How Did Humanity Come To Be

[Jeremy]

I would take the Human argument even further back.

Apes are specialized as small bodied brachiating grazers, medium bodied ground/arboreal omnivores, or large bodied ground grazers.

Our divergent population from the Chimps cleft along two lines: the Robust, and the Gracile. Some of the wimps and weaklings of the Gracile side had brains, and it's possible that they needed to lose jaw muscles to allow their skull to inflate. To survive, the wimps utilized their brains and developed a sophisticated tool industry. A four million year process showed that a wimpy, medium bodied, tool using omnivore was able to out compete a strong, medium bodied, herbivore. Culminating in our Handy Man grandpa Homo habilis.

There after, the other species of the Homo (Human) genus were able to modify the environment. We are so incredibly lucky to have made it to that point, in the following million years old Habilis bit the dust due to competition from his children and apparently so did everyone else left over from the Chimp divergence. What came to fruition in that weird world of ice age galciations and melts was a world dominated by the family of the Erecti species and they went up against some very dangerous animals (like Gigantopithecus).

Somewhere, at some point, a challenger arose to, probably even from, the Erecti. Within these recent decades evidence has been found for a third, earlier line in Central Asia (the Denisova hominin) and a fourth miniature species on the island of Flores, Indonesia. As others have said, we came from a varied background. It takes so much work and dedication to recover all this forensic evidence thousands and millions of years after the fact--what archeologist do is a labor of love, a gift to all the world. There is almost no money in this, they do it so that we may know the story of the Earth and through what struggles our ancestors endured to leave us their inheritance. There is no plot, no demonic agenda, just people doing a job out of kindness -- to insinuate otherwise is uncouth and rude.

When the glaciers rolled back down and Mount Toba catastrophically exploded, the Neanderthals almost had us (Homo sapiens idaltu) licked. As others have said, genetic evidence has shown that our population (at that time) was very small. Brains were nice but the Neanderthals just dealt with the cold better than we did. It has been a constant struggle in the medium size ape category, an arms race between brains and brawn. We came out on top, we killed everyone else off.

Cities started about the same time Modern human races got most of our genetic separation from one another only 12 to 6 thousand years ago. To quote, "we went from happy go lucky hunter-gatherers to farmers with a chip on our shoulder". Where do we stand today? Watch CNN, today is both horrifying and promising. But truthfully, we have relic populations dying off in the Indian Ocean, Australia, and South Africa; nevermind the great First Nations Die Off. There is only one place left for Humans to have an isolated breeding population to develop a new sub species, that is in space and we aren't there. So the Ubermensch or whatever (if anything) comes next will have to wait.

I hope this was helpful.

Tangentially, who would win in a fight, an Australopithecus afarensis, a Chimpanzee, or a Mandrill?

[General Mung Beans]

Hey Mung Beans, I still haven't gotten my question answered either: if faith is something you just choose to believe without evidence (as you intimated earlier), what makes your faith any better than that of Muslims, or Jews, etc? And if you do have evidence, what is it?

Well that's the inherent nature of belief and faith, that your beliefs are true.

[General Mung Beans]

Simple question to put it down: Why would any being of such power bother with us? The Earth and it's system is excessively dull. Our planets are small, our star is average, doesn't even have a partner in the dance, and we're surrounded by alot of other extremely dull systems. We're so far from anywhere at all, you need telescopes to get decent information out of sky. We're not even unique; there have been intelligent tool-users before our current species. So. What the hell makes us sooooo special that a powerful being would give two shits about us, and not the Cro-magnon? Or about the Xoticon of Radim Six? Or the balloon animals?

The fundamental answer is one of Christianity's own 'deadly' sins. Pride.

NITPICK: Cro-Magnons are Homo Sapiens Sapiens!

[Soontir C'boath]

Hey Mung Beans, I still haven't gotten my question answered either: if faith is something you just choose to believe without evidence (as you intimated earlier), what makes your faith any better than that of Muslims, or Jews, etc? And if you do have evidence, what is it?

Well that's the inherent nature of belief and faith, that your beliefs are true.

You need to add 'without evidence' to your last sentence.

[Simon_Jester]

Hey Mung Beans, I still haven't gotten my question answered either: if faith is something you just choose to believe without evidence (as you intimated earlier), what makes your faith any better than that of Muslims, or Jews, etc? And if you do have evidence, what is it?

Well that's the inherent nature of belief and faith, that your beliefs are true.

So where did you get it from? Mind control rays from space?

I mean, I know a lot of faithful people, but the ones I respect don't demand that random strangers consider their faith as being a viable alternative to actually observing things that are right there in front of your damn nose.

[Jeremy]

Simple question to put it down: Why would any being of such power bother with us? The Earth and it's system is excessively dull. Our planets are small, our star is average, doesn't even have a partner in the dance, and we're surrounded by alot of other extremely dull systems. We're so far from anywhere at all, you need telescopes to get decent information out of sky. We're not even unique; there have been intelligent tool-users before our current species. So. What the hell makes us sooooo special that a powerful being would give two shits about us, and not the Cro-magnon? Or about the Xoticon of Radim Six? Or the balloon animals?

The fundamental answer is one of Christianity's own 'deadly' sins. Pride.

NITPICK: Cro-Magnons are Homo Sapiens Sapiens!

You haven't added any discussion to your Opening Post's question. You have gone out of your way (from sentence 2 of your OP) to shift this discussion away from the subject matter.

Cro-Magnongs have a morphologically different skull than modern humans and predate the most recent round of genetic variations by 30,000 to 20,000 years.

[Solauren]

How did the human race to be. Personally I am an evolutionary creationist (aka theistic evolutionist).

Millions of years ago, an alien warlord named Xenu filled a volcano in haiwai with aliens he didn't like, and nuked the hell out of them. (This also is what killed the Dinosaurs off). As a result, the aliens became things called 'Theatans', which after millions of years trying to find hosts, infected human's ape-like ancestors, forcing our species to mutate to like the aliens in order to cope.


Wait, that's wrong? Scientology and Tom Cruise lied to me? Why would anyone lie about something like religion?

(Cut to Reverand Lovejoy pouring money into a sorting machine).

[Liberty]

Hey Mung Beans, I still haven't gotten my question answered either: if faith is something you just choose to believe without evidence (as you intimated earlier), what makes your faith any better than that of Muslims, or Jews, etc? And if you do have evidence, what is it?

Well that's the inherent nature of belief and faith, that your beliefs are true.

So, if you believe something it's automatically true? How does that make any sense? By what you're saying, then, your beliefs are true, and Muslims' beliefs are true, etc. Um...but the contradict. What about that?

And also, if something is true just because someone has faith in it, what if I decide to believe (and have faith that) I'm going to live forever, or that a pink elephant is going to fall from the sky and smash your mail box tonight while you're eating dinner?