Human origins site – the palaeoanthro weblog

This seems to be a blog well worth examining and mining – www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs .  The blogger, Jim Foley, maintains an excellent sense of humour as well as what appears to be considerable energy and knowledge.  There is a link to a masterful April Fool’s Day joke at the expense of the Institute for Creation Research, which gulled their radio show, Science, Scripture and Salvation in 2000 into accepting at face value a spoof article in the April 1997 issue of Discover magazine.  This was penned by the German palaeoanthropologist Oscar Todkopf (Deadheads are fans of the Grateful Dead) of Hindenburg University (Led Zeppelin and a well-known, flaming bag of gas), which documented a find of assorted musical instruments, (a 6 foot length of mammoth tusk turned into a tuba, a bagpipe-like instrument made from the bladder of a large animal, a triangle of thin bones, a collection of hollowed out bones of different lengths, which Todkopf suggested might be part of a xylophone (he called it a ‘xylobone’), the first known Neanderthal cave painting, showing marching musicians alongside some suspected musical notation, and a Neanderthal skull) in the famous Neander Valley, Germany. Even the fact that the eponymous author claimed that Neanderthal musicians played the bagpipes with their remarkably huge noses, did not deter the ICR’s Marvin Lubenow, author of the leading creationist book on human origins, Bones of Contention, from commenting, “There’s overwhelming evidence that Neanderthals were musically inclined.”, along with a further stream of howlers.  For that alone, you must visit this site.  However, it is probably the best source of human-origins information, illustrations and news that there is on the Web, and puts the EPN anthropology and geoarchaeology section to shame!  There is a balance, for the site includes a great many items on creationist ideas, but this has to be tongue in cheek, despite the accuracy of the accounts there. I wonder who Jim Foley is….

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