Did Noah's Flood Kill All Humans except his family?

If you mean by compressed genealogies, that there are big gaps, I do hold that view because the word ‘yelad’ which is used for ‘begat’ is used for grandkids, it is used for a man fathering a tribe! Clearly that isn’t a father-son relationship. Genesis 10:15-16 says:

And Canaan begat Sidon his firstborn, and Heth, 16 And the Jebusite, and the Amorite, and the Girgasite, 17 And the Hivite, and the Arkite, and the Sinite, 18 And the Arvadite, and the Zemarite, and the Hamathite

It seems to me that yelad, if it means a father son relationship that poor Canaan’s wife gave birth to whole tribes of people. lol. My wife called it quits after 3 kids.

It was the lack of a flood in that time frame that was a real problem for me after I left YEC.

The Bible seems to be the only major religious group whose founding book has a creation account–Since no man was alive at that time, if it is true (and I believe it can be read in full concordance with modern science), then it had to be given to the writer by God. Similarly, with the pre-creation of Adam description of Eden–Only God could have given it. If one already has God divinely communicating with man on the creation, then why not a wee bit more of the Scripture and carry it out to the flood. or even up to Abram. In for a penny in for a dollar as the saying goes.

Tough questions, and while I have thought about some of these, and indeed read the Book of Enoch, I don’t know the answer to your questions, but that hasn’t been my area–Genesis 1-10 ahs been my area.

I know. Without someone providing a pathway for there to be reality in Genesis 1-11, you reached the only logical conclusion–but it has bad implications for our theology, in my opinion. In my mind there were scholars a lot smarter than I who could have walked the intellectual path that I have, but they didn’t try. Christianity is absolutely in two wagon wheel ruts. Only two options are offered to Christians–false and fraudulent young earth/global flood or it doesn’t have a lick of truth to it. That is an awful, bad, stark choice. I blame our scholars for not working to find a solution–They all gave up!!!

Sure I might be wrong. But at least I am offering something brand new, that matches the Bible and matches modern science. At least I am trying to get Christianity out of this abysmal set of ruts!

I intend to write a post on the question of the boats, I have a section on this question in my old book Adam Apes and Anthropology (or Foundation Fall and Flood), can’t remember. Don’t worry no longer sell them but the data and theory from those 25 year old books has stood up to the test of time.

Think about this: if you and 8 friends, knowing what you all know are the sole survivors of a global flood on earth at this time (play along with me about the global flood). Yall 8 are the only people alive, and you have landed you know not where. How much of today’s technology do you think you could pass on to your kids. Plant a garden? 3 months before you get crop. By then you are starved to death. Plant a garden go hunting? As a gentleman farmer who tried gardening and working he week in Houston, I can tell you the critters ate my crops almost every year. Deer and squirells got my peaches, cows ate half of my corn. Weeds chocked out everything else. Farming is smething that can only be don FULL TIME,which raises a real question in my mind about Abel being able to farm and not starve to death. I am working on a post on that issue too.

Let’s continue. Do you know how to make stone tools?, Fletch an arrow? do you know what fletching is? Do you know the best kind of wood is needed to make an arrow? Just any old tree won’t work. (bois d’arc and Yew). Make a fish weir?, Do you know where iron deposits are? Do you know where coal is? Can you mine it even if you can walk to those sites? Assuming you have coal, and iron ore, and you build a kiln, and put it all in and set it on fire. Will you get molten iron? Do you even know the answer to that question? Do you know what is missing that is required to get iron out of rocks?

I could go on and on. I am extremely educated in geology, ancient technology and even know the theory of making stone tools, but I am not sure I could do it. Making arrow heads requires long periods of practice. Very few modern humans can even make Neanderthal Levalois tools. People have lost eye sight from rock slivers shooting into the eye.

So, whatever technology they had, it would be lost. Hunger today rules everything when 8 people are left on a virgin world. Because of all this, the lack of technology in early mankind is totally irrelevant. If you and 8 of your chosen friends survived alone on earth, it would be millions of years before our technology arose again. That is a simple fact–yet so many people think we humans are so smart as to be able to recreate farming. Farming requires storage like pottery–a pile of wheat left on the ground will be eaten by bugs and mice. Harvest requires lots of peoeple–8 people on earth couldnt feed themselves. All I can say is that God had to help them.

I know someone will mention Noah’s grape vine. I made great jelly from an intentionally planted wild grape vine at the ranch I got loads of grapes off of it. Just getting those grapes didn’t make me a farmer!

I did make some fantastic jelly out of them. lol

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God will reward you more greatly than I because of your faith. I didn’t have that faith that I don’t need to understand everything. My best friend, Dean, who also was once a YEC but went into the oil industry is still anti-evolution. He chides me occasionally with this: “Glenn who you do you think you are that you demand to know every answer?” About all I can answer is ’ that is me."

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With the genealogies and connected histories, the Bible certainly does give a time frame for Adam and Eve as is abundantly well known all through the history of Christianity. To be sure this is not an absolute proof. So it is only a question of whether you have given sufficient reason to ignore this time frame. And I don’t think that you have. The idea that Gen 2:5 can place this story in a geological time frame sounds utterly absurd to me. There is no evidence whatsoever of a geological period which it did not rain anywhere and there have always been locations where it does not rain.

They have been mentioned so many times in this forum, I thought you would be familiar with them by now: Gen 4:14 and Gen 6. People were everywhere at the time of Adam and Eve, though it distinguishes the those who were the sons of God from other men. But if you want to go the fantasy route of half angelic giants, talking snakes, magical fruits, and golems of dust and bone… well that is your business but it is not of the slightest bit of interest to me any more than creationism and UFOs.

This was something you applauded loudly earlier in the thread. And the point was this explanation is sufficient negating any need for looking for ways to prop up Adam and Eve as genetic progenitors of the human species. That direction for Christianity connecting spirituality (relationship with God) to genetics is one which holds even less interest for me than creationism and UFOs.

The evidence for this came from comparison of the genetics for the different types of lice. Sure its not absolute proof. Again it is a matter of whether sufficient reason has been given to ignore this piece of evidence and I do not think you have done so.

Your talk of Homo Erectus is irrelevant since they did not exist 5 million years ago. 5 million years ago is before Homo Erectus, before Homo Habilis, back to the beginnings of the Australopithicus, and they had neither fire nor clothing. Their remains are found in Africa. The Homo Erectus are found outside Africa but that was much later around 1.8 million years ago.

I said nothing about “Neolithic times” so you seem to be avoiding what I actually said. The Bible speaks of Abel with herds and Cain tilling the ground so this is clearly a time when agriculture was practiced, but the scientific evidence tells us that agriculture began 12,000 to 23,000 years ago. Again it is a question of whether sufficient reason has been given to ignore this and you have not given good reason to ignore this evidence also.

Well you have not answered any of my objections in the slightest. It all comes down to the question of WHY? What possible reason can we have for ignoring all the scientific and Biblical evidence? Frankly the only coherent reason I can see given is besides you simply liking the idea of being the one who found Noah’s flood in geological history, is that this is flood big enough and impressive enough in your mind. But it is not your mind that counts here but rather the experience of people a very long long time ago with an extremely limited notion of the how big the world was and when it took very little to make it look like the end of the world to them.

So that is the question you must focus on because the details of some Biblical passage that can be interpreted in endless numbers of different ways simply will not cut it. What is the overriding theological necessity that could possibly drive us to ignore not only the contrary Biblical details but the scientific evidence from so many different directions? I not only see none but I see the precise opposite, where we should be denying that this is about genetics and is instead about the very different inheritance of the human mind.

