Urantiana

National Geographic has a short article, DNA From Ancient Site in Spain Reshapes Human Family Tree, posted by Miguel Vilar, 2013 Dec 5. explaining the impact of the sequencing of "the mitochondrial genome of a 400,000 year-old ancient human from Spain."

Now the story has changed and we are scrambling to come up with a new narrative. Is this a different species ancestral to Denisovan, but not Neanderthals? Were there two movements out of Africa before the third and final migration that Homo sapiens took in the last 50,000 years? How many different species of hominids lived in Europe, Africa and Asia in the Pleistocene? And since these beings surely interbred, can we even call them separate species? When the dust settles, a new story of human ancestry will have surely emerged.

The "Denisovan" was only identified three years ago.

In the comments, one "Patrick" wrote on Dec 6,:

Anyone interested in this subject should read The Urantia Book.

There is NO guesswork in it and it explains EVERYTHING about the history of the human race, including where we came from and how we got to where we are, step by step.

I appreciate Patrick's obvious enthusiasm for the Papers, and for the outlines given in the Urantia papers regarding the progression of human development. What first really intrigued me about this strange book, about which I then knew nothing, nor knew any but one person who had read it, were the very papers regarding the later stages of of human beings appearing on our world.

From my forty years of familiarity with the Papers, I deem Patrick may be engaging in enthusiasm-prompted hyperbole, because it would hardly be proper to say the Papers explain "everything." In fact, they explain very little, or give us only the broadest and most general of understandings, as they do in many of the historic and scientific statements. They are specific enough for their purposes, but not detailed in a manner that is much more than a broad guide to our anthropological understandings.

I am no anthropologist, but as I say, this is enough of an area of interest of mine that it was the topic which drew me into the revelation. In ensuing years, with each anthropological theory or discovery of which I've read, I wonder if, and how, it fits (or does not) into the revelation. It may be considered testimony to the generality of the papers' "revealed" anthropology that I have had very little satisfaction of tying a finger bone here and a hominid branch there to the flow of Andonites, Sangiks, Nodites, Adamites, and Andites described in the papers.

As in all other areas, we are the blind men feeling different parts of an elephant, and describing the animal quite differently, while the revelators see from above the whole picture. We pick up a piece of something here, figure some relationship between DNA patterns there, and do the best we can with what chance, nature, time, and ancestors falling into crevices reveals to us from the past. Even with the box-top picture, it's not always easy to see where a piece of a puzzle might fit in, when you hardly have any pieces at all.

Ötzi the Ice Man. Death: Kazuhiko Sano | National Geographic. Mummy: Wired.

As if to supplant our parental affection for their alteration of the status of Adam and Eve (while keeping the beings themselves, in new legend), the revelators described the first two human beings, Andon and Fonta. Although we are given this carefully-crafted new narrative of the first beings to attain human levels of sentience on our world and suitable attendant celestial ceremony, we are later informed, in Overcontrol of Evolution:

Even the loss of Andon and Fonta before they had offspring, though delaying human evolution, would not have prevented it. Subsequent to the appearance of Andon and Fonta and before the mutating human potentials of animal life were exhausted, there evolved no less than seven thousand favorable strains which could have achieved some sort of human type of development. And many of these better stocks were subsequently assimilated by the various branches of the expanding human species. [Emphasis added.]

Andon and Fonta were unique in being — by lottery as it were — the first spiritual-capacity creatures on Urantia, but they were far from the only possible first. Unless we just happen some day to uncover that very cave in which Andon and Fonta died, we are not likely to be able to pin-point the origins of the Andonites with much accuracy.

Similarly, the entire Sangic race division began, unusually (and from a cynical perspective, unbelievably) in one family, so they tell us:

There were many unique features of the Urantia life experiment, but the two outstanding episodes were the appearance of the Andonic race prior to the evolution of the six colored peoples and the later simultaneous appearance of the Sangik mutants in a single family. Urantia is the first world in Satania where the six colored races sprang from the same human family. They ordinarily arise in diversified strains from independent mutations within the prehuman animal stock and usually appear on earth one at a time and successively over long periods of time, beginning with the red man and passing on down through the colors to indigo.

In the random encounter between fossil-tweazing anthropologists and bits of human remains not obliterated by Nature, in parsing out the fragments of the DNA we understand so little, we might have been lucky enough to be somewhat able to parse out six races had they appeared in different places across eons. It's not likely we'll stumble across a specific half-million-year-old village graveyard containing nineteen distinguishable sets of remains exhibiting six different mutational mainfestations. All we can find is their occasional descendants' remains, widely separated, generations later, partially admixed with innumerable other strains. The Blue man was assimilated into other and later strains, There is nothing but some giantism in some places to suggest the Orange man who were eradicated by the Green, who were themselves absorbed into the Indigo.

