[quote=“mitchellmckain, post:57, topic:42578”]
Let’s enumerate my objections.
- 7000 years ago is the time frame that the Bible gives for Adam and Eve.
OK, I will take these objections on. But just know I spend hours on these posts because I want them documented… First, the Bible does NOT date Adam and Eve. I was just preparing another blog entry and your first question falls right into it.
Genesis 2:5 says, ".… and no shrub of the field had yet appeared on the earth and no plant of the field had yet sprung up, for the LORD God had not sent rain on the earth and there was no man to work the ground
Based on one phrase alone, ‘plants of the field,’ Eden is clearly placed PRIOR to the Neolithic time which is when so many place him. The Scripture itself says this is wrong. It is also on a land on which it had not rained. This rules out all the usual locations suggested for Eden. It had clearly rained on Turkey, the Levant, and Mesopotamia. . Thus Scripture itself says Neolithic Adam is wrong. The Neolithic was full of farming. Indeed the earliest wheat farming took place around 9600 BCE. The events of Eden were before this time. At a time when there were no ‘plants of the field’.
- Two passages in Genesis suggest that Adam and Eve are not the sole genetic progenitors of the human species.
lol, Am I supposed to read the entire Bible in about 30 m searching for these mystery verses?
Genesis 3:20 And Adam called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of all living. Assuming this doesn’t mean she gave birth to cats, Scripture says she is the mother of all living humans. Given that only Adam was alive with her, then there was no paramour for Eve, meaning Adam was the father of all living.
- If you believe that being human is more than just a biological species then there is no problem with Adam and Eve being the beginning of humanity even if they are not the sole genetic progenitors of the human species.
I am not sure how this is an objection rather than a statement of your views. By ‘more than a biological species’ I guess you mean they bore the image of God. Yes, I think thy bore the image of God.
- Pushing Adam and Eve back 5.3 million years also pushes back the significance to humanity of their relationship to God and what they did. It is basically claiming that these had nearly no measurable impact on us at all for 5 million years, and thus if we would look for any explanation of things we much look to completely different causes. That is 5.2 million years before before we even began wearing clothes or had any language (all the evidence for these things points to these starting around 70,000 to 150,000 years ago at most).
Clothing is one of those things that does not easily fossilize. Because of this all we can say is that it is millions of years before the evidence of clothing. One can’t categorically state that there was no clothing. And there is indirect evidence for clothing of some type as early as a maybe 2
“Between about 900,000 and 700,000 years ago, the first humans to settle in these northern lands had migrated north from Africa, together with the many species of animals they hunted. The first Europeans and Asians were small Homo erectus bands, originally tropical and subtropical hunters, who were adapted to live within a range of temperatures around 80 degrees F (27 deg. C). This particular temperature is the critical level at which humans neither cool nor warm their bodies, neither sweat nor shiver. We can withstand surprisingly large variations about this temperature, by maintaining an artificial microclimate around ourselves as near to this temperature as possible. For Homo erectus to be able to adapt to the more temperate climate of Europe and Asia, it was necessary not only to tame fire but to have both effective shelter and clothing to protect against heat loss. Homo erectus probably survived the winters by maintaining permanent fires, and by storing dried meat and other foods for use in the lean months.” ~ Brian M. Fagan, The Journey From Eden, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1990), p. 76
H.erectus lived at Dmanisi, Georgia–the Georgia in Asia, around 1.8 myr ago. It was a famous find. He might have needed clothing during the winters. And there is Lantian, China from 1.6 myr ago, a fossil skull and subsequent researches have found stone tools at Lantien dated to 2.1 myr ago–in China. I can say for a fact that one can’t live naked through a winter in central China. I lived in Beijing. In winter I usually war a sheepskin coat (yes an animal skin thrown over my body) to keep me warm and it wouldn’t do it on occasion. There is a story to tell about this picture below of my son and Daughter in law. It was January and they came to visit me in Beijing–wanted to see the sites. I told my dau. in law that I would buy her a fur lined hat with ear flaps. She flatly told me she wouldn’t wear one. I bought it anyway. Throughout the morning she went with head exposed in Beijing but was clearly uncomfortable. She soon put on a scarf, and that didn’t solve the problem. But when we went to the Great wall a few miles outside of Beijing, I carried that hat with me, and she finally wanted to wear it. I was in my fur coat and fur lined russian style hat and was cold. I loand my son a mink hat I had and he is wearing it–and we were still very cold.
Below is my outfit and I was freezing.
