Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig. Today, the Doctrine of Man,

Part 16. For more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonable faith.org.

Welcome to Defenders. I'm glad that you could join us for this podcast. In our last few sessions, we've

been looking at the scientific evidence for the date of the origin of humanity in order to

determine when plausibly the historical atom might have lived. As we've probed the evidence

for human origins, the evidence has pointed us again

and again to the progenitor of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals as the found of humanity, the

mysterious Heidelberg man. What do we know of him? In 1907, the lower jaw of a hominin was discovered at the

Grafenrein sand and gravel quarry in Maui, Germany, in the vicinity of Heidelberg.

Dating from about 600,000 years ago,

the jaw appeared to belong to a previously unknown species of early hominin.

The following year, the name Homo Heidelbergensis was bestowed by Otto Schurtenzak upon this species. In 1921, a nearly complete skull

appropriate to the Maur mandible, along with a shin bone, was unearthed in a metal ore mine in Broken Hill Rhodesia. Initially classed

as belonging to a new species, Homo Rhodesiensis, the new find eventually came to be classified

as an instance of Homo Heidelbergensis.

Although the brain case was relatively long and low compared to that of modern man, it was higher

and more expansive than that of Homo erectus, and had a capacity about 800 to 1,300 cubic centimeters, thus

overlapping the modern average, which is about 1,100 to 1,500 cubic centimeters.

The man at Broken Hill is estimated to have stood about six feet tall and to have weighed around 160 pounds.

Since the discovery at Broken Hill, a number of finds have been made and have been identified

as belonging to Homo Heidelbergensis, including remains from Boxgrove, England, Arago, France, Bilzingsleben,

Germany, Petrolona, Greece, Bodo, Ethiopia, Capthurin, Kenya, and Elansfontein, South Africa.

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