You missed it but I just wrote to Skove on this issue:
If you mean by compressed genealogies, that there are big gaps, I do hold that view because the word ‘yelad’ which is used for ‘begat’ is used for grandkids, it is used for a man fathering a tribe! Clearly that isn’t a father-son relationship. Genesis 10:15-16 says:

And Canaan begat Sidon his firstborn, and Heth, 16 And the Jebusite, and the Amorite, and the Girgasite, 17 And the Hivite, and the Arkite, and the Sinite, 18 And the Arvadite, and the Zemarite, and the Hamathite

It seems to me that yelad, if it means a father son relationship that poor Canaan’s wife gave birth to whole tribes of people. lol. My wife called it quits after 3 kids.

They have been mentioned so many times in this forum, I thought you would be familiar with them by now: Gen 4:14 and Gen 6.

Well, Genesis 6, descendants of A and E not closely to proving other folk were around when A and E were created. Genesis 4:14? No matter what time this happened, it could have been a forward looking statement, or Cain and Able could have been long after A and E had grandkids, so it would have been clear that someone might want to extract revenge.

I know where it came from. And I find it to be only indicative of when mankind started wearing clothing all the time. Clothing lice don’t like being on naked people. When this came out I researched it extensively. All this can tell you is when there was a consistent wearing of clothing.

His team reached its verdict after comparing DNA from head lice, which only grow on the scalp, with that from body lice, which live in clothes and feed on the body. From rates of mutation in the DNA, they calculate that body lice probably evolved from head lice, and that the relatively sudden spread of a single species of body louse throughout the world is consistent with the rapid spread of clothed humans from Africa. (Current biology, Vo 13, p. 1414.” “Clothes Conquer All,” ,” New Scientist, Aug 23, 2003, p.22

I am going to get to that. I want to update my response to that. In short, no wait for the entire thing. that is what I was working on when you posted earlier today if you will recall.

Ok, I will amend it to from uppermost Pleistocene times to the present. I think you are picking nits here to use the lice analogy. And you are ignoring what I told you this afternoon. I knew you would, you haven’t responded to:

So, if you don’t want me ignoring you, then you should cease ignoring what I said. Also you didn’t respond to the need for clothing as H. erectus moved into the northern climates. He was as hairless as we are–he sweated as did all subsequent H. erectus’s

The antiquity of this bodily to heat stress told us something else too: the boy was probably running around in hot, open country and sweating. Although it is indirect evidence, the boy’s body build suggests that he, and all Homo erectuses, had lost whatever body fur or hair our more ancient ancestors probably possessed. If he had been hairy or furry, then panting (and avoiding) activity during the hottest hours of the day) would have served as his main mechanism for heat loss, as it does for the other animals of the African savanna. Because he had no furry protection from the harsh equatorial sun, the boy was probably also very darkly pigmented. Another fascinating feature reflects another aspect of the boy’s adaptation to functioning in such a hot and arid environment: he had a nose, a real nose. Bob Franciscus and Erik Trinkaus of the University of New Mexico documented the fact that erectus was the earliest species to have a projecting, human-type nose. In contrast, australopithecines and Homo habilis had flat, apelike noses, so that (prior to erectus) the nostrils leading to the nasal aperture–the opening of the respiratory tract through the nostrils–were sunken into the surface of the face rather than being part of an external nose." ~ Alan Walker and Pat Shipman, The Wisdom of the Bones, (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1996), p. 196-197.

If all you are going to do is ignore my answers to you and merely throw rocks again, then you are not worth me wasting my precious remaining time on. Please explain why H. erectus could live naked and hairless in a Chinese winter–China to refresh your memory is just south of Siberia which is very cold in the winter and send cold air south.

And I gave you a very good reason why clothing of some sort had to exist earlier which you ignored. Stop ignoring what I give in response to your questions!!!

lol, I didn’t know you were my employer giving me a yearly review.

What evidence have you presented? Not a single citation–you couldn’t even give me a reference to the louse article. you want it? here it is.Did We or Didn't We? Louse Genetic Analysis Says Yes | PLOS Biology

Quite simply if we don’t do it, we make the Bible 1. historically false; 2. scientifically false. 3. a laughing stock for our adversaries. 4. we make God out to be impotent at communicating to us, yet we claim that he is in control of our lives. that out to be enough of an incentive if one isn’t so jaded as to wish God to be a failed god. going to bed now.

I need to reply to this. Mitch, if you were totally honest you would admit that I have zero chance of ever convincing you of this and never did have a chance. It is like another guy with whom I had zero chance–that is ok, no view gets 100% support–life and theology don’t work that way. So telling me what will and won’t cut it, just be honest, nothing will cut it with you. I could lay everything out for you and it would be like Jesus said:

Whereunto then shall I liken the men of this generation? and to what are they like? 32 They are like unto children sitting in the marketplace, and calling one to another, and saying, We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned to you, and ye have not wept. Luke 7

If I dance for you, it will make no difference and if I cry for you it will make no difference. I have learned this over the years and it is why, when I first came here last summer, I told Ted Davis that I didn’t want to spend my last days debating about things no one will accept anyway–like I did back on the old ASA list before Ted got mad at me and shut down the free wheeling forum, turning it into boredom boiled down to its purest essence. I will answer questions but I expect you to be specific telling me why what I answered doesn’t work. I don’t care to cast my pearls in front of the unconvinciable–it wastes your time and mine.

Just like I answered Pevaquarks post but he won’t explain why the breach at Gibraltar doesn’t sound very much like the fountains of the deep breaking forth–the deep was he sea. I wasted good time answerinig him in good faith–and I answered you in good faith–you should have the courtesy to go through my answers using data to say why clothing on an H. erectus to save him from the cold, isn’t really clothing!!!

This argument is total nonsense. Your example was only a measly 11 children. Lots of people where I live have more than 12 children. And this was even more common in the past.

You are altering the text and not taking what it says seriously. And I can only repeat myself that I just don’t see you giving sufficient justification for doing so. It’s just like the way creationists add sisters and incest never spoken of in the text just so they can force the Bible to fit their beliefs. Rejected.

I didn’t ignore it. I simply disagree with your interpretation. It proves absolutely nothing. I disagree with the whole idea that Genesis 2 is speaking of a special creation of Adam and Eve just as I disagree with the idea that Adam and Eve are golems of dust and bone. This is the creation of all mankind over billions of years, because that is what it took to create Adam and Eve as it takes to create all human beings. God formed their bodies of the stuff of the Earth according to the laws of nature which includes the process of evolution, and then He spoke to them in order to bring their minds to life. The magical treatment of this story will never interest me. I would throw the book into a garbage can first.

You have to remember the differences between us. I am not someone raised to take the truth of the Bible for granted and thus trying to justify it to science. I simply asked myself whether there could be any value to this book taking the findings of science for granted. I came to the conclusion that the answer was yes because magical understandings of the text are not required for it to have value, let alone these distortions of the text in order to force the book to contradict evolution. But where there is no conflict with the findings of science I see no reason to reinterpret the text away from what it actually says.

Nonsense. The Bible is neither an historical text nor a scientific text. And it is insisting that it is either of these things which makes it a laughing stock. Yes the book of Genesis has an historical intent, but it is hardly anything like a historical text. And it has no scientific intent at all. We are talking about about stories from before any such specialization of human activities and writings into such things as history or science. And thus it is absurd to expect it to fit into such categories.

In other words… you don’t have any good answer to the question of WHY? Why do we need to ignore all the scientific evidence and change the text of the Bible to make it force a fit of this flood 5 million years ago to Noah’s flood? I have heard no good reason for this and you haven’t provided one and without that I will certainly not agree.

