The Sudden Appearance of Modern Humans

How do evolutionists describe the "sudden" appearance of advanced humans in history? One evolutionists in Scientific American describes how in his imagination.

In the December, 2008 Scientific American, Peter Ward wrote an article entitled “The Future of Man--How Will Evolution Change Humans?”

Creationists would find the article interesting because it essentially compliments creationist models of the existence of humans. With the bias that human ancestry comes from parents Adam and Eve, Ward describes races of people deriving from one population of humans. Many times he uses the word evolution when in fact he is only speaking of natural selection observations. For example he talks about lactose intolerant peoples in China compared to Denmark. He describes this has evolution when natural selection could easily be noted.

I think it is interesting how Ward describes human evolution in the past 10,000 years as "evolving 100 times." Once again the evolutionary bias is at work. Biblical creation states that the first humans were created and soon thereafter were found working in fields and raising animals.

Harpending and Hawks’s team estimated that over the past 10,000 years humans have evolved as much as 100 times faster than at any other time since the split of the earliest hominid from the ancestors of modern chimpanzees. The team attributed the quickening pace to the variety of environments humans moved into and the changes in living conditions brought about by agriculture and cities. It was not farming per se or the changes in the landscape that conversion of wild habitat to tamed fields brought about but the often lethal combination of poor sanitation, novel diet and emerging diseases (from other humans as well as domesticated animals). Although some researchers have expressed reservations about these estimates, the basic point seems clear: humans are first-class evolvers.

Stephen Jay Gould and others postulated 30 years ago the theory of punctuated equilibrium. This theory states that evolution did not occur in a gradual linear procession but that there were time periods of evolution on speed. This theory helped explain the evolution's embarrassment of a incomplete fossil record. It appears that Peter Ward's article is also helping address an evolutionary embarrassment and that is the sudden appearance of advanced humans on the evolutionary scene {sic}