Here there be dragons … but no centaurs

Wikimedia commons/Pearson Scott Foresman

What’s the difference between believing in centaurs and believing in dragons? Jamie L. from Australia writes in response to The Year the Water Dragon Roared:

I am a Christian and a subscriber to your magazine. I would love to find more evidence that supports our view of a creator and loving God, however sometimes I think we are just reaching. If we use this kind of rationale, we could also perhaps say that the Egyptians knew of half men half horse centaurs. I think we can do better than this, don’t you?

What We Learned About Humanity in 2012

By Charles Choi, LiveScience Contributor | LiveScience.com

The controversial extinct human lineage known as "hobbits" gained a face this year, one of many projects that shed light in 2012 on the history of modern humans and their relatives. Other discoveries include the earliest known controlled use of fire and the possibility that Neanderthals or other extinct human lineages once sailed to the Mediterranean.

Here's a look at what we learned about ourselves through our ancestors this year.

We're not alone

A trove of discoveries this year revealed a host of other extinct relatives of modern humans. For instance, researchers unearthed 3.4-million-year-old fossils of a hitherto unknown species that lived about the same time and place as Australopithecus afarensis, a leading candidate for the ancestor of the human lineage. In addition, fossils between 1.78 million and 1.95 million years old discovered in 2007 and 2009 in northern Kenya suggest that at least two extinct human species lived alongside Homo erectus, a direct ancestor of our species. Moreover, fossils only between 11,500 and 14,500 years old hint that a previously unknown type of human called the "Red Deer Cave People" once lived in China.

Scientists Find Earliest Known Penis

Possibly the world's oldest penis — over 100 million years old — was found on a recently discovered fossil of an ostracod, an early crustacean, related to crabs, shrimps, and water fleas, according to NewScientist.com and Reuters.

"To my knowledge, it is the oldest penis. I don't know of any older," said Professor David Siveter, of the University of Leicester in England.

Siveter was presenting his research on the fossil, found in Brazil, to the British Association Festival of Science.

7 Places Where You Can Still Pan for Gold

Posted by The Penny Hoarder

Define the perfect family vacation.

Could it be soaking in scenic landscapes from America’s streams and rivers? Maybe it’s learning about an historic piece of the American experience? Certainly, striking it rich and pulling out a 17 pound chunk of gold worth millions would be an enticing bonus!

For centuries Americans have taken to rivers and streams in search of the ultimate riches and at many historic claims, you still can.

Did Humans Really Evolve from Apelike Creatures? - Answers in Genesis

by Dr. David Menton

Perhaps the most bitter pill to swallow for any Christian who attempts to “make peace” with Darwin is the presumed ape ancestry of man. Even many Christians who uncritically accept evolution as “God’s way of creating” try to somehow elevate the origin of man, or at least his soul, above that of the beasts. Evolutionists attempt to soften the blow by assuring us that man didn’t exactly evolve from apes (tailless monkeys) but rather from apelike creatures. This is mere semantics, however, as many of the presumed apelike ancestors of man are apes and have scientific names, which include the word pithecus (derived from the Greek meaning “ape”). The much-touted “human ancestor” commonly known as “Lucy,” for example, has the scientific name Australopithecus afarensis (meaning “southern ape from the Afar triangle of Ethiopia”). But what does the Bible say about the origin of man, and what exactly is the scientific evidence that evolutionists claim for our ape ancestry?

Biblical Starting Assumptions

God tells us that on the same day He made all animals that walk on the earth (the sixth day), He created man separately in His own image with the intent that man would have dominion over every other living thing on earth (Genesis 1:26–28). From this it is clear that there is no animal that is man’s equal, and certainly none his ancestor.

