Observations placeholder
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre - The Phenomenon of Man - Homo sapiens
Identifier
018532
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
- Modern man emerged relatively recently
- he followed a series of experiments Neanderthal, Sinanthropus, Pithecanthropus – in other words versions which proved under testing on earth to be not quite right
- Homo sapiens appeared as an already designed species, with nothing in the way of intermediary species and once established and proven he suddenly appeared all over the world very quickly.
- Furthermore, there has been no noticeable genetic change since
A description of the experience
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin – The Phenomenon of Man
Where did he come from this new man [Homo Sapiens]? Some anthropologists would like to see in him the culmination of certain lines of development already pinpointed in earlier epochs – a direct descendent, for example, of Sinanthropus. For definite technical reasons, however, and still more because of overall analogies, it is better to view things in another way. Without doubt, somewhere or other and in his own way, Upper Paleolithic man must have passed through a pre-hominid phase and then through a Neanderthaloid one. But, like the mammals … and all the other phyla, he disappears from our field of vision in the course of his (possibly accelerated) embryogenesis. We find imbrication and replacement rather than continuity and prolongation: the law of succession once again dominates history. I can thus easily picture the new comer as the scion of an autonomous line of evolution, long hidden though secretly active – to emerge triumphantly one day doubtless in the midst of those pseudo-Neanderthaloids
Thirty thousand years, a long period measured in terms of our lifetime, but it is a mere second for evolution. From the osteological point of view there is during this interval no appreciable breach of continuity in the human phylum.
And this is where we get our greatest surprise. In itself, it is only very natural that the stem of Homo sapiens fossils studied at its point of emergence, far from being simple, should display in the composition and divergence of its fibres the complex structure of a fan. This is, as we know, the initial condition of each phylum on the tree of life. At the very least we should have counted on finding, in this depths, a cluster of relatively primitive and generalised forms, something antecedent in form to our present races. And what we find is the opposite. Assuming one can trust bones to give us an idea of flesh and blood, what were in fact those first representatives, in the age of the reindeer, of a new human verticil freshly opening? Nothing more or less than what wee see living today in approximately the same regions of the earth. …........when we study Upper Paleolithic man, not only in the essentilal features of his anatomy but also in the main lines of his ethnography, it is really ourselves and our infancy that we are finding... the framework of modern humanity. We see the same general body form, and the same fundamental distribution of races