Indeed the premises of our thinking looks to be wildly different. What appears to be important to me is of little importance to you and what appears to be important to you is of little importance to me. That is generally the case with any two people, because the varieties of people are vast and possibilities exceed the numbers of atoms in the universe.

gbob - Glen - brother, your sense of purpose is inspiring, never stop. Do you have any headspace for the posit that nihilism and God are compatible?

Mitch going to tell a parable. A man went on a trip to a far away place, and found a cleft in the rock that was barely passable, thinner than the cleft at Petra. He walks through that cleft and finds the other end opens to a ledge on a high cliff. Below he sees dinosaurs. Tyranosaurus, apatosaurus, velociraptors, Duck bills etc. He goes back to civilization, tells his friends that they have to come see what he has found, and they follow him and when they get on the ledge, and he shows them the dinosaurs, One says, this isn’t interesting, thee are no pteradactyls–and he walks away. A second says, 'You can’t explain how they survived here." and he walks away. Everyone seems to want to miss the big point. Even if I can’t explain everything to your oh so perfecting standard, it doesn’t change the fact that I did find a flood that matches the Biblical description of Noah’s flood. My inability to satisfy someone on X does not mean that Y isn’t still true.

Another story seen in the Wall street this morning, in the cartoon. A hiring manager is talking to the job candidate and says, “You are the perfect candidate, except your handshake was a bit weak” Yep, that is a reason to reject that candidate.

Are you kidding me? That is 2 children and 9 tribes. In case you haven’t noticed the ‘ite’ is a suffix for a whole lot of people. And we don’t know if Jebu of the Jebusites as a grandkid or not. I am not altering the text, I am reading what is there. It is Sidon, Heth and the 9 ‘ites’.

As I said, I never had a chance with you. Your theology comes first, observational data comes second. I have known that since our discussions of quantum.

And you think I was? My father was an atheist and my mother a sociopath attempted murderess. You really assume knowledge you don’t have and then act as if it can’t be doubted.

As I said, it is fine to hold your own view, the views among Christian about almost everything is legion. What I don’t understand is if you are comfortable in your view, why is it so important to whomp on my view? I suggest maybe you are not as confident of your position as you make out. I might be wrong–I am not assuming that to be the case, it just seems that you really don’t want my view to be true–and that is your right.

That is of course, an assumption. Nowhere does the Bible actually say, “this is historical nonsense”. So, don’t act like God told you that the Bible was neither a historical nor book in concordance with science. I am always amazed at how certain people are that they know the mind of God as to what he intended. And that is what you are saying–that you know beyond a doubt what God intended. The only problem is no one explains where they obtained that certainty; where they obtained their knowledge.

Maybe your assumption is erroneous. Maybe it was meant to be history and you weren’t determined enough to find that history.

No, it is that you have already made up your mind and are not open to any other way of looking at things–I remind you of your words:

That pretty much says my view is not for you and that this assumption rules the rest of your ideology.

Yes, and it is best to argue against another position by using the assumptions of THAT position, showing logical contradictions, not by trying to impose your assumptions on the other system of thought as if one’s own assumptions are unquestionable certitudes Assumptions are taken by faith–it is your faith that Adam and Eve were not Golems of dust. It is my faith that they might have been so explore the consequences. Note that I didn’t say that they were made of dust and bone for I can not prove that. But if I can do what thousands have said was impossible–find a flood that matches Noah’s description, it certainly makes me wonder if God could also do exactly what is claimed in Genesis 2-3!

Some of the questions you raise are issues that need to be answered, but not answered within the confines of your assumptions, but answered within the confines of my assumptions. To require the answer I give which flow from my set of assumptions to fit in with your assumptions (like no golems made of clay or bone) is the wrong way to evaluate another system of thought.

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Hi Martin. Oh gosh, you embarass me. lol. I am about the least inspiring person on earth being abut as feisty as you. lol

Bring it on Martin. I would love to see such a combo. I might not agree or I might. Let’s see what your assumptions going into this interestingly different possibility are-- This almost sounds dialectical when I refresh my mind on the meaning of nihilism to get a technical definition… lol

Start a new thread and I will find it.

While I am working on a couple of things, I thought I would show some of the wildlife that lived on the bottom of the Mediterranean sea when it was dry. I do this so that people won’t think that there is no way anything could have lived there. These are reconstructions from fossils, so exact coloration is not to be obtained but that doesn’t mean the animals were here. All of these were found in Messinian sediments. Some of those sediments have been uplifted above sealevel bringing their fossils with them so they could be found.

First Myotragus–a goat. The only way this goat could have made it to this island was to have walked across the dry basin and then by luck, was above sea level when the flood came. Now, they could have retreated up the mountain as the waters rose, numerical modeling says the waters rose in the basin around 7 m per day. This is a model and different assumptions would change that number, but it gives an idea of how herds could retreat up-slope day after day while the basin filled with water. While they only survived on Mallorca they would likely have been widespread during the Messinian Salinity Crisis–I will discuss him later.

Early elephant called Gomphotherium

gomphothere-Gomphotherium

A couple of Hyaenids, Hyaenictitheriium and Lycyaena

A big cat Machairodus and below is size compared to man


Micromeryx, a deer with fangs

Pika’s
Sardinian_pika

Baby hippos

A bovid lived in the Messinian sediments.

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Are you kidding me? That is a bizarre interpretation. ‘ite’ is not ‘ites.’ Much more reasonable understanding is that this is only one child who was eventually the origin of an entire tribe. But I guess if you are looking for excuses to ignore the time frame given for Adam and Eve then you can find wiggle room almost anywhere. But I don’t see good reason to reject both the Bible and the findings of science in order to support this magical interpretation of things which is so disconnected from the reality we experience it is like living in a comic book or fantasy novel.

My theology and reading of the Bible starts with science, that is for sure. Science definitely comes first. I have said so many many times. I was a scientist before I was ever a Christian and I always will be. No magical fruit, no talking snakes, and no golems of dust and bone magic either. But it is demonstrable that your theology comes first and the Bible and science comes second and third with you.

I don’t need to make any assumptions in order to speak about myself. As for science and theology a graduate education makes one aware of how much is out there, while enabling the coming to conclusions about the things one studies in most detail in the direction of our interests.

Yep. That is what I have been saying over and over again. Like I said what appears to be important to me is of little importance to you and what appears to be important to you is of little importance to me. We can certainly leave it at that.

Concerning genealogies one thing I was wondering that could play a part and hinting at compressed records is the fact that often only the sons are mentioned. The daughters for the most part seem to be skipped and if they are skipped is it possible even sons were skipped who simply did not seem worth mentioning.

Is it possible that those could be missing and if so that the records are indeed highly compressed at times?

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Mitch, that is a nit hardly worth mentioning. Are you reduced to this kind of nit-picking? Have a good evening Mitch, when one is reduced to this kind of nonsense, there isn’t much more to say.

I found this in my notes, which makes loads of compressed genealogy in Genesis 10:

10:1 Now these are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth: and unto them were sons born after the flood.
2 The sons of Japheth; Gomer, and Magog, and Madai, and Javan, and Tubal, and Meshech, and Tiras.
3 And the sons of Gomer; Ashkenaz, and Riphath, and Togarmah.
4 And the sons of Javan; Elishah, and Tarshish, Kittim, and Dodanim.
5 By these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations.
6 And the sons of Ham; Cush, and Mizraim, and Phut, and Canaan.
7 And the sons of Cush; Seba, and Havilah, and Sabtah, and Raamah, and Sabtechah: and the sons of Raamah; Sheba, and Dedan.
8 And Cush begat Nimrod: he began to be a mighty one in the earth.
9 He was a mighty hunter before the LORD: wherefore it is said, Even as Nimrod the mighty hunter before the LORD.
10 And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar.
11 Out of that land went forth Asshur, and builded Nineveh, and the city Rehoboth, and Calah,

And Resen between Nineveh and Calah: the same is a great city.