Thus, when God paraded the animals by Adam for him to name, He observed that “for Adam there was not found an help meet for him” (Genesis 2:20). Jesus confirmed this uniqueness of men and women when He declared that marriage is to be between a man and a woman because “from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female” (Mark 10:6). This leaves no room for prehumans or for billions of years of cosmic evolution prior to man’s appearance on the earth. Adam chose the very name “Eve” for his wife because he recognized that she would be “the mother of all living” (Genesis 3:20). The apostle Paul stated clearly that man is not an animal: “All flesh is not the same flesh: but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds” (1 Corinthians 15:39).

Evolutionary Starting Assumptions

While Bible-believing Christians begin with the assumption that God’s Word is true and that man’s ancestry goes back only to a fully human Adam and Eve, evolutionists begin with the assumption that man has, in fact, evolved from apes. No paleoanthropologists (those who study the fossil evidence for man’s origin) would dare to seriously raise the question, “Did man evolve from apes?” The only permissible question is, “From which apes did man evolve?”

Since evolutionists generally do not believe that man evolved from any ape that is now living, they look to fossils of humans and apes to provide them with their desired evidence. Specifically, they look for any anatomical feature that looks “intermediate” (between that of apes and man). Fossil apes having such features are declared to be ancestral to man (or at least collateral relatives) and are called hominids. Living apes, on the other hand, are not considered to be hominids, but rather are called hominoids because they are only similar to humans but did not evolve into them. Nonetheless, evolutionists are willing to accept mere similarities between the fossilized bones of extinct apes and the bones of living men as “proof ” of our ape ancestry.

What Is the Evidence for Human Evolution?

Though many similarities may be cited between living apes and humans, the only historical evidence that could support the ape ancestry of man must come from fossils. Unfortunately, the fossil record of man and apes is very sparse. Approximately 95 percent of all known fossils are marine invertebrates, about 4.7 percent are algae and plants, about 0.2 percent are insects and other invertebrates, and only about 0.1 percent are vertebrates (animals with bones). Finally, only the smallest imaginable fraction of vertebrate fossils consists of primates (humans, apes, monkeys, and lemurs).

Because of the rarity of fossil hominids, even many of those who specialize in the evolution of man have never actually seen an original hominid fossil, and far fewer have ever had the opportunity to handle or study one. Most scientific papers on human evolution are based on casts of original specimens (or even on published photos, measurements, and descriptions of them). Access to original fossil hominids is strictly limited by those who discovered them and is often confined to a few favored evolutionists who agree with the discoverers’ interpretation of the fossil.

Since there is much more prestige in finding an ancestor of man than an ancestor of living apes (or worse yet, merely an extinct ape), there is immense pressure on paleoanthropologists to declare almost any ape fossil to be a “hominid.” As a result, the living apes have pretty much been left to find their own ancestors.

Many students in our schools are taught human evolution (often in the social studies class!) by teachers having little knowledge of human anatomy, to say nothing of ape anatomy. But it is useless to consider the fossil evidence for the evolution of man from apes without first understanding the basic anatomical and functional differences between human and ape skeletons.

Jaws and Teeth

Because of their relative hardness, teeth and jaw fragments are the most frequently found primate fossils. Thus, much of the evidence for the ape ancestry of man is based on similarities of teeth and jaws.

In contrast to man, apes tend to have incisor and canine teeth that are relatively larger than their molars. Ape teeth usually have thin enamel (the hardest surface layer of the tooth), while humans generally have thicker enamel. Finally, the jaws tend to be more U-shaped in apes and more parabolic in man.

The problem in declaring a fossil ape to be a human ancestor (i.e., a hominid) on the basis of certain humanlike features of the teeth is that some living apes have these same features and they are not considered to be ancestors of man. Some species of modern baboons, for example, have relatively small canines and incisors and relatively large molars. While most apes do have thin enamel, some apes, such as the orangutans, have relatively thick enamel. Clearly, teeth tell us more about an animal’s diet and feeding habits than its supposed evolution. Nonetheless, thick enamel is one of the most commonly cited criteria for declaring an ape fossil to be a hominid.

