Neanderthals were human just like us

 

Image courtesy of Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock,

Joel Kontinen

According to evolutionists, we the species that survived. A hundred years ago, they were depicted as mere cave men. But things have changed since then. More and more research shows that the Neanderthals were as human as us.

 ”Neanderthals might never even have gone extinct, instead genetically embedding themselves in the human genome as a result of interbreeding.”

They also showed the things that make us human, such as, symbolic art, tool and weapon making, the use of fire, and burial ceremonies.  

According to evolution, The brains of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens  “were similar in size and similar in blood supply from the internal carotid arteries to the cerebrum, the cognitive part of the brain … so effectively there is no evidence that the cognitive ability of the two species was any different,” Roger Seymour says.

We already know that Neanderthals were fully human and they lived mostly in Europe in the same way we do. We belief that they lived in Europe atter the flood of Noah’s day.

Source:

Novak. Sara, 2021 Debunking the Myth of Homo Sapiens Superiority, Discover  21 December,  

Another Neanderthal Invention: They Made “First” Glue

Neanderthals spiced their food with herbs like these.




Joel Kontinen

Once upon a time, Neanderthals were thought to be very primitive. Darwinists initially hailed them as the first apemen.

But with an increasing number of their artefacts being discovered, Neanderthals are beginning to look fully human.

Many recent discoveries have shown that they were clever inventors.

New research published in the journal Scientific Reports suggests that Neanderthals made the world’s oldest glue some “200,000 years” ago. They obviously extracted tar from birch bark and heated it above a fire.

They used it to fix the point of a spear to the shaft.

This follows a long string of inventions, including cave art, string and even abstract art –thousands of years before Picasso.

In the model based on Genesis, Neanderthals are descendants of Noah.

They mostly lived in caves during the harsh ice age winters after the global flood, but they obviously also knew how to sail.

Source:

University of Leiden. 2017. How Neanderthals made the very first glue. Science Daily. (31 August).

Babylonian Astronomers Were Cleverer Than We Thought

Jupiter plays a major role in a recent discovery of the prowess of Babylonian astronomers. Image courtesy of NASA, ESA, and A. Simon (Goddard Space Flight Center), public domain.




Joel Kontinen

Many people tend to think that ancient men could not have been as clever as we are. This is in keeping with the Darwinian idea that humans evolved very gradually from ape-like creatures and learning was a hit-or-miss affair. They were not expected to accomplish much intellectually.

However, many discoveries suggest that this view is badly outdated. Homo Erectus, for instance, made engravings and Neanderthals were anything but the caricature presented by 19th century evolutionists, who portrayed them as stooping, grunting ape-men.

Cave paintings were astonishingly sophisticated. New Scientist even speculated that cavemen might have invented the cinema.

Then, the ruins of Göbekli Tepe in modern-day Turkey showed that instead of living in simple dwellings, hunter-gatherers could already build towns.

Stonehenge in Britain has also caused a rethink of evolution-based views.

Then there’s the Antikythera Mechanism. With at least 30 gear wheels and pointers, it was a mechanical computer for calculating the movements of the sun, moon and probably also some planets.

And it was built 2,000 years ago.

There’s more. Recently, astroarchaeologist Mathieu Ossendrijver of Humboldt University in Berlin examined Babylonian clay tablets at the British Museum. The documents, dated from 350 BC to 50 BC, were a great surprise to him and everyone else.

The journal Science summarises the findings, stating that Babylonian astronomers

“also employed sophisticated geometric methods that foreshadow the development of calculus. Historians had thought such techniques did not emerge until more than 1400 years later, in 14th century Europe.”

Ossendrijver also published a report in Science entitled The Ancient Babylonian astronomers calculated Jupiter’s position from the area under a time-velocity graph.

Jupiter was important for Babylonians, as they identified it with their chief god Marduk. It seems that astronomers wanted to know precisely where the planet was at each stage:

“Ossendrijver figured out that the trapezoid calculations were a tool for calculating Jupiter’s displacement each day along the ecliptic, the path that the sun appears to trace through the stars. The computations recorded on the tablets covered a period of 60 days, beginning on a day when the giant planet first appeared in the night sky just before dawn.”

