Brains Are Way Too Slow to Explain Fast Recall and Thinking

Scientists have long advanced the claim that the human brain is the storage place for memories and the source of human thinking. But such claims are speech customs of scientists rather than things they have proven. There are numerous reasons for doubting such claims. One big reason is that the proteins in synapses have an average lifetime of only a few weeks, which is only a thousandth of the length of time (50 years or more) that humans can store memories. Another reason is that neurons and synapses are way too noisy to explain very accurate human memory recall, such as when a Hamlet actor flawlessly recites 1476 lines. Another general reason can be stated as follows: the human brain is too slow to account for very fast thinking and very fast memory retrieval.

Consider the question of memory retrieval. Given a prompt such as a person's name or a very short description of a person, topic or event, humans can accurately retrieve detailed information about such a topic in one or two seconds. We see this ability constantly displayed on the long-running television series Jeopardy. On that show, contestants will be given a short prompt such as “This opera by Rossini had a disastrous premier,” and within a second after hearing that, a contestant may click a buzzer and then a second later give an answer mentioning The Barber of Seville.  Similarly, you can play with a well-educated person a game you can call “Who Was I?” You just pick random names of actual people from the arts or history, and require the person to identify the person within about two seconds. Very frequently a person will succeed. We can imagine a session of such a game, occurring in only ten seconds:

John: Marconi.

Mary: Invented the radio.

John: Magellan.

Mary: First to sail around the globe.

John: Peter Falk.

Mary: A TV actor.

We can also imagine a visual version of this game, in which you identify random pictures of any of 1000 famous people. The answers would often be just as quick.

The question is: how could a brain possibly achieve retrieval and recognition so quickly? Let us suppose that the information about some person is stored in some particular group of neurons somewhere in the brain. Finding that exact tiny storage location would be like finding a needle in a haystack, or like finding just the right index card in a swimming pool full of index cards. It would also be like opening the door of some vast library with a million volumes and instantly finding the exact volume you were looking for.

There are certain design features that a system can have that will allow for very rapid retrieval of information. One of these features is an indexing system. An indexing system requires a position notation system, in which the exact position of some piece of information can be recorded. An ordinary textbook has both of these things. The position notation system is the page numbering system. The indexing system is the index at the back of the book. But the brain has neither of these features. There is nothing in the brain like a position notation system by which the exact position of some tiny group of neurons can be identified. The brain has no neuron numbers, and a brain has no coordinate system similar to street names in a city or Cartesian coordinates in a grid. Lacking any such position notation system, the brain has no indexing system (something that requires a position notation system).

So how is it that humans are able to recall things instantly? It seems that the brain has nothing like the speed features that would make such a thing possible. You can't get around such a difficulty by claiming that each memory is stored everywhere in the brain. There would be two versions of such an idea. The first would be that each memory is entirely stored in every little spot of the brain. That makes no more sense than the idea of a library in which each page contains the information in every page of every book. The second version of the idea would be that each memory is broken up and scattered across the brain. But such an idea actually worsens the problem of explaining memory retrieval, as it would only be harder to retrieve a memory if it is scattered all over your brain rather than in a single little spot of your brain.

We also cannot get around this navigation problem by imagining that when you are asked a question, your brain scans all of its stored information. That doesn't correspond to what happens in our minds. For example, if someone asks me, "Who was Teddy Roosevelt," my mind goes instantly to my memories of Teddy Roosevelt, and I don't experience little flashes of knowledge about countless other people, as if my brain were scanning all of its memories.  

When we consider the issue of decoding encoded information, we have an additional strong reason for thinking that the brain is way too slow to account for instantaneous recall of learned information.  In order for knowledge to be stored in a brain, it would have to be encoded or translated into some type of neural state. Then, when the memory is recalled, this information would have to be decoded: it would have to be translated from some stored neural state into a thought held in the mind. This requirement is the most gigantic difficulty for any claim that brains store memories. Although they typically maintain that memories are encoded and decoded in the brain, no neuroscientist has ever specified a detailed theory of how such encoding and decoding could work. Besides the huge difficulty that such a system of encoding and decoding would require a kind of "miracle of design" we would never expect for a brain to ever have naturally acquired (something a million times more complicated than the genetic code), there is the difficulty that the decoding would take quite a bit of time, a length of time greater than the time it takes to recall something. 

So suppose I have some memory of who George Patton was, stored in my brain as some kind of synapse or neural states, after that information had somehow been translated into synapse or neural states using some encoding scheme.  Then when someone asks, "Who was George Patton?" I would have to not only find this stored memory in my brain (like finding a needle in a haystack), but also translate these synapse or neural states back into an idea, so I could instantly answer, "The general in charge of the Third Army in World War II."  The time required for the decoding of the stored information would be an additional reason why instantaneous recall could never be happening if you were reading information stored in your brain.  The decoding of neurally stored memories would presumably require protein synthesis, but the synthesis of proteins requires minutes of time. 

There is another reason for doubting that the brain is fast enough to account for human mental activity. The reason is that the transmission of signals in a brain is way, way too slow to account for the very rapid speed of human thought and human memory retrieval.

Information travels about in a modern computer at a speed thousands of time faster than nerve signals travel in the human brain. If you type in "speed of brain signals" into the Google search engine, you will see in large letters the number 286 miles per hour, which is a speed of 128 meters per second. This is one of many examples of dubious information which sometimes pops up in a large font at the top of the Google search results. The particular number in question is an estimate made by an anonymous person who quotes no sources, and one who merely claims that brain signals "can" travel at such a speed, not that such a speed is the average speed of brain signals. There is a huge difference between the average speed at which some distance will be traveled and the maximum speed that part of that distance can be traveled (for example, while you may briefly drive at 40 miles per hour while traveling through Los Angeles, your average speed will be much, much less because of traffic lights). 

A more common figure you will often see quoted is that nerve signals can travel in the human brain at a rate of about 100 meters per second. But that is the maximum speed at which such a nerve signal can travel, when a nerve signal is traveling across what is called a myelinated axon. Below we see a diagram of a neuron. The axons are the tube-like parts in the diagram below.

The less sophisticated diagram below makes it clear that axons make up only part of the length that brain signals must travel.

There are two types of axons: myelinated axons and non-myelinated axons (myelinated axons having a sheath-like covering shown in blue in the diagram above). According to this article, non-myelinated axons transmit nerve signals at a slower speed of only .5-2 meters per second (roughly one meter per second). Near the end of this article is a table of measured speed of nerve signals traveling across axons in different animals; and in that table we see a variety of speeds varying between .3 meters per second (only about a foot per second) and about 100 meters per second. 

But from the mere fact that nerve signals can travel across myelinated axons at a maximum speed of about 100 meters per second, we are not at all entitled to conclude that nerve signals typically travel from one region of the brain to another at 100 meters per second. For nerve signals must also travel across dendrites and synapses, which we can see in the diagrams above. It turns out that nerve signal transmission is much slower across dendrites and synapses than across axons. To give an analogy, the axons are like a road on which you can travel fast, and the dendrites and synapses are like traffic lights or stop signs that slow down your speed.

According to neuroscientist Nikolaos C Aggelopoulos, there is an estimate of 0.5 meters per second for the speed of nerve transmission across dendrites. That is a speed 200 times slower than the nerve transmission speed commonly quoted for myelinated axons. According to Bratislav D. Stefanovic, MD, the conduction speed across dendrites is between .1 and 15 meters per second. Such a speed bump seems more important when we consider a quote by UCLA neurophysicist Mayank Mehta: "Dendrites make up more than 90 percent of neural tissue."  Given such a percentage, and such a conduction speed across dendrites, it would seem that the average transmission speed of a brain must be only a small fraction of the 100 meter-per-second transmission in axons. 

Besides this “speed bump” of the slower nerve transmission speed across dendrites, there is another “speed bump”: the slower nerve transmission speed across synapses (which you can see in the top “close up” circle of the first diagram above). There are two types of synapses: chemical synapses and electrical synapses. The parts of the brain allegedly involved in thought and memory have almost entirely chemical synapses. (The sources here and here and here and here and here refer to electrical synapses as "rare."  The neurosurgeon Jeffrey Schweitzer refers here to electrical synapses as "rare."  The paper here tells us on page 401 that electrical synapses -- also called gap junctions -- have only "been described very rarely" in the neocortex of the brain. This paper says that electrical synapses are a "small minority of synapses in the brain.")

We know of a reason why transmission of a nerve signal across chemical synapses should be relatively sluggish. When a nerve signal comes to the head of a chemical synapse, it can no longer travel across the synapse electrically. It must travel by neurotransmitter molecules diffusing across the gap of the synapse. This is much, much slower than what goes on in an axon.

Diagram of a synapse

There is a scientific term used for the delay caused when a nerve signal travels across a synapse. The delay is called the synaptic delay. According to this 1965 scientific paper, most synaptic delays are about .5 milliseconds, but there are also quite a few as long as 2 to 4 milliseconds. A more recent (and probably more reliable) estimate was made in a 2000 paper studying the prefrontal monkey cortex. That paper says, "the synaptic delay, estimated from the y-axis intercepts of the linear regressions, was 2.29" milliseconds. It is very important to realize that this synaptic delay is not the total delay caused by a nerve signal as it passes across different synapses. The synaptic delay is the delay caused each and every time that the nerve signal passes across a synapse. 

