T. H. Huxley’s view of man’s development. Archaeological discoveries do not support this story. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
Joel Kontinen
According to the Darwinian view, advanced civilisations evolved rather recently. They were preceded by hundreds of thousands of years of primitive culture.
Archaeology does not support this old evolution-based story, however. The oldest discoveries reveal that humans have always been creative and inventive.
Old pottery fragments were recently found in Hunan province in China. Based on carbon-14 dating of charcoal and bones discovered at the site, the shards are estimated to be 18, 000 years old.
Physicist Elisabetta Boaretto of the Wiezmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel and archaeologist Xiaohong Wu of Peking University and their colleagues recently published a paper in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences outlining the discovery. They concluded that humans were able to make pottery much earlier than previously assumed.
A Venus figurine carved from mammoth ivory was recently found in Germany. Probably used as a pendant, the figure is estimated to be 35, 000 years old. The figure shows that at least some early Europeans were clever artists.
The Darwinian great story tells us that humans have a long common history with ape-like creatures. Archaeological discoveries do not support this view, however.
We should take a skeptical approach to carbon dates of tens of thousands of years. They are based on the assumption that Earth’s atmosphere has remained practically unchanged for hundreds of thousands of years.
According to Genesis, the global flood of Noah’s days changed our planet thoroughly. Torrential rain and volcanic eruptions broke Earth’s only continent and most of the plants were probably also destroyed. The C-14 content of the atmosphere was changed dramatically. In other words, many older C-14 dates are unreliable.
When we take this into account, we will notice that archaeological discoveries support the biblical view – and even timescale - of mankind’s past.
Sources:
Nature. 2009. Prehistoric Pinup. Nature video. http://www.nature.com/nature/videoarchive/prehistoricpinup/
Watzman, Haim. 2009. Earliest evidence for pottery making found. Nature news 1 June http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090601/full/news.2009.534.html?s=news_rss
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