Comparing the tablets to older Babylonian texts from ca. 1800 BC to 1600 BC, he was able to see that the Babylonians had developed “abstract mathematical, geometrical ideas about the connection between motion, position and time that are so common to any modern physicist or mathematician.”

The discovery also throws light on how Noah could build a big ocean-going vessel 4,500 years ago and how the wise men from the east were able to reach Bethlehem after the birth of Christ.


Source:

Cowen, Ron. 2016. Math whizzes of ancient Babylon figured out forerunner of calculus. Science (28 January).

Cavemen Made Porridge, Defying Evolutionary Expectations

Only smart artists could paint like this. Image courtesy of Rameessos, Wikipedia.





Joel Kontinen

Darwinian evolution inspired researchers to assume that human civilization must have evolved from very humble beginnings towards increasing sophistication.

The problem with this scenario is that the facts don’t support it. A recent study upsets the Darwinian palaeocart:

”Going on the palaeo diet? Don’t put down your porridge just yet. Hunter-gatherers ate oats as far back as 32,000 years ago – way before farming took root,” New Scientist reports and then goes on to say:

"This is the earliest known human consumption of oats, say Marta Mariotti Lippi at the University of Florence in Italy and her colleagues, who made the discovery after analysing starch grains on an ancient stone grinding tool from southern Italy.”

While the date is suspect, the research suggests that the basic assumptions of Darwinian thinking were wrong.

Previous studies have shown that cavemen were surprisingly smart; they probably even invented the cinema.

They were talented artists and created sophisticated cave art.

Their weapons were anything but primitive, and as Göbekli Tepe shows, the assumed hunter-gatherers were skilled builders.

In other words, they conform nicely to the description Genesis gives of them.

Source:

Twaddell, Iona. 2015. Stone-age people were making porridge 32,000 years ago. New Scientist (7 September).

Sophisticated Cave Art ”Rewriting Human Prehistory”

Gua Tewet tree of life in Borneo, Indonesia. Image courtesy of Luc-Henri Fage.



Joel Kontinen

For evolutionists, cave art is an enigma. At times, it seems to appear too early, and it is often very sophisticated – better than some contemporary art.

Recently, researchers examined a cave in Sulawesi, Indonesia that was discovered in the 1950s but not dated until now.

The assigned date – ca. 40,000 years before present – would mean that the cave has the earliest hand stencil. (The date ignores the effect of the global flood of Noah’s day.)

The impulse (and skill) to produce artwork seems to have been a global human phenomenon, with Neanderthals proving that they were no brutish apelike creatures but fully-fledged humans.

Cavemen were much smarter than we thought, but then Genesis describes early man as inventive and creative from the very dawn of humankind.

Source:

Brahic, Catherine. 2014. World's oldest hand stencil found in Indonesian cave. New Scientist 2990 (8 October).

Did Cavemen Invent the Cinema?

A bison in the cave of Altamira. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.


Joel Kontinen

We would probably not associate cavemen with moving pictures but that is exactly what an article in New Scientist does. Its title – Prehistoric cinema: A silver screen on the cave wall – already suggests that cave paintings are more sophisticated than we assumed.

It seems that seen in their original light, they provide quite a surprise:

“Catch them at dawn or dusk and you are in for a treat as the figures jump out at the viewer, rendered in 3D by the shadows of the etched grooves in the rock. The effect recalls the techniques used to create the illusion of depth in trompe l'oeil paintings,” says Frederick Baker, an archaeologist at the St Pölten University of Applied Sciences in Austria.

And just a few years ago we were taught that cavemen were simpletons. As more facts are discovered, Darwinian dogma is becoming less and less convincing.

Of course, the Genesis based model stated that humans were clever from the very beginning.


Source:

Brahic, Catherine. 2012. Prehistoric cinema: A silver screen on the cave wall. New Scientist 2896, 44–46.