Such a delay may not seem like too much of a speed bump. But consider just how many such "synaptic delays" would have to occur for, say, a brain signal to travel from one region of the brain to another. It has been estimated that the brain contains 100 trillion synapses (a neuron may have thousands of them).  So it would seem that for a neural signal to travel from one part of the brain to another part of the brain that is a distance away only 5% or 10% of the length of the brain, that such a signal would have to endure many thousands of such "synaptic delays" requiring a total of quite a few seconds of time. 

An average male human brain has about 1300 cubic centimeters. Let's try to calculate the minimum number of synapses that would have to be sequentially traversed in order for a neural signal to travel through a volume of only 1 cubic centimeter (.39 of an inch). 

If there are 100 trillion synapses in a brain of 1300 cubic centimeters,  then the number of synapses in this volume of 1 cubic centimeter would be roughly 100 trillion divided by 1300, which gives 77 billion. (This page gives an estimate of 418 billion synapses per cubic centimeter, but notes that estimates of synapse density vary; so let's just stick with the smaller number.)

It would be a big mistake to assume that a neural signal would have to sequentially traverse all those 77 billion synapses. To traverse the shortest path across this area, the signal would have to merely pass through a number of synapses that is roughly the cube root of the total number of synapses in this volume (the number that you would have to multiply by itself three times to get the total number of synapses in this volume).  Similarly, if we imagine a ball with 64 equally spaced connected nodes, including nodes in the center, something rather like the ball shown below,  then it is clear that the shortest path between any one node at the outer edge of the ball to another node on the opposite end of the ball would require that you traverse a number of nodes that is at least the cube root of 64, which is 4. 

So to roughly compute the shortest series of synapses that would have to be traversed for a brain signal to travel though this 1 cubic centimeter volume, we can take the cube root of 77 billion (the number that multiplied by itself three different times equals 77 billion).  The cube root of 77 billion is 4254.  So it seems that to traverse the shortest path through a volume of 1 cubic centimeter containing 77 billion synapses, traveling a distance of about 1 cubic centimeter, a neural signal would have to pass sequentially through a path containing at least 4000 different synapses (along with other neural elements such as dendrites).  

To calculate how long this traversal would take across a 1 cubic centimeter region of the brain, considering only the dominant delay factor of synaptic delays,  we can simply multiply this number of 4000 by the synaptic delay (the time needed for the signal to cross a single synaptic gap).  Using the smallest estimate of the synaptic delay (an estimate from 1965 of about .5 millisecond), and ignoring the more recent year 2000 estimate of 2.29 milliseconds for the synaptic delay, this gives us a total time of 4000 multiplied by .5 millisecond.  This gives us a total time of two seconds (2000 milliseconds) for how long it would take a nerve signal to travel across one cubic centimeter of brain tissue.   The velocity of nerve signal speed we get from this calculation is a speed of less than 1 centimeter per second (it's actually a speed of a half a centimeter per second).  

Take careful note that this speed is more than 10,000 times slower than the "100 meters per second" figure that is given by some experts when they are asked about how fast a brain signal travels. Such an expert answer is very misleading, because it only calculates the fastest speed that a nerve signal can travel inside the brain, while it is traveling through the fastest tiny parts of the brain (myelinated axons),  not the average speed of such a brain signal as it passes through different types of brain tissue and many different synapses. It turns out that because of the "speed bump' of synaptic delays, the average speed of a nerve signal traveling though the brain should be about 20,000 times slower than "100 meters per second" -- a slowpoke speed of about a half of a centimeter per second.  That's half the maximum speed at which a snail can move.  If I had used the year 2000 estimate of the synaptic delay (2.29 milliseconds), I would have got a speed estimate for brain signals that is only about .125 centimeters per second, which is one eighth the speed of a moving snail. 

This calculation is of the utmost relevance to the question of whether the brain is fast enough to account for extremely rapid human thinking and instantaneous memory retrieval.  Based on what I have discussed, it seems that signal transmission across regions of the brain should be very slow -- way too slow to account for very fast thinking and instantaneous recall and recognition.  

Many a human can calculate as fast as he or she can recall. For example, the Guinness world record web site tells us, "Scott Flansburg of Phoenix, Arizona, USA, correctly added a randomly selected two-digit number (38) to itself 36 times in 15 seconds without the use of a calculator on 27 April 2000 on the set of Guinness World Records in Wembley, UK."  Such speed cannot be explained as the activity of a brain in which signals literally move at a less than a snail's pace. 

To give another example, In 2004 Alexis Lemaire was able to calculate in his head the 13th root of this number:

85,877,066,894,718,045, 602,549,144,850,158,599,202,771,247,748,960,878,023,151, 390,314,284,284,465,842,798,373,290,242,826,571,823,153, 045,030,300,932,591,615,405,929,429,773,640,895,967,991,430,381,763,526,613,357,308,674,592,650,724,521,841,103,664,923,661,204,223

In only 77 seconds, according to the BBC, Lemaire was able to state that it is the number 2396232838850303 which when multiplied by itself 13 times equals the number above.  Here we have calculation speed far beyond anything that could be possible if calculation is done by a brain in which signals travel at less than a snail's pace.  

In this matter it seems our neuroscientists have acted as if they were afraid to put two and two together. They have measured the speed of brain signal transmission in axons, dendrites and synapses. But I find a curious avoidance in neuroscience literature of the basic topic of the average time it should take a signal to travel across one region of the brain to another. It's like our neuroscientists are afraid to do the math which might lead them to the conclusion that signals cannot travel from one random brain region to another nearby region at a rate of more than an inch a second. For if they were to do such math, their claim that brains are the source of our thinking and recall would be debunked.  

Echoing part of what I have said here, a textbook says "the cumulative synaptic delay may exceed the propagation time along the axons." But why aren't scientists more explicit, by telling us that this cumulative synaptic delay will actually exceed the propagation time along the axons by a factor of more than 1000, leading to "snail's pace" brain signals? Another source vaguely tells us that "cumulative synaptic delay would affect the speed of information processing at every level of cognitive complexity" without mentioning what a crippling effect this would be if our brains were doing thinking and recall. 

I may note whenever a neuroscientist answers a question such as "how fast do brain signals travel" by mentioning only the fastest rate at which a brain signal can travel through the fastest little parts of the brain (through a myelinated axon), such as neuroscientists typically do, such an answer is either deceptive or very clumsy. It's like answering the question "how fast can you travel across Manhattan" by citing the maximum speed limit on any Manhattan cross-street such as 42nd Street, without considering all the delays caused by traffic lights.  Synaptic delays are comparable to traffic light delays, and they are a factor that must be calculated when realistically considering how fast a brain signal typically travels inside the brain.  

It is interesting that both this 1979 scientific paper and this 2008 scientific paper estimate the number of synapses in the human cortex as being about a billion per cubic millimeter, which equals a trillion per cubic centimeter.  This is 10+ times greater than the 77 billion per cubic centimeter figure I was using above. The more synapses, the more speed bumps, and the slower the brain signal. If I had done the brain speed calculation specifically for cortex tissue (the supposed center of higher thought), the calculation would have come up with a brain signal speed very much slower than the  half a centimeter per second result that was reached. 

To sum up,  we have several gigantic reasons for thinking that brains must be too slow to account for instantaneous recall:

(1) Finding the exact little spot where a memory was stored would be like finding a needle in a haystack, given the lack of any indexing system or position coordinate system in the brain.
(2) Decoding stored memories from encoded neural states would take additional time that would make neural memory recall much less than instantaneous.
(3) The "snail's pace" speed of brain signals (greatly slowed by synaptic delays) would prevent an instantaneous recall of memories and stored information such as humans often have. 

The slowness of the brain is one of many neuroscience reasons for believing that the brain cannot be the storage place of our memories, and cannot be the source of our thinking and consciousness.  Human mentality must be primarily a psychic or spiritual or non-biological reality rather than a neural reality. 

I can imagine various ways in which a person could try to rebut some of the argumentation in this post, Someone could simply say that we know that signals must travel very fast in a brain, because humans are able to recall things instantly or recognize things instantly. But we do not at all know that recognition or recall are actually effects produced by the brain, and we have good reasons for doubting that they are (such as the short lifetimes of synapse proteins and the fact that the high noise levels in brains and synapses is incompatible with the fact that humans such as Hamlet actors can flawlessly recall very large bodies of memorized information). So we cannot use the speed of recognition or recall to deduce the speed of brain signals. 

Another way you could try to rebut this post would be to cite some expert who estimated how fast signals move about in a brain.  But further analysis would generally show that such an estimate was not derived from a calculation of all the low-level factors (such as synaptic delay) affecting the speed of brain signals, but was simply a calculation based on the assumption that brains must pass about signals at the speed at which humans recognize or recall things or respond to things.  We cannot use such circular reasoning or "begging the question" when considering this matter. The only intelligent way to calculate the speed of a brain signal is to do a calculation based on low-level things (such as synaptic delays) that we definitely know, rather than starting out making grand assumptions about the mind and brain that are unproven and actually discredited by the very low-level facts (such as the length of synaptic delays)  that should be examined. 

