up with increased body sizes and their more elaborate nervous systems, but the animal became no “smarter” than before.

Man's oversized brain, however, completely outgrew his body – which did
not
grow noticeably bigger. Thus, this brain riddle has utterly confounded anthropologists ever since the Theory of Evolution came in, and one could quote dozens of disturbed skeptics.

As an example, back in 1899 this statement was made:

If we do not admit that latent capacities in the savage brain [of Hominids] were implanted for use at some time in the distant future [namely, today], we can only say that they are the result of a force which we do not know, and of a law we have not guessed.
¹⁵

Implanted! . . . force! . . . law!

Doesn't that sound exactly as if the speaker, too, suspected that some
outside agency
, not classical Evolution, accounted for the amazing growth of the Hominid
Homo
brain in the past few million years?

Perhaps it is not quite clear to the reader how truly extraordinary Man's brain is as compared to other creatures. As mentioned before, the ratio of a given animal's brain weight to total body weight is the key factor. Man stands head and shoulders above any animal, extinct or living, in this respect (with the unimportant exception of the tiny hummingbird, in which the brain had reached the minimum size to function as any sort of central “nerve box” and hence remained relatively large).

The following table clearly shows how Man's brain represents a thinking organ of enormous proportions in relation to the body.
¹⁶

The significant figure is the last one, where the brain-weight to body-weight proportion has been “corrected.” This means that certain other organs or portions of the body, of certain species, need to be unproportionately large for survival considerations and should not count in the gross body-weight.

For example, the blue whale carries an enormous extra weight in blubber, or fat, simply because his organism must be protected from icy waters in his daily life. When the blubber is “scaled down” to reasonable proportions, a more “average” body weight results, making for a more valid comparison with brain weight.

Anyway, we can see at a glance that Man far outstrips all other creatures in the comparative size of his brain, by a factor of 35. The chimp comes in a very poor second with a factor of 5.2. Thus, Man's brain is seven times as “large” as the chimp's, not in actual weight, but in proportion to its functions and abilities. This comes close to the other
comparative
figure we gave before, where Man has ten times as many neurons (brain cells) as the chimp: 10 billion to 1 billion.

From whatever angle the problem is examined, we are left with the stark truth that the human brain is a superanomaly that is hopeless for Evolution to explain.

Our superbrained starmen sires are the true answer.

13

L
ET US START with a quote from a recent best seller by a noted researcher in archeology and anthropology: “Certainly the track of racial development from Hominids to
Homo sapiens
can be followed back clearly for millions of years.”
¹

We, the authors of this book, are not so sure about
that!

To continue his statement: “but we cannot make nearly so definite a statement about the
origin of intelligence.
. . . So far I have not been fortunate to hear an explanation [from the anthropologists] of the origin of intelligence in Man that is even tolerably convincing.”

He then later admits that even the
physical
development of Hominids is not as “clearly” traceable as he stated above, when he says, “Several million years passed before anthropoids came into being through natural mutations, but after that the dawn men [early ape-men] underwent a lightning-like development.”

He then switches to mental development. “All of a sudden, tremendous advances appear about 40,000 years ago. The club was discovered as a weapon; the bow was invented for hunting; fire was used to serve Man's own ends; stone wedges [of advanced design] were used as tools, the first painting appeared on the walls of caves [by Cro-Magnon Man].”

Then he, in turn, quotes Loren Eisley, professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, who stated that Man emerged from the animal world over a period of millions of years and only slowly assumed human features.

“But,” Professor Eisley goes on, “there is one exception to this rule. To all appearances his [Man's] brain ultimately underwent a rapid development and it was only then that Man finally became distinguished from his other [primate] relatives.”

The book's author makes his own evaluation, first saying that Man is a result of an
artificial
mutation (not through nature), then reenforcing that bold concept: “I voiced the suspicion that
Homo sapiens
became separated from the ape tribe by a
deliberately planned mutation.
”
²
(Italics added.)

He has been forced into this heretical (to science) conclusion because of the fantastic growth of the Hominid brain to its present human capacity. Let us examine this growth in more startling detail.

Going back to the true apes of 15 to 30 million years ago, their brains ranged from 325 cubic centimeters to 500 cubic centimeters in bulk or volume. The early chimp, for instance, rated at 400 cubic centimeters.

Now, the first-known Hominid, among the fossil finds of Dr. Louis Leakey in East Africa, was
A. africanus
, a very primitive Hominid of 2.7 million years ago who boasted of a 442 cubic centimeter brain – even less than the apes.

However, living concurrently with him was a more advanced Hominid,
A. robustus
, who jumps to 530 cubic centimeters and immediately goes a cut above the anthropoids. Man, and his big brain, were already on the way.

Australopithecus
of a million years ago reached a brain capacity of 660 cubic centimeters, definitely above the apes.

But then there came an enormous jump, and by 600,000 B.C.,
Homo erectus
sported a brain up to 1,000 cubic centimeters in size. He was, as we previously noted, the first true Man of the genus
Homo
, and had already left the ape-brain far, far, behind.

Now we come to one of the other major mysteries of the “descent of Man,” as Darwin put it, which really turns out to be an “ascent” of a remarkable nature.

For after
Erectus
, the human brain not only reached its present-day peak but
beyond.
To quote an authority, “as we proceed
backward in time the human brain increases rather than decreases in volume.”
³