Artistic imagination has been used to illustrate entire “apemen” from nothing more than a single tooth. In the early 1920s, the “apeman” Hesperopithecus (which consisted of a single tooth) was pictured in the London Illustrated News complete with the tooth’s wife, children, domestic animals, and cave! Experts used this tooth, known as “Nebraska man,” as proof for human evolution during the Scopes trial in 1925. In 1927, parts of the skeleton were discovered together with the teeth, and Nebraska man was found to really be an extinct peccary (wild pig)!

Skulls

Orangutan Skull

Human Skull

Skulls are perhaps the most interesting primate fossils because they house the brain and give us an opportunity, with the help of imaginative artists, to look our presumed ancestors in the face. The human skull is easily distinguished from all living apes, though there are, of course, similarities.

The vault of the skull is large in humans because of their relatively large brain compared to apes. Even so, the size of the normal adult human brain varies over nearly a threefold range. These differences in size in the human brain do not correlate with intelligence. Adult apes have brains that are generally smaller than even the smallest of adult human brains, and of course they are not even remotely comparable in intelligence.

Perhaps the best way to distinguish an ape skull from a human skull is to examine it from a side view. From this perspective, the face of the human is nearly vertical, while that of the ape slopes forward from its upper face to its chin.

From a side view, the bony socket of the eye (the orbit) of an ape is obscured by its broad, flat upper face. Humans, on the other hand, have a more curved upper face and forehead, clearly revealing the orbit of the eye from a side view.

Another distinctive feature of the human skull is the nose bone that our glasses rest on. Apes do not have protruding nasal bones and would have great difficulty wearing glasses.

Leg Bones

The most eagerly sought-after evidence in fossil hominids is any anatomical feature that might suggest bipedality (the ability to walk on two legs). Since humans walk on two legs, any evidence of bipedality in fossil apes is considered by evolutionists to be compelling evidence for human ancestry. But we should bear in mind that the way an ape walks on two legs is entirely different from the way man walks on two legs. The distinctive human gait requires the complex integration of many skeletal and muscular features in our hips, legs, and feet. Thus, evolutionists closely examine the hipbones (pelvis), thighbones (femur), leg bones (tibia and fibula), and foot bones of fossil apes in an effort to detect any anatomical features that might suggest bipedality.

Evolutionists are particularly interested in the angle at which the femur and the tibia meet at the knee (called the carrying angle). Humans are able to keep their weight over their feet while walking because their femurs converge toward the knees, forming a carrying angle of approximately nine degrees with the tibia (in other words, we’re sort of knock-kneed). In contrast, chimps and gorillas have widely separated, straight legs with a carrying angle of essentially zero degrees. These animals manage to keep their weight over their feet when walking by swinging their body from side to side in the familiar “ape walk.”

Evolutionists assume that fossil apes with a high carrying angle (humanlike) were bipedal and thus evolved into man. Certain australopithecines (apelike creatures) are considered to have walked like us and thus to be our ancestors largely because they had a high carrying angle. But high carrying angles are not confined to humans—they are also found on some modern apes that walk gracefully on tree limbs and only clumsily on the ground.

Living apes with a high carrying angle (values comparable to man) include such apes as the orangutan and spider monkey—both adept tree climbers and capable of only an apelike bipedal gait on the ground. The point is that there are living tree-dwelling apes and monkeys with some of the same anatomical features that evolutionists consider to be definitive evidence for bipedality, yet none of these animals walks like man and no one suggests they are our ancestors or descendants.

Foot Bones

The human foot is unique and not even close to the appearance or function of the ape foot. The big toe of the human foot is in-line with the foot and does not jut out to the side like an ape’s. Human toe bones are relatively straight, rather than curved and grasping like ape toes.

While walking, the heel of the human foot hits the ground first and then the weight distribution spreads from the heel along the outer margin of the foot up to the base of the little toe. From the little toe it spreads inward across the base of the toes and finally pushes off from the big toe. No ape has a foot or push-off like that of a human, and thus, no ape is capable of walking with our distinctive human stride or making human footprints.