Although neuroscientists typically claim that synapses are where memories are stored in the brain, there are four ways in which the characteristics of synapses are telling us that thinking and memory is not brain-caused:

(1) Synapses show no signs of having stored information, and their main structural feature (the disorganized little blob or bag that is the synaptic knob or head) seems like pretty much the last type of structure we'd expect to see in something storing information for decades. 
(2) Synapses are unstable units undergoing spontaneous remodeling, and synapses consist of proteins with average lifetimes of only a few weeks, only a thousandth of the maximum length of time that humans store memories.
(3) Synapses are very noisy, so noisy that one expert tells us that a signal passing through a synapse "makes it across the synapse with a probability like one half, or even less," making synapses unsuitable as reliable transmitters of memory information that humans such as Wagnerian tenors can recall abundantly with 100% accuracy. Given such noise levels, which would seem to have the effect of rapidly extinguishing brain signals,  there would seem to be good reason for suspecting that it is effectively impossible for brain signals to travel more than a centimeter or an inch without vanishing or becoming mere tiny traces of their original strength. 
(4) The most common type of synapse is slow,  and although the synaptic delay in a single synapse is only about a millisecond,  when we calculate the cumulative synaptic delay we find that brain signals must be slower than a snail's pace, way too slow to explain instantaneous recall and fast thinking. 

In fact, if some designer of the human body had specifically designed something to tell us (by its characteristics) that our brains cannot be the source of our fast thinking and instantaneous memory, it's rather hard to imagine anything that would do a better job of telling us that than our signal-slowing, very noisy, unstable synapses.  Our synapses are telling us (by their characteristics) that thinking and memory is not brain-caused, but our neuroscientists (trapped in ideological enclaves of dogma and reigning speech customs) aren't listening to what our synapses are telling us. 

Postscript: I may note that you do not get a much faster estimate for the speed of brain signals if you calculate the speed from one neuron to the nearest neuron, rather than the speed through a cubic centimeter. The speed is the same snail's pace I have calculated, because the signal will always have to pass through synapses that are the dominant slowing factor. 

There is an entirely different method you could use to calculate the speed of signals inside the brain, using not estimates of the number of synapses per cubic centimeter, but instead the average distance between neurons. This paper mentions an average distance of about 26 micrometers between neurons in a rat cortex, and it says, "we believe that the parameter of 26 µm [micrometers] average distance between neurons is also a valid assumption in the human brain." I assume that by "average distance between neurons" this source means the average distance between two adjacent neurons. Below are some calculation figures that we get if we use this average distance figure, and we use a synaptic delay estimate that is about the average of the .5 millisecond and 2.29 millisecond estimates quoted above. 

Average distance between neurons in micrometers	26
This distance in centimeters	0.0026
Synaptic delay in milliseconds	1
Time needed to cross distance above (in seconds), considering only the synaptic delay	.001
Total distance that could be traversed by a brain signal in a second	1000*0.0026 centimeter=2.6 centimeter
Signal speed between adjacent neurons in centimeters per second	2.6

Using this method, we get a result in the same ballpark as the result calculated by my first method.  The first method found that brain signals travel at a rate of about .5 centimeters per second, and this method finds that brain signals travel at about 2.6 centimeters per second, which is about an inch per second.  Either way, this speed is way too slow to account for instantaneous recall and very rapid thinking. 

A most-realistic estimate of brain signal speed would also take into account two other factors ignored in the calculations above (and also ignored by neuroscientists when discussing the speed of brain signals):
(1) The noise in synapses, and the fact that in the cortex, signal transmission across synapses is highly unreliable. A scientific paper says, "In the cortex, individual synapses seem to be extremely unreliable: the probability of transmitter release in response to a single action potential can be as low as 0.1 or lower."  Considered over a large section of brain tissue, this unreliability would be equivalent to a big additional slowing factor, and might well lead to speed estimates much lower than I have made here. 
(2) Synaptic fatigue,  a temporary inability of the head or vesicle of a synapse to send a signal, because of a depletion of neurotransmitters. Referring to synaptic fatigue, one paper states the following:

By contrast, following neurotransmission, synaptic vesicle membranes are internalized within seconds, and the recycled synaptic vesicles can be reloaded with neurotransmitter within 1–2 minutes.

This paper mentions a much shorter "timescale of vesicle recovery" of 800 milliseconds, but even that would be a large slowing factor, making it all the more unlikely that brain signals inside the cortex can regularly travel about at much more than about a centimeter per second. 

There are two other factors I didn't mention in my original post, both tending to further slow the speed of a signal from one end of the brain to another:
(1) Tortuosity: the fact that a shortest path between two different brain areas is typically a sinuous, snake-like path rather than a straight line (tortuosity is the technical term for such a thing).
(2) Folding of cerebral tissue: the surface area of cerebral tissue is much larger than you might think by looking at the top of a head; and a brain signal can't travel a straight line between these folds.   

So below is a list of all of the factors that must be considered when considering the true speed of signals between two opposite areas of the brain:
(1) The speed of transmission through dendrites, which can be 200 or more times slower than the "100 meters per second" estimate based on transmission through axons.
(2) Synaptic delays, which end up being a huge slowing factor because so many synapses must be traversed.
(3) Synaptic unreliability or noise, the fact that a signal is often transmitted with only between 10% to 50% likelihood, a factor that is typically ignored but which has a huge impact on effective speed.
(4) Synaptic fatigue, the fact that a synapse will so often need a rest period after firing, a period that can be more than a minute.
(5) Tortuosity, the fact that nerve signals must travel through sinuous paths that are not straight lines.
(6) Folding of cortex tissue, a further slowing factor. 

Every one of these factors is ignored by 95% of discussions of brain signal speed in the popular press. 

A 2011 LiveScience.com article is entitled "Speed of Brain Cell Chatter Clocked for the First Time." Buried within the article is a fact that corroborates what I have said in this post. The article discusses an experiment in which scientists clocked signal speed in mouse brains, by tagging neurotransmitters with a fluorescent protein.  The article reports, "On average, it takes about five seconds for the cells to collect up the neurotransmitters and this timeframe didn't vary much between a cell's different synapses." This is the only speed figure given by the article. Since the article was talking about a mouse brain (no larger than about two centimeters across), this is exactly the "snail's pace" signal transmission rate that I have claimed in this post, a pace of roughly one centimeter per second. 

Four Near-Death Experiences of the Nineteenth Century

Ever since Raymond Moody's best-selling 1975 book Life after Life, the common characteristics of a near-death experience have been well-known. A particular near-death experience may have between 1 or more of these characteristics. The characteristics include:

• a sensation of floating out of the body, which may include seeming to view the body from above;
• feelings of peace, joy or tranquility;
• a life-review in which previous life events are reviewed or relived in some sped-up manner;
• a passage through a tunnel;
• an encounter with a very bright light or a “being of light” or a light that is somehow sensed to be numinous or a source of thought or feeling;
• an experience of seeing some heavenly or supernatural realm;
• an experience of seeming to see one or more deceased relatives;
• an experience of being told that you must “go back” and continue to live your regular life;
• an experience of having heightened consciousness, mentality or perception.

Could it be that such experiences are just a kind of modern myth that arose about 45 years ago, and that people continue to have such experiences because they are kind of “following a cultural script”? One way to test that idea is to see whether there are any accounts of such experiences very long before the publication of Life After Life.

As it happens, a few nineteenth century books contain accounts that have some of the characteristics listed above. One such book is the 1873 book Biography of Mrs J.H. Conant the World's Medium of the Nineteenth Century by Allen Putnam. The book can be read in full here. On page 36 of the book we are told Mrs. Conant received a bad overdose that caused a doctor to declare that “she must die.” Mrs. Conant then fell into a “deathly stupor.” She then experienced a near-death experience described below:

“Nature rallied, and she rapidly recovered. When she regained full consciousness, she remembered that she seemed to have been in some beautiful place, she thought was heaven. Here she met the mother who left her in earlier years, and when she wept and begged to be allowed to stay with her, her parent gently but firmly told her that she must return to earth life — that she had yet a mission to perform — and her poor tempest-tossed bark was again obliged to put to sea from out the haven of peace where it hoped to rest; but blessed were the assurances she received, that in due time she should again and finally cast anchor amid the golden sand that sparkles in the river of Paradise.”

So we have in this 1873 account three of the common characteristics of a near-death experience: a trip to a heaven-like place, a meeting with a dead relative, and a communication that the person must return to earthly life because the time was not right.

Another account of a near-death experience can be found in

the 1847 book "Autobiographical memoir of Sir John Barrow, Bart., late of the admirality." On page 398 of that book we have (from a letter by Beaufort) an account of an Admiral Beaufort who almost drowned at sea. The account is repeated on pages 176 to 179 of the 1863 book  From Matter to Spirit: The Result of Ten Years of Experience in Spirit Manifestations, Intended as a Guide to Enquirers by Sophia Elizabeth de Morgan and Augustus de Morgan, as you can see by using this link (and also reported in an 1886 book you can read here).  Beaufort states the following (I quote from the 1847 book):

"Many years ago, when I was a youngster on board one of his Majesty’s ships, in Portsmouth harbour, after sculling about in a very small boat, I was endeavouring to fasten her alongside the ship to one of the scuttlerings; in foolish eagerness I stepped upon the gunwale, the boat of course upset, and I fell into the water, and not knowing how to swim, all my efforts to lay hold either of the boat or of the floating sculls were fruitless....

