Discoveries Challenge Beliefs on Humans’ Arrival in the Americas
Excerpt: “How could Polynesians have made it to Brazil? Or aboriginal Australians? Or, if the archaeologists here are correct, how could a population arrive in this hinterland long before Clovis hunters began appearing in the Americas? The array of new discoveries has scholars on a quest for answers.”
My comment: There are two answers to questions that arise with the reported presence of humans who hunted giant sloths about 30,000 years ago in what is now Uruguay.
1) They mutated into existence due to snake predation. That answer is implied in: Pulvinar neurons reveal neurobiological evidence of past selection for rapid detection of snakes
2) They arose as did the modern human population in what is now central China about 30,000 years ago due to a single nutrient-dependent base pair change and an amino acid substitution that stabilized their genome via processes involving alternative splicings of pre-mRNA. That answer was detailed in the context of biophysical constraints on Nutrient-dependent/pheromone-controlled adaptive evolution: a model
Only answer 2 is biologically plausible. No experimental evidence supports answer 1, which is based on population genetics. Population geneticists do not consider biophysical constraints. They consider what they can observe. If they see what they think is a mutation, it can be attributed to something that arose as one of many constraint-breaking mutations that supposedly somehow cause species diversity. “…genomic conservation and constraint-breaking mutation is the ultimate source of all biological innovations and the enormous amount of biodiversity in this world.” (p. 199) Mutation-driven evolution.
In the context of mutation-driven evolution, upending the theory that people first arrived in the Americas from Asia about 13,000 years ago has additional associated problems. The revision to 30,000 years puts two different modern human populations in two different locations of the world at the same time as the Neanderthals supposedly had disappeared from locations they previously inhabited for a much longer time, although none of those locations link their presence to the Americas.
Therefore, evolutionary theorists are faced with the multitude of unanswered questions about how evolution occurred in different populations in different parts of the world. The questions arise because it has become obvious that ecological variation enables ecological adaptations in species from microbes to man via conserved molecular mechanisms. The magnitude of the problem for theorists is expressed by the claim of one researcher who said: “To say monkeys produced the tools is stupid.”
If monkeys in the Americas did not produce the tools, which appear to change the dates others have been told establish the time frames used in social sciences like evolutionary psychology, that implies that some theorists are little more than stupid monkeys who have not ecologically adapted. They may, however, be mutants. But the real danger to the mutants who tout evolutionary theory may be
or the belief that
When dates and locations become scrambled, which is what has happened to theorists in past, it begins to appear that they are trying to make a stupid monkey out of each of us.