Hipbones

The pelvis (hipbones) plays a critically important role in walking, and the characteristic human gait requires a pelvis that is distinctly different from that of the apes. Indeed, one only has to examine the pelvis to determine if an ape has the ability to walk like a man.

The part of the hipbones that we can feel just under our belt is called the iliac blade. Viewed from above, these blades are curved forward like the handles of a steering yolk on an airplane. The iliac blades of the ape, in contrast, project straight out to the side like the handlebars of a scooter. It is simply not possible to walk like a human with an apelike pelvis. On this feature alone one can easily distinguish apes from humans.

Only Three Ways to Make an “Apeman”

Knowing from Scripture that God didn’t create any apemen, there are only three ways for the evolutionist to create one:

1. Combine ape fossil bones with human fossil bones and declare the two to be one individual—a real “apeman.”
2. Emphasize certain humanlike qualities of fossilized ape bones, and with imagination upgrade apes to be more humanlike.
3. Emphasize certain apelike qualities of fossilized human bones, and with imagination downgrade humans to be more apelike.

These three approaches account for all of the attempts by evolutionists to fill the unbridgeable gap between apes and men with fossil apemen.

Combining Men and Apes

The most famous example of an apeman proven to be a combination of ape and human bones is Piltdown man. In 1912, Charles Dawson, a medical doctor and an amateur paleontologist, discovered a mandible (lower jawbone) and part of a skull in a gravel pit near Piltdown, England. The jawbone was apelike, but had teeth that showed wear similar to the human pattern. The skull, on the other hand, was very humanlike. These two specimens were combined to form what was called “Dawn man,” which was calculated to be 500,000 years old.

The whole thing turned out to be an elaborate hoax. The skull was indeed human (about 500 years old), while the jaw was that of a modern female orangutan whose teeth had been obviously filed to crudely resemble the human wear pattern. Indeed, the long ape canine tooth was filed down so far that it exposed the pulp chamber, which was then filled in to hide the mischief. It would seem that any competent scientist examining this tooth would have concluded that it was either a hoax or the world’s first root canal! The success of this hoax for over 50 years, in spite of the careful scrutiny of the best authorities in the world, led the human evolutionist Sir Solly Zuckerman to declare: “It is doubtful if there is any science at all in the search for man’s fossil ancestry.”¹

Making Man out of Apes

Many apemen are merely apes that evolutionists have attempted to upscale to fill the gap between apes and men. These include all the australopithecines, as well as a host of other extinct apes such as Ardipithecus, Orrorin, Sahelanthropus, and Kenyanthropus. All have obviously ape skulls, ape pelvises, and ape hands and feet. Nevertheless, australopithecines(especially Australopithecus afarensis) are often portrayed as having hands and feet identical to modern man; a ramrod-straight, upright posture; and a human gait.

The best-known specimen of A. afarensis is the fossil commonly known as “Lucy.” A life-like mannequin of “Lucy” in the Living World exhibit at the St. Louis Zoo shows a hairy, humanlike female body with human hands and feet but with an obviously apelike head. The three-foot-tall Lucy stands erect in a deeply pensive pose with her right forefinger curled under her chin, her eyes gazing off into the distance as if she were contemplating the mind of Newton.

Few visitors are aware that this is a gross misrepresentation of what is known about the fossil ape Australopithecus afarensis. These apes are known to be long-armed knuckle-walkers with locking wrists. Both the hands and feet of this creature are clearly apelike. Paleoanthropologists Jack Stern and Randall Sussman² have reported that the hands of this species are “surprisingly similar to hands found in the small end of the pygmy chimpanzee–common chimpanzee range.” They report that the feet, like the hands, are “long, curved and heavily muscled” much like those of living tree-dwelling primates. The authors conclude that no living primate has such hands and feet “for any purpose other than to meet the demands of full or part-time arboreal (tree-dwelling) life.”