With the violent but vain attempts to make myself heard I had swallowed much water; I was soon exhausted by my struggles, and before any relief reached me I had sunk below the surface—all hope had fled-— all exertion ceased—and I felt that I was drowning.

So far, these facts were either partially remembered after my recovery or supplied by those who had latterly witnessed the scene; for during an interval of such agitation a drowning person is too much occupied in catching at every passing straw, or too much absorbed by alternate hope and despair, to mark the succession of events very accurately. Not so, however, with the facts which immediately ensued; my mind had then undergone the sudden revolution which appeared to you so remarkable—and all the circumstances of which are now as vividly fresh in my memory as if they had occurred but yesterday.

From the moment that all exertion had ceased— which I imagine was the immediate consequence of complete suffocation—a calm feeling of the most perfect tranquillity superseded the previous tumultuous sensations—it might be called apathy, certainly not resignation, for drowning no longer appeared to be an evil—I no longer thought of being rescued, nor was I in any bodily pain. On the contrary, my sensations were now of rather a pleasurable cast, partaking of that dull but contented sort of feeling which precedes the sleep produced by fatigue. Though the senses were thus deadened, not so the mind; its activity seemed to be invigorated, in a ratio which defies all description—for thought rose after thought with a rapidity of succession that is not only indescribable, but probably inconceivable, by any one who has not himself been in a similar situation. The course of those thoughts I can even now in a great measure retrace—the event which had just taken place—the awkwardness that had produced it—the bustle it must have occasioned (for I had observed two persons jump from the chains)—the effect it would have on a most affectionate father—the manner in which he would disclose it to the rest of the family —and a thousand other circumstances minutely associated with home, were the first series of reflections that occurred. They took then a wider range—our last cruise—a former voyage, and shipwreck —my school—the progress I had made there, and the time I had misspent—and even all my boyish pursuits and adventures. Thus travelling backwards, every past incident of my life seemed to glance across my recollection in retrograde succession; not, however, in mere outline, as here stated, but the picture filled up with every minute and collateral feature; in short, the whole period of my existence seemed to be placed before me in a kind of panoramic review, and each act of it seemed to be accompanied by a consciousness of right or wrong, or by some reflection on its cause or its consequences ; indeed, many trifling events which had been long forgotten then crowded into my imagination, and with the character of recent familiarity.

May not all this be some indication of the almost infinite power of memory with which we may awaken in another world, and thus be compelled to contemplate our past lives? Or might it not in some degree warrant the inference that death is only a change or modification of our existence, in which there is no real pause or interruption? But, however that may be, one circumstance was highly remarkable ; that the innumerable ideas which flashed into my mind were all retrospective-—yet I had been religiously brought up—my hopes and fears of the next world had lost nothing of their early strength, and at any other period intense interest and awful anxiety would have been excited by the mere probability that I was floating on the threshold of eternity: yet at that inexplicable moment, when I had a full conviction that I had already crossed that. threshold, not a single thought wandered into the future—I was wrapt entirely in the past.

The length of time that was occupied by this deluge of ideas, or rather the shortness of time into which they were condensed, I cannot now state with precision, yet certainly two minutes could not have elapsed from the moment of suffocation to that of my being hauled up.

The strength of the flood tide made it expedient to pull the boat at once to another ship, where I underwent the usual vulgar process of emptying the water by letting my head hang downwards, then bleeding, chafing, and even administering gin; but my submersion had been really so brief, that, according to the account of the lookers on, I was very quickly restored to animation.

 My feelings while life was returning were the reverse in every point of those which have been described above. One single but confused idea—a miserable belief that I was drowning —dwelt upon my mind, instead of the multitude of clear and definite ideas which had recently rushed through it—a helpless anxiety—a kind of continuous nightmare seemed to press heavily on every sense, and to prevent the formation of any one distinct thought—and it was with difficulty that I became convinced that I was really alive. Again, instead of being absolutely free from all bodily pain, as in my drowning state, I was now tortured by pain all over me; and though I have been since wounded in several places, and have often submitted to severe surgical discipline, yet my sufferings were at that time far greater; at least, in general distress."

This astonishing account matches closely the “life review” accounts told in modern near-death experiences. There is also a very strong element of heightened mentality, heightened memory and heightened consciousness that matches accounts of heightened mentality often told in near-death experiences. Similarly, in 1892 Albert Heim described what it felt like to fall from a high height while mountain climbing.  His account included a feeling of tranquility and a life review:

"Then I saw my whole past life take place in many images, as though on a stage at some distance from me. I saw myself as the chief character in the performance. Everything was transfigured as though by a heavenly light and everything was beautiful without grief, without anxiety and without pain. The memory of very tragic experiences I had had was clear but not saddening. I felt no conflict or strife; conflict had been transmuted into love. Elevated and harmonious thoughts dominated and united the individual images, and like magnificent music a divine calm swept through my soul. I became ever more surrounded by a splendid blue heaven with delicate roseate and violet cloudlets. I swept into it painlessly and softly and I saw that now I was falling freely through the air and that under me a snowfield lay waiting. Objective observations, thoughts, and subjective feelings were simultaneous. Then I heard a dull thud and my fall was over."

According to this book (page 108), Heim later published a book about the experiences of other people who had survived falls from heights. He said that almost 95% of such people reported a common set of characteristics. There was:

"rather calm seriousness, profound acceptance, and a dominant mental quickness and sense of surety. Mental activity became enormous, rising to a hundredfold velocity or intensity....Time became greatly expanded....In many cases there followed a sudden review of the individual's entire past."

Another nineteenth century near-death experience can be found in the 1897 book Mediumistic Experiences of John Brown, the Medium of the Rockies by John Brown, which you can read here.  In Chapter VI (page 87-89) Brown reports of an experience he had near death, when he could no longer see, could no longer speak, and no longer use his limbs, at a time when he was convinced he was dying. Brown states the following:

"In a few moments, my head fell to one side, my heart having ceased to vibrate; then the whole involuntary machinery made one last effort for breath, but in vain. In a moment my entire nervous system gave one shake and all was still; all was quiet. I heard the doctors say, “that is the last; he will not move again; he is dead.” Yes, I heard all, but I did not see with my eyes. At this time it seemed to me, that I was moving slowly through a warm atmosphere; and in the distance I began to perceive a lighter or whiter spot in the darkness. As this light gradually increased in size, it came nearer to me, till finally it filled the room, and all outside. It was not like the light of our sun—it was more white, more still. It appeared to carry with it a life principle. At this moment I found myself lying horizontally above my body and about two feet from it. With no effort on my part I moved off from over my body and stood upon my feet, about five feet from it. I knew that I had left my body. I could see it on the bed..."

Here we have two of the characteristics of near death experiences: a report of floating out of the body and observing your own body from above; and a report of a mysterious bright light that has numinous characteristics.

It is rather clear from these three accounts that the typical near-death experience described by Moody is not at all some cultural creation of recent decades, but is instead something matching experiences people had more than a century before Moody's book was written. Collectively these accounts have every one of the main characteristics of a near-death experience except for the “traveling through a tunnel” characteristic that only occurs in a minority of such experiences. I may note that each of the books I have cited are little-known books of very low readership, and their accounts have been almost never reported. We cannot at all suppose that accounts in recent decades were derived from these nineteenth century accounts that were so little known.  

Postscript: On page 16 of the 1887 book here, we have two accounts of near-death experiences:

"1.A sailor who had been snatched from the waves, after lying for some time insensible on the deck of the vessel, proclaimed on his recovery that he had been in Heaven, and complained bitterly of his being restored to life as a great hardship. The man had been regarded as a worthless fellow; but from the time of the accident having occurred, his moral character was altered, and he became one of the best conducted sailors in the ship" (The Works of Sir Benjamin Brodie, vol. i. p. 184.)

2.  I was once told by a near relative of mine — says De Quincey — that having in her childhood fallen into a river, and being on the very verge of death but for the assistance which reached her at the last critical moment, she saw in a moment her whole life, clothed in its forgotten incidents, arrayed before her as in a mirror, not successively, but simultaneously ; and she had a faculty developed as suddenly for comprehending the whole and every part. The heroine of this remarkable case, continues De Quincey, was a gid about nine years old, and there can be little doubt that she looked down as far within the crater of death — that awful volcano — as any human being ever can have done that has lived to draw back and to report her experience."

Why the Origin of Humans Is an Unsolved Mystery

We have good evidence from art in early human caves that the human species is older than 40,000 years. But the earliest past of humanity is very murky indeed. For decades scientists have been dogmatically speaking as if they understand the origin of the human race. We are told that this occurred when man evolved from more primitive ancestors with smaller brains, through a Darwinian process of natural selection and random mutations. But the evidence cited for such claims has always been weak.

The first widely-read sales pitch for the idea that man has evolved from lower species was presented by Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Regard to Sex. In Chapter XX1 of that book, entitled “General Summary and Conclusion,” Darwin summarized his case that man had evolved from lower forms. He presented only an extremely weak set of reasons, but dogmatically declared them to be decisive evidence. He appealed mainly to embryology and structural similarities between man and animals. He stated we are “forced to admit that the close resemblance of the embryo of man to that, for instance, of a dog – the construction of his skull, limbs, and whole frame, independently of the uses to which the parts may be put, on the same plan with that of other mammals – the occasional reappearance of various structures, for instance of several distinct muscles, which man does not normally possess, but which are common to the Quadrumana ---and a crowd of analogous facts – all point in the plainest manner to the conclusion that man is the co-descendant with other mammals of a common progenitor.”