"Finally, modern humans don’t always wear clothing. The Ona
To get back to my subject: Ona clothing Children of bith sexes wore robes like their parents’. Fir small children, the soft skins of the very young guanaco were used. These however, got sodden with rain too rapidly to be of much use in bad weather. When the temperature permitted, the boys ran about stark naked, but the girls, though discarding their robes, always retained their tiny aprons. I have heard an Ona sternly reprove his wife for allowing their little daughter, a child of six or seven, to play without her apron. It was the wearing that was important; if in the child’s gambols her apron worked its way half round her body, it would have been of no account and would have brought no comment from the father." ~ E. Lucas Bridges, The Uttermost Part of the Earth, (New York: Dutton, 1949), p. 373
And my grandkids ancestors the Guachichile, part of the Chichimecas: “This,however, was not the case with the indigenous natives of the north who led barbarous primitive existences. for the most part, they went about naked and lived off he land by eating seeds and plants.” David T. Raphael, The Conquistadores and Crypto-Jews of Monterrey," Chapter 4 kindle edition location 622…
- So this does even agree with the Bible on other details like the beginning of things like agriculture, which the evidence places 12,000 to at most 23,000 years ago (depending on how you define it), as well as clothes and speech.
Already addressed farming–the Bible doesn’t say that Eden was in Neolithic times contrary to extremely widely belief. Speech. Jay and I disagree on this issue. There is one thing you need to know about speech. it comes from the neocortex, not from the emotional centers. All animal vocalization comes from their emotional centers. This is a significant difference and speech is tied to both Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas of the brain–no that isn’t all there is to speech, but, Humans have a part of the brain that leaves an impression on the inside of the skull from Broca’s area.
“The one area of the cortex that best distinguishes an ape brain from a human brain is the frontal lobes. A triangular fold of gray matter known as Broca’s area appears in left frontal lobes of humans and is associated with speech. This area does not appear in ape brains. Not only is the lower frontal lobe the best area for distinguishing an ape brain from a human brain, but it is also the area which is most likely to leave a good impression on the inside of the skull and therefore appear on an endocast --a happy accident.” ~ Dean Falk, Braindance,(New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1992), p. 48-49
So, when was the first fossil with that impression?
“The oldest evidence for Broca’s area to date is from KNM-ER 1470, a H. habilis specimen from Kenya, dated at approximately two million years ago. From that date forward, brain size ‘took off,’ i.e., increased autocatalytically so that it nearly doubled in the genus Homo, reaching its maximum in Neanderthals. If hominids weren’t using and refining language I would like to know what they were doing with their autocatalytically increasing brains (getting ready to draw pictures somehow doesn’t seem like enough).” ~ Dean Falk, Comments, Current Anthropology, 30:2, April, 1989, p. 141-142.
Two million years ago Broca’s area is found inside a habilis skull and habilis are as I have stated in earlier posts the earliest hominids who showed signs of them having pain in childbirth–in other words, they were descendants of Eve.
- It is one thing to claim that humanity is more than a biological species and that Adam and Eve added something more than genetics, and it is quite another to make Adam and Eve an entirely different species so that they were not even human biologically. Its not like I think the biological differences are the most important things but it is just as unreasonable to relegate them to no significance whatsoever like your scenario does. The ability to speak is an important difference!!!
Again, I just covered speech. Everyone really misses what a paleontological species is. It says nothing about the ability of two creatures to produce offspring. In the 1990s everyone knew that Neanderthal and Human could produce no viable offspring. that was the group-think of the day. I won’t quote people saying that but now we know they did leave offspring and we are descended from them. We are also descended from H. erectus. The latest erectus lived to around 110 kyr ago, living into the time of H. sapiens. We do share genes with erectus because the average age of our genes is about 1 million years,and the only real candidate for the source of those million year old genes is erectus.
“In fact, while neutrally evolving autosomal loci have TMRCAs ranging from 0.8 to 1.5 million years (MY) [24], gene regions under balancing selection may show coalescence times dating back more than 4 MY.” Rachele Cagliani et al, “Balancing selection is common in the extended MHC region but most alleles with opposite risk profile for autoimmune diseases are neutrally evolving,” BMC Evolutionary Biology201111:171, p. 8
If all you want from us is to say it is so cool that there was this flood 5 million years, then you’ve got it! That is SO COOL! Our primate ancestors could have been living in a lush valley like a garden of Eden which is now the bottom of the Mediterranean sea. I can even envision making a movie of such an event, …though it would be a bit like that penguin movie since none of the characters were actually capable of speech.
Well, I have answered your questions on every point–as I said earlier, over the last 30 years I think I have heard every possible question and everyone that comes up with a list thinks they are the first. They aren’t. I have thought about every objection that was presented to me. And I worked on a solution. Maybe you should take some time to absorb what I have just shown you.
Mitch, it is very easy to throw rocks. The hard thing is to come up with a novel theory to explain things. I expect the rocks will keep coming without actually thiniking about things like, Why did that habilis have a Broca’s area? or how did naked erectines live in cold weather regions? or Why does Eden start with a statement specifically ruling out the Neolithic age, yet group think of this day ignores that sentence. I have spent 2+ hours answering your questions. I hope you will take at least as long thinking about my answers. that would be the courteous thing to do. This is why I leave this place every now and then. there is no way to do the research I want to do when answering the same questions for the 20th time on the internet.