Despite evidence to the contrary, evolutionists and museums continue to portray Lucy (A. afarensis) with virtually human feet (though some are finally showing the hands with long, curved fingers).

Making Apes out of Man

In an effort to fill the gap between apes and men, certain fossil men have been declared to be “apelike” and thus, ancestral to at least “modern” man. You might say this latter effort seeks to make a “monkey” out of man! Human fossils that are claimed to be “apemen” are generally classified under the genus Homo (meaning “self ”). These include Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, and Homo neanderthalensis.

The best-known human fossils are of Cro-Magnon man (whose marvelous paintings are found on the walls of caves in France) and Neanderthal man. Both are clearly human and have long been classified as Homo sapiens. In recent years, however, Neanderthal man has been downgraded to a different species—Homo neanderthalensis. The story of how Neanderthal man was demoted to an apeman provides much insight into the methods of evolutionists.

Neanderthal man was first discovered in 1856 by workmen digging in a limestone cave in the Neander valley near Dusseldorf, Germany. The fossil bones were examined by an anatomist (Professor Schaafhausen) who concluded that they were human.

At first, not much attention was given to these finds, but with the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, the search began for the imagined “apelike ancestors” of man. Darwinians argued that Neanderthal man was an apelike creature, while many critical of Darwin (like the great anatomist Rudolph Virchow) argued that Neanderthals were human in every respect, though some appeared to be suffering from rickets or arthritis.

Over 300 Neanderthal specimens have now been found scattered throughout most of the world, including Belgium, China, Central and North Africa, Iraq, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Greece, northwestern Europe, and the Middle East. This group of people was characterized by prominent eyebrow ridges (like modern Australian Aborigines), a low forehead, a long, narrow skull, a protruding upper jaw, and a strong lower jaw with a short chin. They were deep-chested, large-boned individuals with a powerful build. It should be emphasized, however, that none of these features fall outside the range of normal human anatomy. Interestingly, the brain size (based on cranial capacity) of Neanderthal man was actually larger than average for that of modern man, though this is rarely emphasized.

Most of the misconceptions about Neanderthal man resulted from the claims of the Frenchman Marcelin Boule who, in 1908, studied two Neanderthal skeletons that were found in France (LeMoustier and La Chapelle-aux- Saints). Boule declared Neanderthal men to be anatomically and intellectually inferior brutes who were more closely related to apes than humans. He asserted that they had a slumped posture, a “monkey-like” arrangement of certain spinal vertebrae, and he even claimed that their feet were of a “grasping type” (like those of gorillas and chimpanzees). Boule concluded that Neanderthal man could not have walked erectly, but rather must have walked in a clumsy fashion. These highly biased and inaccurate views prevailed and were even expanded by many other evolutionists up to the mid-1950s.

In 1957, the anatomists William Straus and A.J. Cave examined one of the French Neanderthals (La Chapelle-aux-Saints) and determined that the individual suffered from severe arthritis (as suggested by Virchow nearly 100 years earlier), which had affected the vertebrae and bent the posture. The jaw also had been affected. These observations are consistent with the Ice Age climate in which Neanderthals had lived. They may well have sought shelter in caves, and this, together with poor diet and lack of sunlight, could easily have led to diseases that affect the bones, such as rickets.

In addition to anatomical evidence, there is a growing body of cultural evidence for the fully human status of Neanderthals. They buried their dead and had elaborate funeral customs that included arranging the body and covering it with flowers. They made a variety of stone tools and worked with skins and leather. A wood flute was recently discovered among Neanderthal remains. There is even evidence that suggests that Neanderthals engaged in medical care. Some Neanderthal specimens show evidence of survival to old age despite numerous wounds, broken bones, blindness, and disease. This suggests that these individuals were cared for and nurtured by others who showed human compassion.