This was all an extremely weak case. It was not at all clear that we should assume humans and dogs have a common ancestor because of a similarity of embryos, nor was it clear that a rough structural similarity of anthropoid bones should cause us to think that men have evolved from an apelike ancestor (particularly given that the skulls of other species look different from human skulls). The meager items mentioned by Darwin in his summary did not by any means “point in the plainest manner to the conclusion that man is the co-descendant with other mammals of a common progenitor.”

But today's evolutionary biologist would claim that the modern case for human evolution is much better, because of fossil evidence. We are told that paleontologists have found a series of fossils belonging to creatures with brains midway between the size of a human brain and the size of a chimpanzee brain. 

But there is a reason why such fossils do not by themselves establish any claim of lineage or ancestry. The reason is that quite possibly there existed during the past 5 million years a variety of anthropoid species which were not ancestors of the human species; and in such case there would have been the same fossil record that we have discovered, even if mankind did not evolve from any of those species.

Imagine if the human race were to travel to a distant planet, and intervene in that planet's biosphere, introducing a human-like species (call it species Z) to the planet. Suppose that on the planet there existed from 3 million BC to 300,000 BC a species (call it Species X) with 50% of the human brain size, and that from 1 million BC to 100,000 BC there existed still another species (call it Species Y) with 75% of human brain size. Then 100,000 years after this human intervention, descendants of the organisms introduced by humans might be able to make a “Chart of Evolution” looking like this:

Time	Species	Brain Size (Compared to Us)
1,000,000 years ago	Species X	50.00%
500,000 years ago	Species Y	75.00%
Present	Our species (Species Z)	100.00%

Such a chart could be presented as a “Chart of Evolution” suggesting a progression from Species X to Species Y, and then a progression from Species Y to Species Z. But there would not actually have been such a progression. In fact, in this case there is no ancestry at all between any of these species.

That's an example of how “Charts of Evolution” can be made by cherry-picking data, and arranging them in a linear sequence to encourage people to believe in a progression that did not actually occur. Here is another example. Imagine you go to the Columbia University library, and find some old university yearbooks. You could choose from 1970 a picture of a short, very fat student. Then from from 1980 you could choose a picture of a slightly short, slightly fat student. Then from 1990 you could choose a picture of a student of average weight and height. Then from 2000 you could choose a student of a rather tall and slightly muscular student. Then from 2015 you could choose a picture of a tall and very muscular student looking like a football tight end. You could then arrange these pictures chronologically in a series you might entitle “Evolution of the Columbia Student.” Such a series would give someone the completely erroneous idea that students at Columbia have evolved from being very fat and short to being tall and muscular. But such a chart would be very misleading.

Such examples should make us pretty suspicious of the standard “Chart of Evolution” showing some ape-like species evolving over millions of years to become man. Such charts don't show the likelihood of such a progression, but merely show the possibility of such a progression. We may become more doubtful when we consider that visual representations of past species are largely speculative. Fossils of claimed human ancestors are all fragmentary. An example is the famous Lucy skeleton, where we have but a few small pieces of a skull and some other small bone fragments. We see charts listing the brain sizes of organisms corresponding to such fossils, but the numbers in such charts are guesswork, since we don't have any fossilized brains. We may wonder whether the numbers supplied in such charts are numbers arbitrarily chosen to fit in with orthodox assumptions about evolutionary transitions. We should remember that almost every account of fossil evidence coming from orthodox biologists, paleontologists and anthropologists is likely to be biased, slanted and speculative, because such scientists (trained in ideological enclaves resembling seminaries) are tribal conformists peer-pressured into peddling a particular Darwinist belief system based on the assumption that humans descended from lower species.

But is there some evidence that might make ideas of human ancestry better founded? In theory, there could be: DNA evidence. If you were able to have complete DNA that corresponded to each of the fossils in a fossil series, you would be on much firmer ground drawing conclusions about ancestry.

But in this case our paleontologists do not have what they would like to have. This is one of the dirty little secrets of modern evolutionary biology. Our evolutionary biologists do not have the DNA evidence they need to solidify the claims they make about human origins. The problem is that regular organic material rots in less than a few thousand years, and you can't get much DNA from a very old fossil bone. The half-life of DNA is 521 years. So we don't have any adequate DNA evidence from Homo erectus or Homo habilis, which are claimed to be ancestors or evolutionary cousins of the human species. The oldest DNA from a claimed human ancestor is a scrap of DNA dating back 400,000 years. But this is only about 16,000 base pairs, and the human genome is 3.2 billion base pairs. Such a tiny scrap doesn't give you a hundredth of what you would need to genetically verify that such an organism was an ancestor of humans.

Imagine a trial in which the prosecution needed some blood photographed at a crime scene corresponding to the blood of the person being tried. But imagine the blood was washed away before its DNA was checked, so no DNA match was made. That's the kind of position our evolutionary biologist is in. He really needs some complete Homo erectus DNA or Homo habilis DNA to back up his claims that these are human ancestors. But no such DNA exists, merely a rare scrap here and there. Some scientists try to use mitochondrial DNA obtained from fossils, but no reliable conclusions can be drawn from such DNA (mitochondrial DNA has less than 1% of the genetic material found in regular DNA).

We do have the complete DNA of modern humans and modern chimpanzees, and some argue that the similarity between these two implies that both had a common evolutionary ancestor. It has long been falsely claimed that the protein-coding part of the human genome is 98% similar to the protein-coding part of the chimpanzee genome. But this refers to merely the building materials of proteins (amino acids), and is not based on a comparison of the full protein, which has a 3D shape. No one knows for sure how proteins get their 3D shapes. This is the long-standing protein folding problem discussed in these three posts. When you look at the full protein including its shape, not just the amino acid building blocks specified in DNA, it turns out that chimpanzees and humans are not so similar. The scientific paper here is entitled “Eighty percent of proteins are different between humans and chimpanzees.” 

The long-cited 98% figure cited above is erroneous.  A 2021 study found that "1.5% to 7% of the human genome is unique to Homo sapiens," suggesting the claim of 98% similarity was probably in error. A 2002 paper is entitled "Divergence between samples of chimpanzee and human DNA sequences is 5%, counting indels." 

A year 2025 article from the very mainstream site LiveScience.com helps clarify that the difference between the genomes of humans and chimpanzees is much greater than 1 or 2 percent. The article tells us this:

"The truth is that the frequently cited 98.8% similarity between chimp (Pan troglodytes) and human (Homo sapiens) DNA overlooks key differences in the species' genomes, experts told Live Science....the 99% figure is misleading because it focuses on stretches of DNA where the human and chimp genomes can be directly aligned and ignores sections of the genomes that are difficult to compare, Tomas Marques-Bonet, head of the Comparative Genomics group at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (CSIC/UPF) in Barcelona, Spain, told Live Science in an email.

Sections of human DNA without a clear counterpart in chimp DNA make up approximately 15% to 20% of the genome, Marques-Bonet said. For example, some bits of DNA are present in one species but missing in the other; these are known as 'insertions and deletions'...

So, while earlier studies suggested a 98% to 99% similarity, comparisons that include harder-to-align regions push that difference closer to 5% to 10%, Marques-Bonet said. 'And if we account for the regions still too complex to align properly with current technology, the true overall difference is likely to exceed 10%,'  he said.

In fact, a 2025 study found that human and chimpanzee genomes are approximately 15% different when compared directly and completely." 

See here for a discussion of that year 2025 study finding that human and chimpanzee genomes are approximately 15% different. The fact that Darwinists in recent years long groundlessly claimed the difference was only 2% is a major scandal of evolutionary biology, one that should cause anyone to doubt the credibility of evolutionary biologists when they talk about human origins. 

In 2017 bbc.com had a long article entitled “We have still not found the missing link between us and apes.” The article discusses the history of postulating a common ancestor linking current ape-like animals and humans. What we get is a story of a great deal of disagreement and changes in the prevailing narrative. Referring to a "last common ancestor" or LCA, we are told, “Surprisingly, the last 15 years has actually seen popular opinion begin to swing away from the idea of a chimp-like LCA, and towards a model closer to that argued by people like Strauss in the 1940s.” Of one analysis, we are told, “One of the implications of their interpretations was that all sorts of anatomical features shared by gibbons, orangutans, chimps and gorillas must have evolved independently in each of these apes.” That claim should raise suspicions, as such coincidental independent evolution is highly improbable.

The article says the following about a Last Common Ancestor:

"There has been a community shift, where people have begun to question what was an emerging consensus for a chimp-like LCA," says Young. But even that is not the end of the story. There are still "chimp-like LCA" advocates out there, and they are fighting back...Of course, only if and when fossils of the LCA itself come to light will the debate finally draw to a close.….It is possible, they say, that the LCA might actually have lived 13 – not seven – million years ago....There are also a few researchers who take a completely different view. For instance, Schwartz is adamant that it is orangutans, not chimpanzees, that are our sister species."

A scientific article tells us, “Few fields of research are subject to so many competing hypotheses, as illustrated by the variable number of ancestral species assigned to the human lineage by different authors, ranging from four to a maximum of 25.” Such gaps and disagreements should not at all inspire our confidence that scientists have a firm gasp on this matter. The scientists are apparently fighting among themselves, disagreeing about the most basic things, and missing many of the fossils they need.  