Cavemen Are Losing Their Apelike Traits

Recent discoveries have shown that Neanderthals were not apelike. Reconstruction of a Neanderthal girl. Image courtesy of Christopher P.E. Zollikofer, Anthropological Institute, University of Zurich, via Wikipedia.




Joel Kontinen

In the Darwinian story, the Neanderthals were the original cavemen. The earliest discoveries were made before Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published over 150 years ago, and evolutionists have used them to persuade millions of people that their ideology could be supported by facts.

However, subsequent discoveries have painted a very different picture of the Neanderthals. A recent sub headline in Nature news illustrates this trend: “Archaic humans may have invented bone implements still used to make expensive handbags.” New Scientist had a somewhat more general title: “Neanderthals made leather-working tools like those in use today.”

The recent discovery has to do with stone tools known as lissoirs that were found at two Neanderthal sites in southwest France.

According to New Scientist: “At both sites, the team found specialised tools made of polished bone, similar to those still used in some cultures today to process animal hides and make leather.”

This is not something that ape men do. That is what humans do. Cavemen might belong to the Darwinian story, but they certainly do not belong to real history, where apes are apes and men are men.

You can read more about Neanderthals here, here, here and here.

Sources:

Barras, Colin. 2013. First bone tools suggest Neanderthals taught us skills. New Scientist (13 August).

Callaway, Even. 2013. Neanderthals made leather-working tools like those in use today. Nature News (12 August).

Cavemen Were Surprisingly Smart

Reconstruction of a Neanderthal girl. Image courtesy of Christopher P.E. Zollikofer, Anthropological Institute, University of Zurich, via Wikipedia.





Joel Kontinen

Sophisticated is not the first adjective that comes to mind when thinking about Neanderthal men. Yet that is exactly what Nature news suggests they were like.

A paper recently published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that Neanderthals imitated H. sapiens. Jean-Jacques Hublin of Max Planck Institute and colleagues report on fossils and ornaments found in the Grotte du Renne cave in central France.

Reporting on the discovery, Nature news suggests that the artefacts Neanderthals made are so complex that similar objects are often attributed to modern humans.

This is just one of the many discoveries (read more here, here and here) that show that Neanderthals were fully human. According to the biblical model, they were descendants of Noah. They mostly lived in Europe during the ice age following the Genesis Flood.


Source:

Switek, Brian. 2012. Neanderthals smart enough to copy humans: Radiocarbon dates hint that human sister species was more sophisticated than previously thought. Nature News (30 October).

Cavemen in the Bible?

Joel Kontinen

This might come as a surprise to many people, but the Bible does speak about people living in caves.

They were not dim-witted brutes, however. One of them was Lot, who after escaping from Sodom, sought refuge in a cave. Later David and his men also lived in caves.

Biblical history shows that there never was a time called pre-history. Man was intelligent from the beginning of his sojourn on earth.

CMI has produced a brief video on cavemen:

New Research: Early Humans Had a Paint Factory

This family tree is based on the erroneous idea of continuous development.





Joel Kontinen

It seems that it is time to discard the idea of grunting cavemen with fingers that were all thumbs.

Last week the journal Science published a report on an ancient workshop where the early inhabitants of South Africa prepared a mixture based on ochre and stored it in abalone shells.

The workshop was found in 2008 in a cave. The find is assumed to be 100, 000 years old.

Christopher Henshilwood of the universities of Bergen in Norway and Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, who led the work, says the discovery reveals an interesting characteristic of early humans: "This isn't just a chance mixture, it is early chemistry. It suggests conceptual and probably cognitive abilities which are the equivalent of modern humans," Nature news quoted him as saying.

In addition to ochre, bone, charcoal, grindstones and hammerstones were also found in the cave.

According to Genesis, humans have always been clever and innovative. Already in the fourth chapter, Moses mentions the harp and the flute as well as bronze and iron tools.

Sources:

Corbyn, Zoë. 2011. African cave's ancient ochre lab. Nature news (13 October).

Henshilwood, Christopher S. el. A 100,000-Year-Old Ochre-Processing Workshop at Blombos Cave, South Africa. Science 334 (6053), 219-222. (14 October).