Still, efforts continue to be made to somehow dehumanize Neanderthal man. Many evolutionists now even insist that Neanderthal man is not even directly related to modern man because of some differences in a small fragment of DNA! There is, in fact, nothing about Neanderthals that is in any way inferior to modern man. One of the world’s foremost authorities on Neanderthal man, Erik Trinkaus, concludes: “Detailed comparisons of Neandertal skeletal remains with those of modern humans have shown that there is nothing in Neandertal anatomy that conclusively indicates locomotor, manipulative, intellectual, or linguistic abilities inferior to those of modern humans.”³

Conclusion

Why then are there continued efforts to make apes out of man and man out of apes? In one of the most remarkably frank and candid assessments of the whole subject and the methodology of paleoanthropology, Dr. David Pilbeam (a distinguished professor of anthropology) suggested the following:

Perhaps generations of students of human evolution, including myself, have been flailing about in the dark; that our data base is too sparse, too slippery, for it to be able to mold our theories. Rather the theories are more statements about us and ideology than about the past. Paleoanthropology reveals more about how humans view themselves than it does about how humans came about. But that is heresy.⁴

Oh, that these heretical words were printed as a warning on every textbook, magazine, newspaper article, and statue that presumes to deal with the bestial origin of man!

No, we are not descended from apes. Rather, God created man as the crown of His creation on Day 6. We are a special creation of God, made in His image, to bring Him glory. What a revolution this truth would make if our evolutionized culture truly understood it!

Help keep these daily articles coming. Support AiG.

Footnotes

1. S. Zuckerman, Beyond the Ivory Tower (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970), p. 64. Back
2. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 60:279–317, 1983. Back
3. Natural History 87:10, 1978. Back
4. American Scientist 66:379, 1978. Back

gotquestions  http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/nab2/humans-evolve-apelike-creatures

cavemen knew how to keep the home-fires burning.

Boston University: “Playing with Fire”

Promethean hypothesis picks up steam from residual cooking fire.

by Dr. Elizabeth Mitchell

South African archaeological spelunking has confirmed “cavemen” knew how to keep the home-fires burning. High-tech “microstratigraphic” analysis of sediment excavated 30 meters inside the cave entrance provided “unambiguous evidence in the form of burned bone and ashed plant remains that burning events took place in Wonderwerk Cave during the early Acheulean [Homo erectus] occupation, approximately 1.0 Ma,”⁸ write the investigators in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“We collect an intact block of material, something the size of a milk container where everything is preserved in its original shape,” says co-author Paul Goldberg. “We can pick out a block of this stuff . . . dry it, soak it in polyester or epoxy resin and turn it into a rock, essentially. Once we do that, we can slice it just like geologists do, mount it on a slide and then look at it under the microscope.”

This archaeological confirmation of an ancient cooking fire comes on the heels of a recent study⁹asserting the small teeth of Homo erectus were “adapted to a diet of cooked food”⁸ and supporting—according to evolutionists—primatologist Richard Wrangham’s “cooking hypothesis.” The title of Wrangham’s book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, sums up his contention that learning to control fire and cook food was the secret to humanity’s evolutionary success. (See News to Note, August 27, 2011 for a discussion of these culinary ramifications.)

“It [cooking food] gave extra energy, used for evolutionary success; reduced feeding time, freeing men to hunt; lowered weaning time, creating bigger families; allowed brain size to increase; gave us our shortfaced, flat-bellied anatomy; enabled the sexual division of labour,” says Wrangham. “It was so important that it likely drove the evolution of our genus Homo.Basically, if the cooking hypothesis is right it turned us from advanced ape to early human.”

The researchers, like Wrangham, believe “the ability to control fire was a crucial turning point in human evolution”⁸ and that the ability to cook had to be in the hominin skill set by 1.9 million years ago, the time evolutionists claim Homo erectus evolved. These findings are the “earliest” known evidence of controlled use of fire and therefore are assumed to support these Promethean concepts of human evolution. (For readers rusty on their classical mythology, Prometheus was the Greek Titan credited in Greek mythology and the plays of Aeschylus and Shelley with giving mankind the gift of fire.)