10:1 . 'el-leh . . towledah . . ben . noach shem cham . yepheth . . . . ben yalad ‘achar . mabbuwl
2 . ben . yepheth gomer . magowg . maday . yavan . tuwbal . meshek . tiyreya’
3 . . ben . gomer 'ashkenaz . riyphath . towgarmah
4 . . ben . yavan 'eliyshah . tarshiysh kittiy . dodaniym
5 . 'el-leh . . 'iy . . gowy parad . . ‘erets ‘iysh ‘iysh . . lashown . . mishpachah . . gowy
6 . . ben . cham kuwsh . mitsrayim . puwt . kena’an
7 . . ben . kuwsh ceba’ . chaviylah . cabta . ra’mah . cabteka’ . . ben . ra’mah sheba’ . dedan
8 . kuwsh yalad nimrowd . chalal . . . gibbowr . . . 'erets
9 . . . gibbowr tsayid paniym . yehovah 'al ken . . 'amar . . nimrowd . gibbowr tsayid paniym . yehovah
10 . . re’shiyth . . mamlakah . babel . 'erek . 'akkad . kalneh . . ‘erets . shin’ar
11 . . . ‘erets yatsa’ yatsa’ 'ashshuwr . banah niyneveh . . ‘iyr rechobowth . kelach
. recen beyn niyneveh . kelach . huw’ . . gadowl 'iyr

Notice that yalad is only used twice in this passage. But ben is used all over the place. Since Farrell was claiming that the use of yalad proved that the genealogies are complete and that the Bible REQUIRES a 6000 year old earth, this is clearly not the case. Even Farrell admitted that ben meant ancestor of. Thus the lack of yalad in Chapter 10:1-12 means that there is plenty of room for time to be inserted here.

This is from my notes:
The first possibility we have of a gap is Genesis 5:10-12, since it doesn’t say that Enosh ““named”” him Kenan.

Other gaps are possible also between: Kenan and Mahalalel; Mahalalel and Jared; Jared and Enoch; Enoch to Methuselah; Methuselah to Lamech, since none of them are said to be ““named”” by their progenitor.

There is some evidence from Luke. I saw this on the net::

Consider the following verse from Genesis 11, 3502 is yalad

Genesis 11:12 And Arphaxad lived five and thirty years, and begat [H3205] Salah:

The word “begat” (H3205) means to produce or bring forth, and in this verse specifically means to produce offspring. Thus Genesis 11:12 is teaching Arphaxad brought forth an offspring or descendant named Salah. Now the important question that needs to be addressed is whether such a descendant must be an immediate offspring (e.g., a direct son of a father) or whether a later descendant can be in view (e.g., a grandson or great grandson). Unfortunately many theologians simply assume “begat” must always without exception refer to an immediate descendant, which for Genesis 11:12 would require that Salah be a direct son of Arphaxad. But was Salah really the direct son of Arphaxad? Let’s look at the genealogy of Luke 3 for an answer to this question,

Luke 3:35-36 Which was the son of Saruch, which was the son of Ragau, which was the son of Phalec, which was the son of Heber, which was the son of Sala, which was the son of Cainan, which was the son of Arphaxad , which was the son of Sem, which was the son of Noe, which was the son of Lamech,

Here in Luke 3 we find that Cainan was the son of Arphaxad, and Salah was (at least) a grandson of Arphaxad. That is, Luke 3 is crystal clear that Salah was not an immediate son of Arphaxad. This means “begat” in Genesis 11:12 cannot require Salah to be a direct or immediate son of Arphaxad since Luke 3 makes him at least a grandson! So whenever we find the word “begat” (Hebrew yalad) in the Old Testament genealogies, we cannot assume an immediate son is being specified. The offspring could be, as in Genesis 11:12, a grandson! https://sites.google.com/site/calendarstudies/begat-hebrew-yalad-

from the Theologicall Wordbook of the Old Testament about yalad:

The word does not necessarily point to the generation immediately following. In Hebrew thought, an individual by the act of giving birth to a child becomes a parent or ancestor of all who will be descended from this child. Just as Christ is called a son of David and a son of Abraham, yālad may show the beginning of an individual’s relationship to any descendant.Harris, R. L., Archer, G. L., Jr., & Waltke, B. K. (Eds.). (1999). Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 379). Chicago: Moody Press.

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Over the next 3 days I will post three items on the technology issues. But before I post the first one I want to re-iterate my view of how the Scripture should be interpreted. The Bible says God won’t lie (yes we have been over that before), but that statement has implications.

  1. while we don’t know how God inspired the writers of the Bible, whatever his part, it must be true, which implies the message must be true if it is to be divinely inspired.
  2. God has to be able to communicate to both Neolithics and modern man in a way that is truthful for both. In my mind it means that there has to be a way to view the Bible favorably within the light of modern science–most of my posts have been done with that as my aim
  3. The above implies some simple things translators should do. If there is a choice of word meanings, don’t chose the meaning that automatically makes the Bible false. An example of translating eretz as earth in Genesis 6-9 leads modern people to think the flood was global and that makes what the Scripture says false. Chosing to translate it as ‘land’ leaves the question open as to whether the flood was global or local. In Job 37 choosing to translate a word as ‘doors’ instead of another alternative ‘lid’ makes the Bible say stupid things about nature.

Thus, I think it is very important to lay out the alternatives and think about the implications of each possible word choice and how it impacts what Scripture says about nature and history. Translation shouldn’t only be done without some such consideration. A case in point, the bad numbers in Numbers. Translators chose to translate ‘aleph’ as ‘1000’ which leads to 2-3 million Hebrews and their cattle and sheep, wandering the Sinai like a locust plague. A more reasonable word choice would be head of a clan, or chief.

This needs to be considered as we go into the technology issues.

Technology Part 1

I am going to do this in 3 posts, one per day. This is a slightly modified version of Pathway Paper #5 which I briefly sold in 2005 after I came back from Scotland but before I left for China. It is an issue no one has really pushed me on here but it is something that can’t be left unaddressed, but which I did address 15 years ago… This is probably the most controversial part of my views, which already challenge much of what Christians believe. When I have presented these ideas, it usually gets a bit raucous. Intellectual honesty makes me, no, requires me to deal with the issue of technology in Genesis 4. The technology listed in Genesis 4 include musical instruments, tents, farming, cattle herding, and even metal work (maybe, and that is a really big maybe not in my opinion–from Scripture). This is obviously possibly problematical for my view, or so many think.

I believe Genesis 2:5 rules out an agricultural setting at least at the time Adam and Eve were created.

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. (I will extend the term Neolithic to include back to 20kyr as Mitch seems to prefer) The Scripture itself says this is wrong, there were no plants of the field. 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, Saudi Arabia, Iran 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’.

So how do I square this circle? There are two possible answers to this. First, let’s assume all of this technology did exist in the pre-flood world. If you hold my feet to the fire insisting I must literally accept the English meanings of the King James Bible, then the easiest explanation is what I would use. I would say this technology issue is meaningless to my view simply because it would all be lost after the flood and would need to be re-invented. This is the easiest least time consuming explanation. As I wrote to Skove (slightly modified),

" Think about this: if you and 8 friends, knowing what you all know are the sole survivors of a global flood on earth at this time (play along with me about the global flood). Yall 8 are the only people alive, and you have landed you know not where. How much of today’s technology do you think you could pass on to your kids. Plant a garden? 3 months before you get crop. By then you are starved to death. Plant a garden go hunting? As a gentleman farmer who tried gardening and working the week in Houston, I can tell you the critters ate my crops almost every year. Deer and squirrels got my peaches, cows ate half of my corn. Weeds chocked out everything else. Farming is something that can only be don FULL TIME, which raises a real question in my mind about Abel being able to farm and not starve to death. I am working on a post on that issue too.