Neandertals Made Jewellery

Reconstruction of a Neanderthal girl. Image courtesy of Christopher P. E. Zollikofer, Anthropological Institute, University of Zurich, via Wikipedia.


Joel Kontinen

The more we learn about the Neandertals, the less they confirm to the traditional concept of grunting cavemen. (You can read more here, here and here.)

João Zilhão, an archaeologist at the University of Bristol, and colleagues recently found jewellery in two caves in southeastern Spain. The painted seashells are estimated to be 50, 000 years old according to the evolutionary timescale. Since researchers think that the first H. sapiens arrived some 10,000 years later in Europe, they believe that Neandertals made the brightly-painted ornaments.

The perforated shells were obviously used as necklaces.

The artists who made the ornaments mixed two colours - yellow goethite and red hematite - to produce orange paint. They obviously had to fetch the paints from five kilometres (three miles) away.

In addition to finding tools made from quartz and flint, Zilhão and his colleagues also discovered a horse bone covered with orange pigment. They suggest that it was used for mixing the colours.

Bible-believing scientists have known for a long time that depicting Neanderthal men as primitive cave dwellers is a myth that is unable to withstand critical evaluation.

According to the model based on Genesis, the Neandertals were descendants of Noah who lived in Europe during the ice age following the universal flood.

Zilhão and colleagues published their discovery online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.


Source:

Choi, Charles O. 2010. Heavy Brows, High Art?: Newly Unearthed Painted Shells Show Neandertals Were Homo sapiens's Mental Equals. Scientific American (8 January)
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=neandertal-art-human

Were Hobbits Master Toolmakers?

Hobbits were obviously master toolmakers.



Joel Kontinen

In 2003 tiny human fossils were found on the Indonesian island of Flores. The 1-metre- tall Flores Man (Homo floresiensis) was soon dubbed Hobbit after Tolkien’s diminutive Middle Earth hero.

It now seems that these Hobbits have left us proof of their dexterity. They used sharp-edged stone tools.

Archaeologist Mark Moore of the University of New England in Armidale, Australia, and his colleagues examined over 11 000 stone tools found in the Liang Buan Cave on Flores island.

With a brain capacity of a third of H. sapiens, Hobbits were nevertheless able to craft so good stone tools that when people classified as H. sapiens later came to the island, they used the very same pattern in their tools. This became obvious when the archaeologists examined the layers in the cave. H. sapiens obviously used the same cave after the Hobbits.

Moore even suggests that H. floresiensis and H. sapiens might have interacted.

Although Hobbits were small, we have no reason to think that they were not fully human. They were obviously no more primitive than individuals classified as Homo sapiens. Like us, they were the descendants of a real man called Adam.



Source:

Culotta, Elizabeth. 2009. Did Humans Learn From Hobbits? ScienceNOW Daily News. (17 April) http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2009/417/3

Neanderthals Were More Advanced Than We Thought

Reconstruction of a Neanderthal girl. Christopher P.E. Zollikofer. Anthropological Institute, University of Zurich Image from Wikipedia.

Joel Kontinen


The first Neanderthal skulls were found in 1829 and 1848 but the early remains went rather unnoticed. They got their name from a 1856 discovery in the Neander valley in Germany. They were assumed to be the remains of early men. The publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of the Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) gave impetus for the search for links between modern man and less developed beings.

In evolutionary thinking, Neanderthal man was assumed to be a very primitive man, incapable of speech and higher culture. However, recent discoveries have shown that the Darwinian view is wrong. Neanderthals were culturally more advanced. They were able to speak, buried their dead, cleaned their teeth and even made musical instruments.

The latest confirmation of the Neanderthals’ cultural development comes from a dig in England. According to a recent item in BBC news, archaeologists have examined dozens of tools they believe were made by Neanderthals. When the tools were first found in Beedings in West Sussex, in 1900, they were thought to be too modern and thus assumed to be fakes. Most of them were thrown away.

Now archaeologists have re-examined some of the artifacts and concluded that they are genuine. The old view of semi-human, grunting Neanderthal men deserves to be buried.