Also, Nature is merciless with flesh. Bones can't tell us someone's skin was orange or green.

For anthropological and prehistoric understanding, the most useful information may be the more recent.

The dispersal patterns of the Andites appear to coincide, physically and culturally, with the appearance of the Nordic and Indic Aryans, and possible pockets of Adamic uplift everywhere. These are the troubled troublemaker remnants of the Caligastia rebellion and the Adamic failure, the super-evolutionarily-added elements of humankind, which have no possible evolutionary explanation.

Click for source page

The Nodites may be somewhat naturally explicable as they were, physically considered, enhanced Andonites — some fashion of clone, we might infer, but genetically similar enough to be considered a beneficent mutation from existing evolutionary mortals.

The extraordinarily superior Adamites, however, would appear suddenly 35,000 years ago. Even under the "beneficent mutant" theory, that would be one heck of a beneficial mutation. However modeled on existing DNA it was, it was effectively the mutation from outer space. But, again, we have less and less of human remains to go by as we go back in time; and the relatively small initial Adamite population, while it left a huge footprint on human biology and history, is as subject to merciless Nature as any other population regarding leaving us their biological record. Identifying the early Adamites, as far as I know, is beyond any current anthropological discovery.

They did admix with the Nodites, significantly, and eventually the superevolutionary Andite strains more or less permeated the world's evolutionary populations, which populations themselves continued to mix with one another. We are unlikely to be able to trace backward to anything like a good picture of the millennia-old Adamic origins, given only the utterly blended populations we have today, and the pitifully tiny records we have been fortunate to discover.

As far as I can tell, the Urantia Papers give us mostly information which we could never discover on our own, not for scientific curiosity, although it stimulates that well enough, but for the understanding of our origins, our world's overcontrol and watchcare, from the earliest power controllers, to the resignation of the Life Carriers upon the arrival of human sentience, to the succession of revelations of divine truth.

Perhaps some revealing burial mound under ancient sands will one day confirm some aspects of what the Urantia Papers say about the earliest Adamites, but without something that strong, we will only have the Papers as a broad box-top picture for understanding all the little pieces we get.

Human family tree chart at SquareCircles.com

Mass Extinction 250 Million Years Ago Sparked Dramatic Shift To Complex Marine Ecosystems

The earth experienced its biggest mass extinction about 250 million years ago, an event that wiped out an estimated 95% of marine species and 70% of land species. New research shows that this mass extinction did more than eliminate species: it fundamentally changed the basic ecology of the world's oceans.

Ecologically simple marine communities were largely displaced by complex communities. Furthermore, this apparently abrupt shift set a new pattern that has continued ever since. It reflects the current dominance of higher-metabolism, mobile organisms (such as snails, clams and crabs) that actually go out and find their own food and the decreased diversity of older groups of low-metabolism, stationary organisms (such as lamp shells and sea lilies) that filter nutrients from the water. ...

Lidgard added, "When Pete walked into my office with his preliminary results, I simply couldn't believe them. Paleontologists had long recognized that ecosystems had become more complex, from the origin of single-celled bacteria to the present day. But we had little idea of just how profoundly this one mass extinction--but not the others like it--changed the marine world."

250,000,000 Years Ago Siberian Traps
The Siberian Traps were the largest volcanic eruption in Earth history and they occured right at the same time as the largest extinction event in Earth history. The massive volcanic eruptions and lava flows lasted at full intensity for about a million years. It is estimated that approximately 95% of all species were wiped out. ...

Initially sulfur aerosols and volcanic ash envelop the earth's atmosphere blocking out sunlight and sending surface temperatures plunging . Ash and sulphur aerosols can remain in the upper atmosphere for 100's to 1000's of years which would be enough to cause a significant glaciation. At the end of the Permian period the biggest ever drop in sea level in history occurred. Two scientists named >Holser and Magaritz in 1987 proposed that such a marine regression could be caused by a large scale glaciation. ...

Permian–Triassic extinction event
The Permian–Triassic (P–Tr) extinction event, informally known as the Great Dying, was an extinction event that occurred 252.28 Ma (million years) ago, forming the boundary between the Permian and Triassic geologic periods, as well as the Paleozoic and Mesozoic eras. It is the Earth's most severe known extinction event, with up to 96% of all marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species becoming extinct. It is the only known mass extinction of insects. Some 57% of all families and 83% of all genera became extinct. Because so much biodiversity was lost, the recovery of life on Earth took significantly longer than after any other extinction event, possibly up to 10 million years.

