(2010-08-24) Taylor Artificial Ape

Interview with Timothy Taylor, author of The Artificial Ape. Clearly our big brains did evolve, but I think Charles Darwin had the wrong mechanism. I believe it was technology. We were never fully biological entities. We are and always have been artificial apes. The archaeological record shows chipped stone tool technologies earlier than 2.5 million years ago. That's the smoking gun. The oldest fossil specimen of the genus Homo is at most 2.2 million years old. That's a gap of more than 300,000 years - more than the total length of time that Homo sapiens has been on the planet. This suggests that earlier hominins called australopithecines were responsible for the stone tools. Evolution.