Source:

McGourty, Christine. 2008. 'Neanderthal tools' found at dig. BBC news 23 June
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7466735.stm

Cavemen were smarter than we thought

T.H. Huxley's incorrect view on man's evolution. Image: Wikipedia.


Joel Kontinen

Science textbooks usually present cavemen as very primitive people who were barely able to utter a few monosyllables. However, as additional data about stone age men is unearthed, the picture becomes considerably more complex. It seems that the more we know about them, the more modern traits they seem to acquire.

A recent study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science suggests that cave dwellers wore shoes. Erik Trinkaus and Hong Shang of the Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri studied the toe bones of a skeleton found in a cave near Beijing. They compared these with the toe bones of modern Americans, Inuits and Native Americans from the time before the advent of the European conquerors. Shoes alter the wearer’s toes. People who regularly walk barefoot tend to have strong and large toes while those wearing shoes do not. Trinkaus and Shang concluded that the Chinese cave dwellers regularly wore shoes.

The obvious conclusion is that cavemen were less primitive than we had thought. This same trend can also be seen in how Neanderthal man is presented. The first skulls were found in the early 19th century but they got their name from a specimen discovered in 1856 in the Neander Valley in Germany.(Tal is valley in German). They were initially described as virtually subhuman missing links. With the passing of time, however, scientist have had to discard their previous notions about them. It is now known that the Neanderthals made musical instruments and efficient weapons, buried their dead and even used toothpicks.

It thus seems that the neat progress from primitive to modern man does not exist. The cave dwellers were not primitive people.

I recently wrote about people still living in caves. You can read it here .

Source:

NewScientist.com 27.1.2008. www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19726405.100&print=true

The Flintstones – they’re living in Gran Canaria

Joel Kontinen


The world of Fred Flintstone is not as far removed from reality as we might think. William Hanna and Joseph Barbera created the popular animation series and cartoon The Flintstones, in which Fred gets some relief from the ardours of stone age world by playing a round of golf. He also drives an automobile. And when Fred drops cooking oil on his tie, he can always get it cleaned in a washing machine.

We would not expect cavemen to drive an automobile. However, that is exactly what present-day cavemen do. Their most frequent expression is not Yabba-Dabba-Doo! But Buenos dias, since these cavepeople are Spaniards living in Gran Canaria, a popular tourist island to which millions of Europeans fly each year to escape the rigours of winter.

Some of the cavepeople live in a village called Guayadeque. These 21st century Flintstones drive automobiles and keep them in cave garages. They have electric lights and modern appliances in their homes they have made for themselves in caves.

These cavepeople are descendants of the Guanches, an ethnic group of tall, blond, blue-eyed people who have lived in the Canary isles since around 500 B.C. With the coming of the Spaniards in the 15th century A.D., many Guanches were killed by the invaders but some remained and most of them intermarried with the Spaniards.

The Guanches were by no means primitive. While their islands lacked metals and they had to make stone tools, their pottery and even clothing resemble those of the Graeco-Roman cultures. They mummified their dead like the Egyptians and performed surgical operations, for instance trepanation, or the drilling of a hole in the skull as a proposed remedy for some illnesses.

It seems that we have been conditioned to think that cavepeople are primitive. We would expect them to have become extinct hundreds of thousands of years ago. We would definitely not expect cavemen to use their leisure time on a golf course. The popularity of the Flintstones is probably due to it breaking this thinking that is obviously based on the evolution model.

However, the true history of our planet shows that the world of Fred Flintstone is closer to reality than the popular explanation of caveman culture. Even today, cavemen and urban dwellers live side by side and probably even play golf together.

It is good to remember that the Bible also talks about people who lived in caves. For instance, Abraham’s grandson Lot lived temporarily in a cave with his daughters after their escape from Sodom about four thousand years ago (Genesis 19:30).

Sources

dos Santos, Arysio Nunes. 1997. The Mysterious Origin of The Guanches. http://www.atlan.org/articles/guanche_origin/

Walker, Amelie A. 1999. Beyond the Beaches of Gran Canaria. Archaeology, Oct. 29, 1999. http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/canary/guayadeque.html