Let’s continue. Do you know how to make stone tools?, Fletch an arrow? do you know what fletching is? Do you know the best kind of wood is needed to make an arrow? Just any old tree won’t work. (Bois d’arc and Yew). Do you know how to straighten an arrow shaft? Make a fish weir?, Do you know where iron deposits are? Do you know where coal is? Can you mine it even if you can walk to those sites? How do you feed yourself while you are mining coal and iron ore? Assuming you have coal, and iron ore, and you build a kiln, and put it all in and set it on fire. Will you get molten iron? Do you even know the answer to that question? Do you know what is missing that is required to get iron out of rocks?

I could go on and on. I am extremely educated in geology, ancient technology and even know the theory of making stone tools, but I am not sure I could do it. Making arrow heads requires long periods of practice. Very few modern humans can even make Neanderthal Levallois tools. People have lost eye sight from rock slivers shooting into the eye.

So, whatever technology they had, it would be lost. Hunger today rules everything when 8 people are left on a virgin world. Because of all this, the lack of technology in early mankind is totally irrelevant. If you and 8 of your chosen friends survived alone on earth, it would be millions of years before our technology arose again. That is a simple fact–yet so many people think we humans are so smart as to be able to recreate farming instantly . Farming requires storage like pottery–a pile of wheat left on the ground will be eaten by bugs and mice. Harvest requires lots of peoeple–8 people on earth couldn’t feed themselves. All I can say is that God had to help them.

I know someone will mention Noah’s grape vine. I made great jelly from an intentionally planted wild grape vine at the ranch I got loads of grapes off of it. Just getting those grapes didn’t make me a farmer!"

That is absolutely the easiest answer to this issue. Humans had it and lost it. Some might say, 'How convenient!". If people don’t like that explanation, then the second option takes a bit more time, but over the next few days I will post on the various technologies, showing that the technologies spoken of in the Bible were invented long before the farming era. If we take what Scripture says about the inventions of Adam and Eve’s descendants, then they were not Neolithic farmers. These inventions were made way back in time. . Thus, the value of the second approach is in showing more data why Adam and Eve were not Neolithic.

I will show that people other than H. sapiens, did tend herds in a certain sense. One thing to remember is that people think shepherding is taking care of the animals, and it is, but for the purpose of killing the animals. The Good Shepherd analogy breaks down at this point. God is shepherding us out of this world; the human shepherd is going to eat those he cares for. The whole point of shepherding is to eat the animal or sell it to others so they can eat. I think of one of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes where aliens come to earth, offer us cures for our diseases, help with our technology, always doing good for mankind. But they had a book, which was entitled. “How to Serve Man”, and which, when translated turned out to be a cookbook–a set of recipes on how to prepare men for their tables. One certainly got the impression in the show that those about to be eaten were less enthused about the aliens loving care of them. ‘Tending’ the herds and it doesn’t require Johnny Farmer to be on site.

What would Abel have tended to down on the bottom of the Mediterranean? Maybe the Messinian aged Myotragus. Myotragus is only found so far on Mallorca in the Western Mediterranean, but that may be only because he survived there when the basin flooded. But it doesn’t matter if it was that or not. The word tson can mean sheep, goat or cattle and there are bovids that likely lived in the basin as well.


As noted, most authorities claim that the Biblical narrative regarding Cain and Abel show a Neolithic (early farming) time setting. If this is true, and Adam and Eve are the direct parents of Cain and Abel, as the Bible indicates, then Adam must be a late entrant into the world. The data of anthropology says, “Not so fast, Cowboy!”

The Bible says,

And again she bare his brother Abel. And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground ” Gen 4:2 ASV

And Adah bare Jabal: he was the father of such as dwell in tents and have cattle. 21And his brother’s name was Jubal: he was the father of all such as handle the harp and pipe. And Zillah, she also bare Tubal-cain, the forger of every cutting instrument of brass and iron ” Gen 4:20-22 ASV

Dick Fischer writes of this:

" Could sophisticated musical instruments (Gen. 4:21) predate simple bone flutes? How could metal working (Gen. 4:22) have preceded the Neolithic (late Stone Age) period?" 110

and

" Genesis 4:22. One of Cain’s descendants, Tubal-Cain, was ‘an instructor of every worker in brass and iron.’

“This is the proverbial smoking gun! Adam belongs after the old Stone Ages, at the end of the Neolithic, at the threshold of a period called the Neolithic when traditional stone tools were augmented by crude copper implements. Adam’s descendants saw the dawning of the Bronze Age.” 111

To satisfy Mitch, I will define the Neolithic as being between 20,000 and 2000 years ago. So, while Dick is not a young-earth creationist, he is a young-earth Adamic person, holding that Adam was recently created. Apart from the troubles we saw above, where language, religion, pain in childbirth, sweat and clothing goes much further back than 6,000 years ago, the trump card in my debates with Dick has always been the passage above. Today, we take that passage on and show why it does not mean a Neolithic Adam

Is this the only way these passages could be read? I don’t think so. In Pathway Paper #1 we discussed the need for the Bible to be true throughout all time. God has a meaning for what he inspired, the writer wrote words inspired by God, but may have had an understanding of those words different than what God intended. Today, when we read the Word with the understanding of a 21st century person, we will understand those words differently than did the Iron-age writer. The hermeneutical approach which requires that we understand the Bible based upon the original intent of the writer ignores the fact that the writer may not have understood exactly what God intended. Thus, we will approach these passages from this point of view, i.e., there is a true meaning but it may not be the traditional interpretation of the Scripture.

Let’s start by looking at the claim that Abel was a keeper of sheep. The word for keeper is abad. The word is a participle and can mean to pasture, tend, graze, feed, shepherd, to associate with, or be a friend of. Of these possible meanings, there seems to be two classes. The first class has the meaning of shepherd. These meanings are ‘to pasture”, “graze”, “shepherd”, and “feed”. The other class has a slightly different meaning. “Tend”, “to associate with, and ‘to be a friend of,” do not have the connotation of the shepherd. How do we know which meaning we should use? For reasons which will become clear below, I will suggest the term ‘tend’ is an appropriate meaning here.

But what about the word ‘sheep’? The word translated sheep is tso’n. The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew lexicon defines that word as “small cattle, sheep, sheep and goats”. Given this range of definitions, we can’t be sure exactly what it was that Abel tended to. It could have been goats for all we know. Like Mandarin, Hebrew isn’t always entirely clear on the distinction between wild goats and wild sheep, nor apparently, even cattle. Both goats and sheep climb cliffs in similar way and live in hills cropping the vegetation close to the ground.

One thing we ought to do is look at when humans began ‘tending’ tso’n (sheep/goats) but we also ought to look at what does it mean to ‘tend’ sheep/goats? A shepherd watches over the sheep and fends off the other predators, like lions, and wolves. But the shepherd is also a sheep/goat predator. In deed, he is the chief predator of the sheep/goat. The animals are kept for his personal use and he kills them when he and his family need food. A herding family will get the vast majority of their calories from eating them with percentages above 75%.112

Now, what are we to think when we learn that Neanderthals in the Caucasus mountains gained 85% of their meat intake from a type of tso’n ?113 Is this not ‘tending’ t’son ? But this is not all. Neanderthals obtained a high percentage of their meat from goats and sheep at numerous other sites. Goat and sheep bones represent 60% of the layer 2A deposits at the Neanderthal site of Mezmaiskaya Cave in the Caucaus mountains.114 Adler states,

Outside the Caucasus, high frequencies of mountain goat in Middle Palaeolithic contexts have been observed in Uzbekistan at Teshik-Tash (Capra sibirica: 1 80% NISP [Gromova 1949]) and Obi-Rakhmat (Capra sibirica: 47.4–66.7% [Wrinn n.d.]), at the Spanish sites of Gabasa 1 (Capra pyrenaica: 33.7–52.2% NISP per layer [Blasco Sancho 1995]) and Axlor (Capra ibex: 25.6% combined ungulate sample [Altuna 1989, 1992]), and at Hortus in southern France (Capra ibex: 75.4% NISP combined sample [de Lumley 1972]). ”115

Given this, how on earth do we say that Neanderthals don’t fit the definition of being a ‘tender of tso’n ”? A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences points out that the isotopic composition of Neanderthal bones showed that they derived most of their calories from meat, not from plant foods.116 This further supports the idea that they were somehow ‘tending’ to the animals they chose to eat.