The researchers have ruled out wildfire, convinced the fire was a controlled fire fed by plant material and that debris was not washed or blown in. Goldberg believes “it was unlikely there was any vegetation of wood or wood-like material that would have been there [30 meters inside] to burn on the spot – you can exclude local burning of material by natural causes. These ashes are really quite delicate, so they can't have been transported by wind or water, they would have never survived as intact pieces. It [the fire] has to be something local, right there on the spot.”

They also found pot lids made of iron. Fractures in these iron artifacts are consistent with those achieved by experimentally heating to over 500 degrees Celsius, again suggesting the fire was used for cooking.

The million-year date ascribed to the burned debris was obtained by integrating paleomagnetic data and cosmogenic isotopic (26Al/10Be) ratios measured outside the cave in recent years.¹⁰The latter measurements are based on decay of beryllium-10 and aluminum-26 isotopes formed in sand exposed to cosmic radiation. Magnetic field reversals are thought to affect the rate of isotope formation, allowing magnetic and isotope data to be integrated. (Decreased magnetic field intensity during reversal would allow more cosmic rays to reach earth causing an increase in isotope production.)

Paleomagnetic reversals are conventionally thought to indicate long ages based on the assumed long age of the earth. Creationist physicist Dr. Russ Humphreys has proposed, however, that convection currents in the core of the earth—affected by Flood-associated tectonic shifts—reversed earth’s magnetic field every few weeks during the global Flood.¹¹ Subsequent research has documented analogous rapid magnetic field reversals in thin layers of cooled lava.¹² Thus paleomagnetic dating is unreliable because magnetic reversals can occur rapidly and likely did so during the global Flood.

Furthermore, many factors can affect the geochemical cycling of these isotopes, including altered production rate due to magnetic reversals and other causes, changes in atmospheric circulation of the isotopes, and changes in precipitation.¹³ Thus these dating methods, singly and together, suffer from the usual problems with unverifiable assumptions that haunt other radiometric dating methods. In particular, the global Flood very likely affected the calibration of at least one of the parameters in a dramatic way for which observable geology has provided an analogous model. Without the million-year date, these findings become merely confirmation that early humans knew how to cook.

Homo erectus was fully human and, like Neanderthals and early modern humans, had smaller teeth than apes’ teeth. Intelligent descendants of people scattered from the tower of Babel, they would all know how to cook. There is no proof cooking enabled “hominins” to evolve bigger, better brains. Brain size is not linked to human intelligence, so the fact that Homo erectus had cranial capacity on the small end of human average and Neanderthals had cranial capacity on the large end fails to show an ascending human evolutionary path. Nothing in the study supports the concept of human evolution from brutish or ape-like ancestors.

On the other hand, the historical accounts in the Bible shed light on the post-Flood Ice Age and the dispersion of Noah’s descendants from Babel, showing how human fossils like Homo erectusfit the biblical picture. Homo erectus, Neanderthals, and Denisovans appear in the Pleistocene rock layers as do extinct Ice Age animals. While Genesis does not offer the details of the post-Flood climate change, the natural result of the global Flood was the Ice Age that affected so much of our world for hundreds of years. People migrating from Babel had to cope with those climate changes and probably used caves for shelter and to bury their dead.

Homo erectus fossils, with “large brow ridges, small chins, and receding foreheads”¹⁴ along with their characteristic tools are preserved near Babel in the Lower and Middle Pleistocene layers of East Africa and Central Asia. Homo erectus fossils also appear farther from Babel in Upper Pleistocene layers along with other varieties of people, such as Neanderthals and the very shortHomo floresiensis of Indonesia. Yet the fossil record does not preserve further record of these members of the human race after the Ice Age, suggesting they ultimately succumbed. Without DNA from Homo erectus we cannot document whether they live on in modern humans as do Neanderthals, but there is no reason to doubt their humanity or their intelligence—or to suppose they were evolving quasi-humans whose humanity depended on newly acquired culinary skills.