Scientists cannot find fossil evidence of a last common ancestor between chimps and humans, as they indicate by their frequent claims that chimps and humans share a common ancestor without specifying what that ancestor was. The wikipedia.org article on "Chimpanzee-human last common ancestor" (CHLCA) confesses, "no fossil has yet been identified as a probable candidate for the CHLCA."  Another major missing link is a common ancestor between humans and Neanderthals. Using the term “LCA” to mean “last common ancestor,” a mainstream scientific paper states the following striking confession:

We still do not have a good fossil candidate for the phenotypic LCA of Neanderthals and modern humans. This result is striking because confidence intervals of ancestral reconstructions are very broad, which means that existing candidates are very incompatible.

If I do a Google image search for “human evolution tree,” I see various charts trying to put fossils into a tree of human evolution. But the charts are speculative. The recent book “Almost Human” by two paleontologists (Berger and Hawks) tacitly admits this, for in its chart of hominid evolution, we see four nodes that have question marks, indicating hypothetical ancestors that have not been found.  According to the "human evolution" chart in that recent book (which can be seen on this page):

(1) We have not found a common ancestor between Neanderthals and humans (that ancestor, which we can call Missing Link 1 is represented in the chart as a question mark).
(2)  We have not found a common ancestor between this Missing Link 1,  Homo erectus and Homo florensis (that ancestor, which we can call Missing Link 2, is represented in the chart as a question mark).
(3)  We have not found a common ancestor between this Missing Link 2, Homo rudolfensis, Homo habilis and Australopithecus sediba (that ancestor, which we can call Missing Link 3, is represented in the chart as a question mark).
(4)  We have not found a common ancestor between this Missing Link 3, Australopithecus africanus, and Australopithecus afarensis (that ancestor, which we can call Missing Link 4, is represented in the chart as a question mark).

Each of these four missing links, according to the paleontologist's chart in this book, are in the direct path of human ancestry, and none of them are missing links in side detours.  But is it really believable that we would be lacking in fossils for four different species that are human ancestors in the past few million years?  

There is also inconsistency in these charts. Some of these charts list Australopithicus africanus as a direct ancestor of humans, while the “Almost Human” chart does not list Australopithicus africanus as a direct ancestor of humans. Some of these charts list Homo erectus as a direct ancestor of humans, while others indicate Homo erectus was not a direct ancestor of humans.

Dogmatic theorists often try to kind of "prove things with language" by referring to species such as Homo erectus as humans.  Such language is erroneous. It is illegitimate to use the word "human" to refer to any species which did not show evidence of language or symbolic activity, and such alleged human predecessors as Homo erectus did not show such a thing.  Art and symbolic activity appeared rather suddenly about 50,000 - 70,000 years ago.  As for the habit of grouping mankind with other species in a genus called Homo, it is merely an arbitrary and dubious classification choice, particularly now that there is such a physically diverse group of species put in that genus, with brain sizes varying by 300% (for example, Homo floresiensis had a brain size only a third as big as humans).  

The most plausible fossil candidate for a human ancestor is not the Neanderthals (whose existence substantially overlapped with the existence of early humans), but a species referred to as Homo heidelbergensis.  But the wikipedia.org article on Homo heidelbergensis tells us that the case for such an ancestry is far from clear. It states the following:

"Homo sapiens has been proposed as derived from H. heidelbergensis via Homo rhodesiensis, present in East and North Africa from around 400,000 years ago. The correct assignment of many fossils to a particular chronospecies is difficult and often differences in opinion ensue among paleoanthropologists due to the absence of universally accepted dividing lines (autapomorphies) between Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo rhodesiensis and Neanderthals. It is uncertain whether H. heidelbergensis is ancestral to Homo sapiens, as a fossil gap in Africa between 400,000 and 260,000 years ago obscures the presumed derivation of H. sapiens from H. rhodesiensis....The delineation between early H. heidelbergensis and H. erectus is also unclear. Given the evidence, it means there is no direct evidence that suggest the Homo heidelbergensis is related to modern-day humans."

Such a statement should shock every person who believes that humans are descended from more ape-like ancestors.  The statement tells us that there is "no direct evidence" that this best candidate for a human ancestor is related to modern-day humans. 

Another line of evidence offered for human evolution is evidence of the use of stone tools, or the use of fire, or burials, dating from way before 100,000 B.C. Here is where some surprising new findings come into play to cast doubt on some of these claims. 

Homo naledi was a species with a brain of only about 500 cubic centimeters, only about 37 percent as big as modern human's brain. The species is not believed to be a direct human ancestor. Fossils of the species have been found in a cave, and analyzed in a scientific paper by paleoanthropologist Lee Berger. The Washington Post refers to “Berger's bolder claims, including the suggestion that Naledi was burying its dead and crafting the sophisticated stone tools that characterize southern Africa's 'Middle Stone Age.' ”

But if a species with a brain only 37 percent as big as a human brain was making tools and burying its dead, a species that was not a human ancestor, that would seem to help wipe out tool evidence and burial evidence as evidence that humans evolved from apelike ancestors. Similarly, a paleoanthropologist has recently written an article entitled, “Stone 'tools' may not have been made by human ancestors, research finds.” The article tells us this: “Recent research published in Nature by a team led by Tomos Proffitt at the University of Oxford shows that capuchin monkeys regularly produce sharp-edged flakes indistinguishable from those made by early hominins.”

As for the use of fire long before about 100,000 BC, none of it is very conclusive. It's all but impossible to distinguish between fires started deliberately and fires accidentally arising from forest fires or lightning strikes. Most of the claims of fire use long before 100,000 BC seem like “face in the clouds” or “Jesus in my toast” kind of claims, in which we can wonder whether the person making a claim is simply finding something that he hoped to find. It is also possible that some species that was not a human ancestor was able to occasionally make fires. Fire-making is just an example of tool-use, and there are other species that make use of tools. Fire-making does not involve the symbolic manipulations that are a hallmark of a human mind.

A paleontologist states the following about the relevant fossils from the past million years:

They do not allow us to order human fossils in a gradually progressive and smooth transitional lineage from ape-like forms to modern humans. They also do not fall into a temporal cline from older primitive to younger derived forms. Some early australopithecines not only exhibit the expected ape-like features but also some very modern human characters, while some late representatives of Homo (e.g., Homo naledi) still have very primitive characters. Thus fossil humans do not form a transitional series like the famous horse series. 

According to Darwinist dogma, lucky random mutations occur and cause "classic sweeps" or "classic selective sweeps" in which some new trait becomes more and more common in the gene pool, eventually so common that most organisms in the population have that trait. This dogma has recently struck out at the plate, as more sensitive scans of the human genome have found little evidence of  such classic sweeps. A scientific paper was entitled "Classic Selective Sweeps Were Rare in Recent Human Evolution." By "recent human evolution" the paper meant the past 250,000 years.

Another recent scientific study in 2014 found there was virtually no sign of adaptive evolution in the human genome. The paper published in a mainstream science journal looked for traces of natural selection by looking for something called “fixed adaptive substitutions” in human DNA. The paper stated, “Our overall estimate of the fraction of fixed adaptive substitutions (α) in the human lineage is very low, approximately 0.2%, which is consistent with previous studies.”  It's hard to imagine a bigger fail or flop for Darwinian explanations. If such explanations were correct, we would have expected to find such signs of adaptive evolution in a large fraction of the human genome, not a fifth of one percent. 

In the 2018 book Who We Are and How We Got Here by David Reich, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, the author makes this revealing confession on page 9: “The sad truth is that it is possible to count on the fingers of two hands the examples like FOXP2 of mutations that increased in frequency in human ancestors under the pressure of natural selection and whose functions we partly understand.” Judging from this statement, there are merely 10 or fewer cases where we know of some mutation that increased in the human population because of natural selection. The scientific paper “The Genomic Rate of Adaptive Evolution” tells us “there is little evidence of widespread adaptive evolution in our own species."

In the study here, an initial analysis found 154 positively selected genes in the human genome -- genes that seemed to show signs of being promoted by natural selection. But then the authors applied something they called "the Bonferroni correction" to get a more accurate number, and were left with only 2 genes in the human genome showing signs of positive selection (promotion by natural selection).  That's only 1 gene in 10,000. Call it the faintest whisper of a trace -- hardly something inspiring confidence in claims that we are mainly the product of natural selection. 

Given the failure to detect large amounts of adaptive natural selection in the human genome, we should have no strong confidence in the orthodox account that humans appeared because of Darwinian evolution from some ancestor that was the ancestor of both chimps and humans.

The number of humans that have lived has been estimated at 100 billion. But a web site discussing this issue tells us that 99% of these people have lived in the past 10,000 years. Since 8000 BC some 100 billion humans have lived, but in the period between about 400,000 BC and 8000 BC, the total number of humans or pre-humans who lived during that period was quite probably no greater than about a billion, and very probably less than 3 billion (the average population size being only about 20,000 for most of this time). But we know there has been very little useful evolution of humans since 8000 BC -- only a few minor things like better lactose digestion and better high-altitude breathing in some people.  So if you believe the conventional account, you must believe that a population of no more than 3 billion humans or pre-humans underwent enormous useful evolution (resulting in humans that had language, abstract thinking and symbolic abilities), but that in 100 billion humans living since 8000 BC there has been almost no useful human evolution.  Such an idea is not credible.  Why would there be so much useful evolution during less than 3 billion lives, and so little useful human evolution during 100 billion lives?  We would expect the opposite to be more likely. 