Researchers have variously suggested that there were from one to three distinct pulses, or phases, of extinction. There are several proposed mechanisms for the extinctions; the earlier phase was probably due to gradual environmental change, while the latter phase has been argued to be due to a catastrophic event. Suggested mechanisms for the latter include large or multiple bolide impact events, increased volcanism, coal/gas fires and explosions from the Siberian Traps, and sudden release of methane clathrate from the sea floor; gradual changes include sea-level change, anoxia, increasing aridity, and a shift in ocean circulation driven by climate change.

According to the Geologic Time Scale on Wikipedia, the P-T event was 251 million years ago.

According to the Marine Life Era paper, "250,000,000 years ago witnessed the appearance of the fish family, the vertebrates, one of the most important steps in all prehuman evolution." This was in the period which "has become known to your researchers as the Devonian."

According to the Geologic Time Scale on Wikipedia, the Devonian began 420 million years ago.

The P-T devastation is described in the last section of the Marine Life Era paper:

This age was one of great life impoverishment. Thousands of marine species perished, and life was hardly yet established on land. This was a time of biologic tribulation, the age when life nearly vanished from the face of the earth and from the depths of the oceans. Toward the close of the long marine-life era there were more than one hundred thousand species of living things on earth. At the close of this period of transition less than five hundred had survived.

The peculiarities of this new period were not due so much to the cooling of the earth’s crust or to the long absence of volcanic action as to an unusual combination of commonplace and pre-existing influences — restrictions of the seas and increasing elevation of enormous land masses. The mild marine climate of former times was disappearing, and the harsher continental type of weather was fast developing.

And this paper describes the Permian, and the Paleozoic Era, as concluding only about 160 million years ago.

I've long known the "known" geologic time and the Urantia Papers' geologic time scale differed. I've never really taken the time to research exactly how much difference there really is. Or why this should be. If the Papers are to be credited, either they used the "knowledge of the time" and the scale of epochs has since been modified, or our measurements of time are off by an amount which the Papers are helpfully correcting. The latter explanation would suggest, of course, some problem with our assumptions about radioactive decay (the yardstick of geologic time).

And lo and behold, in his article, History of Life, I find one Dr. Chris M. Halvorson parses an explanation from Papers 29 and 42.

PDF at UBFellowship.org, with comparative chart
Web page without chart

"The Master Physical Controllers, specifically, the energy transformers [link], have regulated radioactivity (42:4.10) over the span of geologic time, according to the evolution plan of the Life Carriers. In the past, the rates of radioactive decay were greater than the present rates. Therefore, radiometric dates, which are determined by assessing the degree of decay, overestimate the crystallization age of a mineral in a rock, especially if the mineral was formed in the remote past. For the oldest rocks on the surface of the earth, the radiometric dates are about four times greater than the actual dates."

I must admit, Dr. Halvorson's extrapolations seem oblique to me. I didn't find any "according to the plan of the life carriers" reference involving Energy Transformers modifying radioactive rates of decay, nor any reason to assume there was any such claimed variance in the rate of decay, or any other substantive modifications of the normal workings of the universe, either at the behest of the Life Carriers or for any other reason, save that they are personally on inhabited worlds and help "insulate the planets against the powerful energy streams passing between gigantic planetary and starry neighbors." But Paper 29 is emphasis-in-the-original clear that "They can and do change the physical form of the energies of space."

So, maybe, Dr. Halvorson. I'm not a Dr. and I don't play one on TV.

By Dr. Halvorson's chart, the differences between current scientific and the Papers' time scale is none in the recent, and increasing (up to 4x) by the earliest geologic strata. Although the difference shown in his chart is not a steady progression, the variations from a straight line or curve could be within the margin of error in geologic terms (which margin increases the further back in time one goes). Dr. Halvorson began his paper noting that the time periods are only approximations, and there is not exacting agreement among all geologists on all points.

So, it may simply be that the rate of radioactive decay is over-estimated in the (geologically) long term. Perhaps a smooth change of rate based on, I don't know, the expansion of the universe, rather than an interventionist variation by Power Directors.

This is the kind of noodling a knucklehead non-scientist like me can come up with.

My search for any other research relating the Papers' timescale with science's, alas, just turned up more copies of Dr. Halvorson's paper. And I'm not quite prepared to start researching the possibilities of mis-estimations of long-term radioactive decay rates, right now.