It could also be that Homo erectus did NOT
exist. Milford Wolpoff has been one of
themost vocal evolutionists calling for the sinking of the taxon 'Homo erectus'
into 'Homo sapiens.' He says we either admit erectus/sapiens boundary is
arbitrary and use nonmorphological criteria for determining it, or sink erectus
into Homo sapiens. Franz Weidenriech wrote the original descriptions of
Sinanthropus pekinensis and made fine plaster casts before the original fossils
were lost. He recognized that theis classic Homo erectus material was not
different from Homo sapiens. He felt the best appropriate name would have
been Homo sapiens erectus pekinensis, otherwise it would appear as a proper
'species' different than Homo sapiens.
So if erectus is a fuzzy terminology and Nostratic
is a division created by and for linguists, then where are we? Could be
that both erectus and Nostratic should be thrown out.
Gerry
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, February 28, 2003 3:32
PM
Subject: [Nostratica] Re: Swadesh
Lists
I still don't get the relevance of Nostratic to Homo
erectus's
language. Even if it could be shown that H. erectus and H.
sapiens co-
existed in a particular geographic area at some point, how
could you
know that they shared a
language?
Ned