Just as a prosecutor needs to have explanation of a motive before offering a good case against a defendant, anyone arguing that man was descended from lower species needs to have a believable explanation as to how this occurred. The Darwinian explanation relating to human origins has always been both unproven and implausible. No one has proven or well-substantiated any claim that any impressive case of macroscopic biological complexity ever arose because of a combination of natural selection and random mutations. There is an extremely strong reason for believing that natural selection has never produced any complex macroscopic biological innovation. The reason is that any natural selection related to that particular innovation would only occur after the innovation had appeared. Natural selection simply means the improved reproduction rate that may occur after a biological innovation makes an organism more fit to survive. But such an improved reproduction cannot possibly occur because of some biological innovation until after the innovation appears. So in general, natural selection is never an explanation for a complex visible biological innovation. An explanation is something that occurs before the thing it explains, not after it.

Natural selection is a mere filter, capable of filtering out bad designs, but having no power to produce impressive new designs. A tornado will act as a “survival of the fittest” agent to get rid of bad building designs in a town, leaving only the good designs standing. But it would be ridiculous to claim that a tornado produced a useful new building design after passing through a town, using wreckage as building blocks. It seems equally implausible to attribute such creative powers to natural selection.

You do not rebut such an objection by claiming that it is the combination of random changes and survival of the fittest (natural selection) that produces wonderful new designs, because we have the same combination of random changes and survival-of-the-fittest when a tornado passes through a town. But the chance of a tornado ever producing a good new design of building is infinitely low. And if humans perished, and a billion tornadoes passed through the towns and cities we left behind, over the course of millions of years, we would still not expect one of the tornadoes to ever produce an impressive new building design. With all their intricate biochemical machinery, the complexity of mammals is billions of times greater than the complexity of buildings.

In the book Evolution and Ecology: The Pace of Life by Cambridge University biology professor K. D. Bennett, this mainstream authority comments on speciation (the origin of species). He says on page 175, "Natural selection has been shown to have occurred (for example, among populations of Darwin's finches), but there is no evidence that it accumulates over longer periods of time to produce speciation in the Darwinian sense." Similar comments were made by an MIT professor who wrote a long paper entitled "Inadequacies of Neo-Darwinian Evolution as a Scientific Theory" 

Besides the completely general inadequacy of natural selection and random mutations as an explanation for biological complexity, there are other very powerful reasons why the Darwinian explanation of natural selection and random mutations seems to be grossly inadequate to explain the specific claim that humanity evolved from lower species. The first reason is that the human mind has many unique special characteristics that do not serve any purpose of increasing human survival, and which therefore cannot be explained as being the result of natural selection or survival-of-the-fittest. Among these are spirituality, altruism, self-consciousness, introspection, insight, imagination, philosophical reasoning, language skills, mathematical skills, artistic creativity, and aesthetic appreciation. See here for why such things cannot be well explained by natural selection.

In his essay "The Limits of Natural Selection as Applied to Man," it was forcibly pointed out by the co-creator of the theory of natural selection (Alfred Russel Wallace) that natural selection cannot explain some of these higher capabilities of the human mind. In fact, in his his 1910 book The World of Life: a Manifestation of Creative Power, Directive Mind and Ultimate Purpose,  Wallace argued that natural selection and random variations were very far indeed from being sufficient to account for the wonders of biology. Darwin engaged in some quite laughable counter-reasoning in his book The Descent of Man. Very absurdly, he stated near the beginning of Chapter III of that book, “My object in this chapter is to show that there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties.” The long chapter that followed contained much very sophistical reasoning and misinformation, such as when Darwin claimed dogs understand many sentences,  and when he insinuated in the second-to-last paragraph of the chapter that dogs are kind of spiritual like humans. Such misstatements and bad reasoning do nothing to help with the basic problem. There is a vast gulf between the minds of humans and the minds of animals, and natural selection cannot explain it. That gulf consists of a series of human traits that do not increase survival value in the wild, so such traits cannot have arisen because of natural selection.

There are other grave difficulties in the idea that humans evolved from lower species. One is the difficulty of accounting for the origin of spoken language and the biological changes needed for language. This difficulty is so great that it is sufficient by itself to justify very strong doubt about the natural origin of humans through any process humans understand. In this essay I discuss three reasons why the origin of language is inexplicable under orthodox assumptions. 

Another difficulty is the problem of explaining the origin of bipedalism. A species like a chimpanzee uses its long front arms to help it in walking -- what is sometimes called knuckle-walking. That works well for chimpanzees, because the long arms and the hunched over skeleton of the chimpanzee supports that kind of locomotion. Humans walk erect on two legs. That works well for humans, but only because there are many bone and muscle differences between a man and a chimpanzee, which allow erect walking to occur. The problem is that in order for there to be any evolutionary progression from a species that walked like a chimpanzee to a species that walked like a human, it seems there would have needed to have existed an intermediate species that was halfway between knuckle-walking and upright human-style walking – and it seems that such a species would have been in a disadvantageous state where it was prone to fall over. But according to Darwinian theory based on survival of the fittest, you basically cannot have a progression from highly functional to poorly functional and then to highly functional – because there can be no foresight under such a theory. So accounting for the origin of bipedalism is a nightmare for the orthodox Darwinists, who give us explanations “all over the map” to try to explain this. According to one mainstream web site, “If you ask a roomful of anthropologists” about why humans walk on two feet, “you'd likely get a different answer from each person.” That's hardly reassuring for someone troubled by this problem.

Anthropology professor Henry M. McHenry stated this on page 270 of the mainstream book Evolution: The First Four Billion Years: "The published hominin fossil record does not yet have a true intermediate stage between an apelike and a humanlike body."

The "waiting time" problem is another gigantic difficulty. To explain that problem, I must first discuss how it is believed that  that the human population was very small at a time such as 100,000 years ago or 200,000 years ago. It is believed that at such a time the human population was probably not much more than 20,000.   This paper says "we estimate that the effective population size of human ancestors living before 1.2 million years ago was 18,500, and we can reject all models where the ancient effective population size was larger than 26,000."  This scientific papers says, "Resequencing studies have estimated the ancestral effective population size at 12,800 to 14,400, with a 5- to 10-fold bottleneck beginning approximately 65,000 to 50,000" years ago. 

The problem is that the smaller the population, the less likely that it will be blessed by some fantastically lucky series of random mutations needed for a biological innovation (just as the smaller the pool of lottery ticket buyers, the lower the chance that it will win the grand jackpot). When you have a very small population, it becomes fantastically unlikely that a series of mutations needed for a biological innovation will occur. So how could there have occurred all the helpful random mutations needed for Homo sapiens to appear about 100,000 years ago? The likelihood of such a development seems microscopic.

Two scientists (one from Cornell University) published a scientific paper entitled “The Waiting Time Problem in a Model Hominin Population,” which was published in the journal Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling. Using a computer simulation, they “simulated a classic pre-human hominin population of at least 10,000 individuals, with a generation time of 20 years, and with very strong selection (50 % selective elimination).” They were basically trying to see how long it would take before you got a favorable mutation consisting of two nucleotides (which is a fairly minor mutation, only some tiny fraction of the mutations needed for the evolution of human intelligence). This is called the “waiting time problem.” The authors summarize their results as follows:

"Biologically realistic numerical simulations revealed that a population of this type required inordinately long waiting times to establish even the shortest nucleotide strings. To establish a string of two nucleotides required on average 84 million years. To establish a string of five nucleotides required on average 2 billion years. We found that waiting times were reduced by higher mutation rates, stronger fitness benefits, and larger population sizes. However, even using the most generous feasible parameters settings, the waiting time required to establish any specific nucleotide string within this type of population was consistently prohibitive."

Their paper calculates a "waiting time" of some 2 billion years to get a crummy little five-nucleotide mutation. But the mutations needed for man would have required many times more than five nucleotides – and our Darwinists ask us to believe that they occurred not in 2 billion years but in a span of time less than a thousandth of that. The chance of that seems less than the chance of you winning a hundred million dollars from the Powerball lottery on each of three consecutive lottery drawings. 

A very important point is that we are not even sure that there ever existed any species that humans might have evolved from, and that had about 50% or 75% of the mental power of modern humans. There seems to have been a hominid species with about 50% or 75% of the human brain size, but mental power is not predictable from brain size. Some species such as crows are amazingly smart with very small brains, while the elephant is nowhere near as smart as man, although its brain is three times bigger than ours. 