But this data, this high percentage of bones of a single large animal actually contradict ethnological observations of modern hunter gatherers. Modern humans seem much less efficient at hunting than these Neanderthals. Hawkes et al, looked at the caloric economy of modern hunters. If one reads what they conclude, it is entirely a mystery why the Neanderthals were so efficient at large game. Hawkes et al., write,

" The average acquisition rate a man could expect to achieve for his own household was 0.08 kg/hr if he specialized in large prey and 0.04 kg/hr if he specialized in small (table 4). By these calculations, a hunter seeking to maximize his household income should not specialize in small animals instead of large, but he should include small animals among the prey he takes (Hawkes, O’Connell, and Blurton Jones 1991). Each time he encounters a small animal, he can expect to earn its average postencounter acquisition rate while he pursues it. The measured postencounter rates for small animals ranged from 0.23 to 1.5 kg/hr (Hawkes, O’Connell, and Blurton Jones 1991). This means that each time a hunter encounters a guinea fowl and passes by in order to continue earning 0.08 kg/hr searching for big game, he is reducing his household income. Even if neighbors made claims on small animals, a man who pursued them and kept less than half of the lowest-return small prey would still earn a greater nutritional benefit for his own household than he would get from specializing in big game. ”117

They go further,

" These comparisons are based on mean rates. They ignore the most important reason that big-game hunting is an ineffective strategy for provisioning a family: It does not provide a reliable nutrient stream. The daily risk of failure for a Hadza big-game hunter is consistently = 96% (table 3). Big-game encounter hunters can expect to fail 45 days for each success, while small-game encounter hunters would go only 1–3 days between successes (table 4), and plant collectors would rarely if ever come home emptyhanded (table 5) ."118

Clearly, Neanderthals present a mystery. They were so successful at obtaining one big game species, their bones show that they ate almost nothing but meat. This means that they didn’t fail to get big game meat 96% of the time, as modern human hunters do. Indeed, they seem to be able to get meat upon demand—as, say, herders can. This information is quite fascinating and utterly ignored by apologists.

What does it mean to tend sheep/goats? Does one have to walk with them through the pastures to be tending them? Could another form of tending them mean chasing them into an enclosure where they are kept until one wants to eat them? Such an arrangement would ensure a supply of food but also take minimal work. Humans have done this with fish for a long time in the form of fish weirs. Stones are arranged in a shallow stream such that a fish can get into an enclosure but then have a hard time finding the way out. Such weirs, as they are called, are an easy way for a human to feed himself in the wild. But such an arrangement is often used with wild animals. Chase them into a concealed corral and shut the gate. Then it is easy pickings. Would that not be ‘tending the tso’n ?

There is another way this tending the tso’n could be understood. Some hunter-gatherer tribes follow their prey herds. While they are not herders, as we understand the term, they do form an association with the herds and follow them (something a shepherd does as well). Bahn relates,

“Gordon points out the frequent confusion between following herds of caribou and accompanying them and mentions that Burch has agreed that the Chipewyan did indeed follow the herds annually. It is high time that the fallacy that ‘people cannot follow the herds’ was laid to rest.”119

It seems entirely reasonable to say that anyone behaving as the Chipewyan did were doing precisely what Abel was said to be doing—tending the herd.

Some will object that farming and animal control didn’t begin until long after 10,000 BC. But there is some very intriguing art at two paleolithic sites which may indicate that animal control (or at least partial control) goes much further back. Randal White wrote an article critical of the idea, but frankly, the evidence presented in the article and in the ensuing discussion on the pages of Current Anthropology, presents a good case for animal control much longer ago. There are two cave pictures of horses, apparently with bridles, one from St. Michel d’Arudy and the other from La Marche. Both of these are from the Upper Paleolithic and are associated with anatomically modern humans. However, it shows that animal control may go deeper into the past than the Neolithic and that means that Abel’s time frame could also move further back in time.

Here are the pictures of two horses, In the first, note the rope-like pattern on what looks like a bridle.

image
Figure 6 St. Michel d’Arudy Horse(with bridle?) -16-14 kyr ago

Piette, 1894

This isn’t all the evidence for animal control going back that far. Reindeer herders castrate many of the male reindeer in order to reduce aggressiveness when the deer rut and to preserve meat quality throughout the winter.120 What happens is that rutting males produce lots of testosterone, and will attack anything in sight. They become uncontrollable during this time. They will fight with other bulls to acquire a harem, and when they are successful at acquiring the harem, they work endlessly for months keeping the other males away. They don’t eat and they lose weight(what some men won’t do for sex!). In the wild, bulls often don’t live through the winter because they start out in a highly deteriorated state. Herders, not wanting these effects castrate many males to reduce the fighting and to make the herd more docile. Most deer don’t grow antlers after castration, but reindeer are an exception. But the antlers they grow are different. And this brings us to another piece (not provable) of evidence supporting animal husbandry much longer ago than many have heretofore beleived. Paul Bahn says,

On the other hand, it is interesting that a reindeer antler found in Finland in the 1970s and dated to 34,000 years ago has been identified by a Saami reindeer herder as belonging to a castrated male and thus ascribed ‘to a reindeer-herding system’ ”121
image
Hadingham, Secrets of the Ice Age, (New York: Walker, 1979), p. 111 (15kyr ago)

Figure 7 La Marche Horse (with bridle?)

There are other interesting possible indicators of animal control in the upper Paleolithic. At Font de Gaume, France, a mammoth is pictured in what appears to be a hut or cage.122 At the 17,000-year-old site of Lascaux, there there is a painting of horses and a cow, with what appears to be a fence or gate.123 At Mas d’Azil, there is a carving of a horse which appears to have a rope around it’s head.124

Now, let’s look at Cain, the ‘tiller of the ground’. The word.’tiller’ basically means ‘work’. A person familiar with Hebrew with whom I consulted noted that the word can be used in reference to someone working the land without actually planting. Context would define it. But, context, in this case, might not be very helpful because the time is referring to the origin of the human race (at least if one believes that Adam is the progenitor of humanity. Let’s look at how hunter gatherers work the land.

Many people who have not studied anthropology think that there is a clear division between hunter-gatherers and farmers. When one looks at what actually happens, it isn’t so clear cut. Harris relates,

" Studies of modern hunter-gatherers show that there is a correlation between population density and the specialised use of particular foods. Examples include the systematic exploitation (in some cases even involving the sowing) of wild grasses and other herbaceous plants for their seeds, and the replanting of wild yams and other tubers to ensure continuity of supply ."125

This behavior probably went way back in time. Pringle informs us,

The early date for plant domestication in the Near East is not entirely unexpected, says Ofer Bar-Yosef of Harvard University. For example, inhabitants of Ohallo II in what is now Israel had made wild cereal seeds a major part of their diets as early as 17,000 B.C., according to published work by Mordechai Kislev, an archaeobotanist at Bar Ilan University in Ramat-Gan, Israel. Moreover, as close observers of nature, these early foragers were almost certain to have noticed that a seed sown in the ground eventually yielded a plant with yet more seeds. “These people knew their fauna and flora very well,” says Bar-Yosef, "and they probably played with planting plants long before they really switched into agriculture ."126

But the evidence of working the land goes back further. At the Neanderthal site of Amud Cave, we read this,

There is clear and repetitive evidence for the exploitation of mature grass panicles, inferred to have been collected for their seeds.”127

When Cain brought his first fruits, what fundamental difference does it make if he planted the grass? He still had to do the work of gathering it as does any modern farmer. The description of Cain’s sacrifice is not really less for him having done the work of gathering but not of planting.

