All good points, Joshua. And certainly congruent with the body of assumptions and attitudes currently in force within the anthropological establishment.
But more and more, as I read various accounts in a wide range of fields (not only anthropology but religion, "climate change" and other areas where opinions diverge pretty radically), I'm reminded of the comment in
Bere--deleted--h Rabbah on Genesis 11:2 --
They found a plain in Shinar because they were looking for a plain in Shinar.
[Edit : It's
Hebrew, for Pete's sake !
Beres_hith Rabbah. The oldest surviving Commentary on the Book of Genesis].
People (just because they're people) tend to find what they're looking for. They start with a set of expectations, mine the data with an eye to pulling out what supports them, and overlook what doesn't. And when there's a Brain Police controlling what people can even say, let alone what gets published, a lot gets swept under the rug or disguised. So since there probably isn't anyone alive who doesn't have some sort of agenda (conscious or unconscious), I'm not all that sure that you can use "current thinking in the field" to form an overall impression of what's involved without at least looking at (and
for) what's missing and/or suppressed by it. Otherwise, you're coming to conclusions that are dictated by the choice of information available and -- even more importantly -- the assumptions built into that choice.
A case in point from the latest Pleistocene Coalition Newsletter :
Michael Collins has already announced evidence of 14,500 year old occupation at Gault, Texas, repeating a similar date reported by Reid Ferring from the Aubrey Site on the upper Trinity some 22 years previously. But Ferring's oldest dates of 14,000 years had to be averaged in with younger dates to produce an acceptable 11,500 year date that would ensure limited publication of his report. And if (since) that's the case even with C14 dates, to what extent must the body of official thinking with respect to genetics be "massaged" into conformity with orthodoxy ? Seeing as assumptions tend to dictate conclusions, I suspect that
THIS is the real code red issue for the Brain Police.
To the Brain-Police State, there are no races of people -- only consumers. And by the time they get done rationalising the differences between us away (as ideas if not as facts), that's what the resulting picture looks like. But when you look at the fossil record, you find only stability over vast stretches of time. Conditions change, but the fossil forms remain constant. In our own time, Black people living in Canada are not becoming lighter-skinned and narrower-nosed in response to the climate there, nor are White South Africans becoming morphologically "Africanised." Making (to my way of thinking) the airy claim that "adaption" is what produced our differences worse than just suspect as an "explanation" -- suspect in its motivation, the same way "the dog ate my homework" is.
What "the
truth" may be I have no idea. But when I see the Brain Police going absolutely ballistic over something, using every weapon they have to suppress awareness of it, argue it out of existence and persecute anybody who rocks the boat, it sets my bulls_hit detector off.
Scientists examine the unexplained
Brain Police explain the unexamined.