I have already listed quite a few very powerful reasons for doubting that humans understand the origin of humanity, but there are two additional ones of great substance. The first is that we are not remotely close to understanding how a single human adult is even able to originate from a fertilized human egg.  The commonly expressed idea on this topic (that the womb or something in it is reading a blueprint of a human stored in DNA) is demonstrably false.  Although it lists chemical ingredients used by humans, DNA is not a specification of a human, and does not at all store either a blueprint for making a human or a recipe or program for making humans.  The internal limitations of DNA make it impossible that it could be doing such a thing, for DNA uses a genetic code limiting it to very low-level chemical information such as the amino acid contents of proteins.  We actually do not at all understand the progression from a fertilized human ovum to a newly born baby.  Not understanding such a progression, we are therefore very largely ignorant about the biology of the individual human, and have no business claiming that we understand the far larger question of how our entire species originated.  Similarly, if a child has no real understanding of how a house is built, he has no business claiming that he understands how a city originated.  Since DNA is not actually a specification of a human, and is not a blueprint or a recipe for making a human, it seems we should reject the Neo-Darwinist idea that humans have appeared merely because of changes in DNA. 

Another extremely substantial reason for rejecting the claim that we understand human origins is that we have no credible biological account of how the human body can be producing the most impressive aspects of human mentality: consciousness, thinking, imagination, self-hood and memory.  The standard claim on this topic is that all such things are produced by the human brain, but such an assertion is merely a speech custom of neuroscientists, not something they have established through observations. 

There are actually very many strong reasons for thinking that the most impressive aspects of human mentality are things that cannot be produced by the brain.  You can read all about such reasons at this site. For example, it is claimed that human memory is stored in brains and retrieved in brains (in the synapses of brains). But we know that the proteins that make up synapses are extremely short-lived, having average lifetimes of only a few weeks -- meaning that the maximum length of time a synapse would seem to be capable of storing a memory is less than a thousandth of the length of time (50 years) that humans can store memories.  To give another example, we know synapses and neurons are very noisy things, and that a synapse will transmit an electrical/chemical signal with only about 50% reliability. But a human actor (such as one playing Hamlet) can flawlessly recall 1480 lines, not at all what we would expect if noisy, low-reliable synapses were the basis of such recall.  There are very many similar reasons why we must conclude that our brains cannot account for the more impressive human mental capabilities, such as the fact that no one has any coherent explanation of how any such things as abstract ideas, imagination, self-hood or consciousness could arise from any type of matter, whether it be neurons or any other type. 

If it is true that our brains cannot account for all of human mental capabilities and mental experiences (and there are dozens of reasons for thinking that), then we have no business claiming that we understand human origins, for it would seem that there must be some mysterious factor involved to a gigantic extent in our origins that our biologists do not at all understand. 

Click on the visual to enlarge it

There are so many very serious difficulties and unanswered questions involved in all attempts to explain human origins that we should have no great confidence in any of them. We should not regard it as well-established or fairly certain that humans are descended from any previous species (although such an idea still remains a possibility).  The most intelligent opinion about human origins is that such a question is an extremely puzzling mystery that is currently far beyond human understanding. The slang expression of today's overconfident person is: “Don't worry – I got this.” When it comes to explaining human origins, our evolutionary biologists are always telling us, in effect, “Don't worry, we got this.” The reply we should give back to them is: no, guys, you don't got this.

Contrary to the insinuations of explanatory dogmatists, we do not at all have a choice between Darwinist orthodoxy and the biblical account of creation. Those are only two of 12+ possible belief options or speculations one can have about the origin of humans,  which I discuss in this post.  

Our biologists cannot even explain some of the most important low-level mysteries of biology. Our biologists do not even know how the simplest prokaryotic cell could have originated, and they do not have a credible account of how eukaryotic cells originated (only a very unbelievable tall tale). Our biologists do not even know what causes a cell to split into two copies of itself; they do not know what causes polypeptide chains to fold into the three-dimensional shapes of proteins; they do not know what causes a fertilized ovum to progress to become a human baby; and they do not know how humans are able to remember things for 50 years (despite rapid protein turnover in synapses), and how humans can instantly remember things they learned or experienced decades ago.  But even though such basic low-level biological mysteries cannot be well-explained by our biologists, they ask us to believe that they understand something vastly more complicated: the mystery of how human organisms first originated. This is rather like a person who doesn't understand what a boat is telling you he knows how to command an aircraft carrier, or a person who doesn't understand what an atom is telling you he knows how the sun keeps shining, or a person who doesn't understand what a war is or a country is telling you he understands the history of the twentieth century.

Claims such as "we know what caused man's origin" are pushed dogmatically by conformist branches of academia that show much of the same groupthink, hubris and kneeling to authority that we see in organized religions.  When we put aside overconfidence and bluffing brags, and look objectively at the matter with a realistic humility, we should realize that our knowledge of nature is very small and fragmentary, and that the very puzzling question of human origins is one that may well take mankind a thousand years to unravel.  

Postscript: After countless years of people claiming that Australopithecus afarensis (represented by the famous Lucy fossil) was some kind of transitional species between apes and men, we finally have an April 2020 report on the Science Daily mainstream news site, one which tells us that "Contrary to previous claims, the endocranial imprints of Australopithecus afarensis reveal an ape-like brain organization, and no features derived towards humans."

On page 207 of the book Shattering the Myths of Darwinism by Richard Milton, a book which can be read online here, the author points out that a visualization of Australopithecus afarensis (in natural history museums of London and New York) made the species appear to have human-like hands and feet, even though the fossils indicated the species had long curved hands and feet, like those of a tree dweller.  We should distrust all such speculative visualizations, which often are guesses designed to suggest dubious ideas about human ancestry.  There have been many artistic visualizations depicting Neanderthal man as being brutish and anatomically more ape-like than modern humans (such as the misleading visualization here). But it has been pointed out that if you were to dress a Neanderthal man in a business suit, he would attract little attention on a New York City subway car. Not very physically different from modern men, Neanderthals were a type of human, and do nothing to prove humans are descended from apes. 

A long September 2020 article in The Scientist has the triumphal title "Genetics Steps in to Tell the Story of Human Origins."  But the article seems like more of a tale of uncertainty and hesitation.  We are told that Homo heidelbergenis was "not our ancestor," contrary to some previous claims. We are told, "The birth of our genus is one of the most poorly understood periods in evolution."  We are told, "The story in Africa remains murky, however, as researchers have not been able to reconstruct human history in vivid detail, in part because hominin fossils informative about our species’ emergence and coexistence with other species are rare in Africa." We are told that "the oldest human DNA found on the continent is just 15,000 years old."  Since Africa is claimed to the origin place of humans, this suggests that scientists do not have the kind of DNA evidence they need to be making human origin claims with any confidence.  The article also has a rather "funny business" kind of chart using some very objectionable scale in which 100,000 years is represented by two inches on the right side of the scale, but 7 million years is represented by two inches on the left side of the chart.  The article merely claims that Homo erectus is "thought to be a human ancestor," without confidently claiming any pre-human species as a human ancestor. 

In the year 2025 the materialist-oriented newspaper The Guardian published an article confessing how scanty is the claimed fossil evidence for the evolution of humans from apelike predecessors. It stated this:

"Our direct knowledge of the first few million years of human evolution derives from a collection of bone fragments that could no more than halfway fill a large shoebox....Attempting to reconstruct the history of early humanity from the available evidence is, it has been said, akin to trying to divine the plot of War and Peace from just 13 of its pages, picked at random."

Post-postscript: This 2019 post was updated to discuss the 2025 article and study demolishing the long-standing but erroneous claim that the human genome and the chimpanzee genome differ by only 2%. The actual difference is about 14% or 15%.

The table below shows the difference between what some species with a rather human shape might need to survive in the wild, and the abilities and characteristics that humans have. Existing natural explanations fail to explain most of the characteristics in the right column, leaving the origin of humans as an unsolved mystery. 

WHAT IS NEEDED  FOR SURVIVAL IN  THE WILD	WHAT HUMANS HAVE
	Speaking abilities (50,000+ words)
	Planning abilities
	Writing ability
	Reading ability
	Artistic ability
	Ideologies, philosophies and belief systems
	"Luxury" emotions (romantic love, wonder, awe, joy, etc.)
	Organization and construction abilities
	Insight
	Mathematical ability
	Imaginative abilities
	Esthetic and appreciative abilities
	Scientific and investigative abilities
	Moral concerns
	Musical composition ability
	Curiosity
	A sense of self-identity, including a sense of a person's life history
	Introspection
	Forecasting and deliberation ability
	Political ability
	Mathematical ability
	Philosophical ability
	Design ability
	Creative ability
	Singing ability
	Abstraction ability
	Spirituality
Memory of only the past year or less	Ability to remember things learned and experienced 60 years ago
Life spans just long enough to bear several offspring, and raise them to mid-childhood	Lifespans typically lasting several decades past the period of reproduction and child rearing
Crude hearing, maybe enough to hear warning sounds, infant crying or sound of approaching predators	Hearing good enough for excellent music appreciation ability and for understanding spoken languages with vocabularies of 50,000+ words
Paternal and maternal instincts, so offspring are not abandoned	Paternal and maternal instincts, so offspring are not abandoned, and also larger social tendencies leading to the preservation of tribes, towns, cities and governments
Slow mobility, enough to find nearby food	Ability to walk 25 miles a day
Blurry vision, just enough to see approaching predators or find food	Excellent sharp vision, allowing the appreciation of natural beauty, the recognition of thousands of faces, and the ability to read
One crude mitten-like hand for grasping food or throwing rocks or punching	Hands with such dexterity that they allow writing, sewing, tool-making, musical instrument playing, drawing and artistic painting.
Digestive ability	Digestive ability
Respiration ability	Respiration ability
Reproduction ability	Reproduction ability