But the best evidence of working the land with fossil man comes from the 73,000-year-old Neanderthal site of Combe Grenal in France. Anderson-Gerfaud describes a plant-harvesting tool associated with the Neanderthals.

" However, we were able to identify at least one plant-harvesting tool from the Middle Palaeolithic–a convex scraper on a blade from a Wurm I level (Typical Mousterian) at Combe-Grenal, described earlier. This particular tool was significant in that it was clearly used with a curved, ‘harvesting’ motion, and edge damage on the edge opposite the one used suggests that it may have been used in a haft. We then examined the tool with the scanning electron microscope to search for any minute fragments of residue material which might clarify its use. A residue located near the working edge, in a slight depression in the tool surface was found by comparison with microscopic cellular fragments (e.g. siliceous phytoliths) we extracted and studied from living plants) to be from a grass, or possibly a sedge (Cyperaceae) or a rush (Juncus). ”128

What is the difference between this and a Neolithic farmer using a similar scythe to harvest his crop? Not much really. While it is highly unlikely that this Neanderthal tool was used to harvest cereal grain, it leaves one wondering how far back ‘working the land’ goes into prehistory.

But this isn’t all, even further back between 75,000 and 130,000 years ago at Klasies River Mouth Cave in South Africa, evidence of ‘farming’ is present. Shreeve tells us,

" The key change occurred at the beginning of the Middle Stone Age, when people began to manage the environment instead. Rather than take the surrounding landscape as a given, they molded it to fit their needs. The proof, he believes, is in the plants. Increasingly through the Middle Stone Age, the Klasies River Mouth region would have been taken over by open savanna landscape with few fruiting trees. The productivity of plants was concentrated underground instead, in ‘geophytic’ buds and bulbs. Left to their own devices, geophytes are a very slowly renewing resources. In order to rely on them for sustenance, the surrounding vegetation would have to be systematically burned off to speed up new growth. This is exactly what African pastoralists do on the savanna today, to encourage the growth of new grass for their cattle.
"Obviously, such management requires the ability to make fire at will. It also demands a perceptual leap: the sense that the habitat, and with it the very future, can be designed. We know that the Klasies people knew fire. We know they were depending on geophytes to survive, especially during Howiesons Poort times. ‘Putting two and two together,’ Deacon said, 'we get a picture of people “farming” patches of starch-rich plant foods with fire and supplementing this diet with meat from hunting and scavenging and from collecting shellfish when at the coast
.'"129 (emphasis mine)

The final evidence for working the land for plants comes from a logical deduction presented by Bernard Campbell, an anthropologist at the University of Rhode Island. He notes that when H. erectus populated the temperate regions, regions with a severe winter, certain conditions must have been met or they could not have successfully lived in these regions. First he notes that the large variation of daily temperature places large stress on both plants and animals. Clothing would be an essential as we noted earlier. But, the low winter temperatures (-23o C in the Tbilisi, Georgia area where H. erectus lived 1.8 myr ago) prevents plants from growing during the winter months. Thus, the late winter months and early spring would give little in the way of plant material to eat. Food storage would be a must to save food for these lean times.130 And this means, that some sort of ‘working the land’ must have existed in humans from the time when H. erectus lived at Dmanisi, Georgia on. That was 1.8 million years ago.

What we have shown here is that the usual interpretation of Genesis 4:2 doesn’t necessarily require a Neolithic Adam. Indeed, We might very well be eisegetically reading into the verse what we know from our post-agricultural revolution vantage point. Even the divinely inspired author may have understood it as we do, because he, too, while writing the passage, was inserting his view into it. And modern translators continue the tradition by making it appear that this was a Neolithic setting. It might or might not have been. Now, one might object that Cain and Abel wouldn’t have ‘owned’ the sheep or the land. This is true. But in reality, ownership is in the mind of the human, not in the mind of the sheep or land. The sheep doesn’t wake up thinking, “That geezer over there owns me. I want my freedom back.” Humans are territorial and if they view that the territory upon which their plants and sheep lay was their land, then that is ownership.

One final note: Anyone who thinks Neanderthals were stupid non-human brutes needs to seriously retool their anthropological knowledge–but it has been that way for a long time. 10 Surprising Facts About Neanderthals

References

  1. Dick Fischer, The Origins Solution, (Lima, Ohio: Fairway Press, 1996), p. 118

  2. Dick Fischer, The Origins Solution, (Lima, Ohio: Fairway Press, 1996), p. 239

  3. MSN | Outlook, Office, Skype, Bing, Breaking News, and Latest Videos accessed 10-14-06

  4. Daniel S. Adler, Guy Bar-Oz, Anna Belfer-Cohen, and Ofer Bar-Yosef, Ahead of the Game : Middle and Upper Palaeolithic Hunting Behaviors in the Southern Caucasus ,” Current Anthropology Volume 47, Number 1, February 2006, p. 91

  5. L. V. Golovanova, et al, “Mezmaiskaya Cave: A Neanderthal Occupation in the Northern Caucasus,” Current Anthropology, 40(1999):1:77-86, p. 85

  6. Daniel S. Adler, Guy Bar-Oz, Anna Belfer-Cohen, and Ofer Bar-Yosef, Ahead of the Game : Middle and Upper Palaeolithic Hunting Behaviors in the Southern Caucasus ,” Current Anthropology Volume 47, Number 1, February 2006, p. 96

  7. Michael P. Richards, Paul B. Pettitt, Erik Trinkaus, Fred H. Smith, Maja Paunovi, and Ivor Karavani, “Neanderthal diet at Vindija and Neanderthal predation: The evidence from stable isotopes” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, June 13, 2000.

  8. K. Hawkes, J. F. O’Connell, and N. G. Blurton Jones… Hunting and Nuclear Families. Current Anthropology 42(2001):5: 681-709, p. 686-687

  9. K. Hawkes, J. F. O’Connell, and N. G. Blurton Jones… Hunting and Nuclear Families. Current Anthropology 42(2001):5: 681-709, p. 686-687

  10. Paul Bahn, “Comments,” Current Anthropology, 30(1989):5:618

  11. ( Carrie Bucki, Greg Finstad and Tammy A. Smith, Reindeer Roundup: A K-12 Educator’s Guide to Reindeer in Alaska,” (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2004), p. 18 http://www.uaf.edu/snras/afes/pubs/misc/MP_04_07.pdf)

  12. Paul Bahn, “Comments,” Current Anthropology, 30(1989):5:618

  13. Jan Jelinek, The Evolution of Man, (New York: Hamlyn, 1976), p. 434

  14. Jan Jelinek, The Evolution of Man, (New York: Hamlyn, 1976), p. 292.

  15. Jan Jelinek, The Evolution of Man, (New York: Hamlyn, 1976), p. 311

  16. D. R. Harris, “Human Diet and Subsistence,” in S. Jones et al, editors, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 72-73

  17. Heather Pringle, “The Slow Birth of Agriculture,” Science, Vol 282, Issue 5393, 1446 , 20 November 1998 http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/282/5393/1446

  18. Marco Madella, Martin K. Jones, Paul Goldberg, Yuval Goren, Erella Hovers, “The Exploitation of Plant Resources by Neanderthals in Amud Cave (Israel): The Evidence from Phytolith Studies ,” Journal of Archaeological Science 29(2002):7:703-719

  19. Patricia Anderson-Gerfaud, “Aspects of Behaviour in the Middle Palaeolithic: Functional Analysis of Stone Tools from Southwest France,” in Paul Mellars, The Emergence of Modern Humans, (Ithica: Cornell Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 389-418, p. 400

  20. James R. Shreeve, The Neandertal Enigma, (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1995), p. 217-218

  21. Bernard G. Campbell, “An Outline of Human Phylogeny,” in Andrew Lock and Charles R. Peters, Handbook of Human symbolic Evolution, (Malden Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), p. 46

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Been looking at animals who lived on the Mediterranean sea floor and found this interesting case. It seems Crete and Cypriot frogs were able to survive the catastrophe.

“Water frogs inhabiting Cyprus represent a distinct evolutionary species of Messinian origin that is formally described in this paper. The systematic status of Cypriot frogs is evidenced by specific characters in their mitochondrial (mt) and nuclear (nu) DNA sequences, and the fact that they form a well supported monophyletic clade in both mtDNA and nuDNA phylogenies. While genetic data revealed clear and reproducible differences between this new taxon and all other western Palearctic water frog species including Pelophylax bedriagae in the Levant and two Anatolian water frogs lineages ( P. cf. bedriagae ‐1 and P. cf. bedriagae ‐2), there is no diagnostic morphological or morphometric character that allows a clear discrimination between Cyprus frogs and frogs from the adjacent mainland. If several morphometric indices are combined as predictor variables in a discriminant analysis, however, both females and males of Cypriot water frogs are correctly distinguished from the other eastern Mediterranean lineages. While phylogenies based on concatenated sequences of two mitochondrial genes (ND2 + ND3) suggest a sister group relationship of Cypriot and Anatolian water frog lineages, our nuclear data hypothesize a sister group relationship between Cypriot frogs (sp. n.) and Crete frogs ( P. cretensis ), thus speaking for the same isolation time of both island populations” Jorg Plotner, et al, “Genetic data reveal that water frogs of Cyprus (genus Pelophylax) are an endemic species of Messinian origin.” Zoosystematics and Evolution, Vol. 88:2, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/zoos.201200021

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Love this subject and very curious about it … loooooong article. will read…thanks

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Bluebird!, you should be cautious of new ideas. But one shouldn’t let the caution blind one to the fit between the statements of the Bible and the geological facts on the ground. If it would help, my views have been published in probably the premier Christian/Science publication Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith. Thus, they have passed peer review, even if the reviewers held their noses. They couldn’t get around the data I was presenting. here is a list of my articles on anthro and this flood.

Morton, G. R. (1997). The Mediterranean Flood. Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, 49:4:238-251

Morton, G. R. (1998). Bonobo Trails. Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, 50:2:84

Morton, G. R. (1999) Dating Adam. Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, 51:2:87-97.

Morton, G. R. (1999) Neandertal Hybrid, Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, 51:3,:145

Morton, G. R. (1999) Planning Ahead: Requirement for Moral Accountability, Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, 51:3:176-179

Morton, G. R. (2002) “Language at the Dawn of Humanity,” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, 54(2002):3:193-194

Morton, G. R., 2006, “The Dilemma Posed by the Wee People” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, 58(2006):2:142-145

This one talks about small brained folk (brains the size of the australopithecines 380 cc. They made stone tools, and local legend in the area (these guys seem to have lived to about 12-14,000 years ago) has some sort of language.

Pleistocene deposits in Sector VII contain relatively few stone artefacts; only 32 were found in the same level as the hominin skeleton. In Sector IV, however, dense concentrations of stone artefacts occur in the same level as H. floresiensis-up to 5,500 artefacts per cubic metre. Simple flakes predominate, struck bifacially from small radial cores and mainly on volcanics and chert, but there is also a more formal component found only with evidence of Stegodon, including points, perforators, blades and microblades that were probably hafted as barbs (Fig. 5). In all excavated Sectors, this ‘big game’ stone artefact technology continues from the oldest cultural deposits, dated from about 95 to 74 kyr, until the disappearance of Stegodon about 12 kyr, immediately below the ‘white’ tuffaceous silts derived from volcanic eruptions that coincide with the extinction of this species. The juxtaposition of these distinctive stone tools with Stegodon remains suggests that hominins at the site in the Late Pleistocene were selectively hunting juvenile Stegodon.“” M. J. Morwood, et al, ““Archaeology and age of a new hominin from Flores in eastern Indonesia,”” Nature,431(2004):1089

They made tools, and press reports from the discoverers note that they used fire. For an explanation of the mental capacities needed for fire, see my article Morton, G. R. (1999) Planning Ahead: Requirement for Moral Accountability, Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, 51:3:176-179
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/planningahead.htm

*H Floresiensis makes the best case for small brained hominids being intelligent and capable of having a technology. *
""It is a new species of human who actually lived alongside us, yet were half our size. They were the height of a three-year-old child, weighed around 25kg and had a brain smaller than most chimpanzees. Even so, they used fire, made sophisticated stone tools, and hunted Stegodon (a primitive type of elephant) and giant rats. We also believe that their ancestors may have reached the island using bamboo rafts. The clear implication is that, despite tiny brains, these little humans were intelligent and almost certainly had language.“” Skeleton Reveals Lost World Of 'Little People' | ScienceDaily
These people are the size of Australopithecus. And since I have long suggested that Adam lived millions of years ago, which would mean that either he was H. erectus or Australopithecine, it seems logical to make some comments on these wee people.

I have long said that brain size should not be the sine qua non of intelligence. Many have disliked my views precisely because they found it unbelievable that such small people as the Australopithecines could really be human. But this discovery vindicates that long asserted view. These people seem to have done all the things we would associate with any other human society, yet they are so different, being directly descended from H. erectus, and not from H. sapiens. What applies to them, should apply to their larger H. erectus ancestors.

So what are the traits that make us think they are human? I am struck by a 3 word sentence in the description of the skeletal material from one of the two Nature articles:
““Cranial base flexed.”” P. Brown et al, A New Small-Bodied Hominin from the Late Pleistocene of Flores, Indonesia,“” Nature, 431(2004): 1055

This is important because one of the physical traits believed to be necessary for language is a flexed cranial base.

I need to do an article on H. floresiensis–my hero for small brained Adam. Sorry for the long articles. I have terminal cancer and little time to get all the data out so that it can be found by determined readers.

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Gbob…very interesting. I watched your video 1 and then started into the PBS video mentioned at very last word of your epistle—seems like almost same video.

Again, very interesting. While I am NOT a young-earther, I do believe that the Bible generally (with exceptions) is referring to things that actually did occur. I am not saying “your” idea here is the final word on the matter, but very though-provoking. I also am intrigued — and you probably have already heard/read this – in the possibility of this “Edeb” having been the Persian Oasis which is now at the bottom of the Persian Gulf and has many of the features mentioned in the Genesis description. See Swamidoss’ reference and also find the footnoted article he references when talking about it.
I am not “sold” on the idea that we “know” for a fact every little thing that has happened along the Mediterranean/Persian Gulf in the last 6 million years. But we do know some things that happened, and we know that the earth is relatively old. The late Sumerologist Kramer speculated on a flood in early third millennium BC, and others have suggested things. There likely have been pretty significant floods in Mesopotamia many times over the millennia (NOTE: If a flood event destroys YOUR community/home/family --it is a momentous and earth-shattering event so far as you and your neighbors are concerned.)
I do think you have an interesting idea here and appreciate your contribution.