For more information:

• Axing Evolutionary ideas—Stone Dead!
• Still Trying to Make Ice Cores Old
• The ‘Principle of Least Astonishment’!
• See also Answers magazine volume 7, number 2 (April–June 2012) which contains several articles and helpful diagrams (example, right) explaining how “cavemen” can be explained within the biblical timeline in the special feature: “Finding a Home for Cavemen: Who were they? When did they live? How are they different?”

http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/2012/04/07/news-to-note-04072012#one

WAS THERE A QUEEN OF SHEBA? EVIDENCE MAKES HER MORE LIKELY

By COLIN CAMPBELL

THE Queen of Sheba is described in the first Book of Kings, Chapter X, as having visited King Solomon in Jerusalem ''with camels bearing spices, and very much gold, and precious stones.'' She tested the wise king with ''hard questions,'' evidently got the right answers, and then departed as mysteriously as she had arrived.

But did she really exist? The question has been argued for years. Many scholars and archeologists have assumed that the biblical land of Sheba was in southwestern Arabia, where the ancient Greeks placed the Sabaeans and where some noble ruins testify to the inhabitants' former glory. So perhaps, since her country existed, the biblical Queen of Sheba existed.

One flaw in this hypothesis has been that Solomon ruled Israel in the 10th century B.C., three centuries earlier than the oldest known remains of Sheba's highest civilization.

But now an archeologist at the University of Pennylvania, James A. Sauer, who has headed an archeological project in the area of ancient Sheba for the past five years, argues that Sheba is older than some scholars have believed.

Dr. Sauer's hypothesis, stated in a recent paper on the project, is based partly on an excavation in a dry valley called Wadi al-Jubah, about 25 miles south of the remains of Sheba's capital at Marib, in the eastern region of present-day Yemen.

The cut was made in a likely-looking mound called Hajar at-Tamrah, the Mound of the Date Palm, and near its bottom archeologists found broken pottery and a piece of timber that radiocarbon tests indicated was from the 13th century B.C. In such tests traces of carbon 14, a natural radioactive isotope of carbon, are used to determine the age of fossil and archeological remains.

At another, larger mound, Hajar ar-Rayhani, American excavators have turned up pottery, ash and evidence of a copper foundry dating to the 7th century B.C., and the diggers still have several yards and several centuries to go before they reach the oldest layers of the mound.

Although such findings are still just hints, Dr. Sauer believes that further excavations will eventually provide evidence for those scholars who have assumed that Sheba was a considerable trading nation by the time of Solomon, and was thus capable of sending a monarch to pay a call on another rich monarch whose capital lay 1,400 miles to the north.

''These findings are very preliminary,'' Dr. Sauer said recently as he stood in his darkened office at the University of Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia. A satellite photograph projected on the wall beside him showed the Arabian Peninsula, a red and yellow block surrounded by bright blue seas. ''But they fit in with recent excavations in Saudi Arabia, where some very early finds have also turned up, also older than the 10th century B.C., and I think they demolish the idea that South Arabian civilization is too young to have sent a queen to Jerusalem.''

Although archeological excavations since the 1920's have convinced some specialists that southern Arabian civilization dates to the 10th or 11th century B.C., part of the evidence for this chronology comes from excavations in what is now the country of Southern Yemen rather than from the area around Marib, Sheba's capital. In ancient times there were several kingdoms in southern Arabia, including Hadhramaut, Main and Qataban as well as Sheba.

In Sheba, however, a great stone dam near Marib, an elegant temple to the local moon god, bronze and albaster statues and other signs of wealth and civilization are all considerably younger than Solomon's time. Riddle of Greek Alphabet

One other factor that has tended to cast doubt on the idea that Solomon and the Queen of Sheba actually met has been the argument by the Belgian scholar Jacqueline Pirenne that the many inscriptions from the ancient kingdoms of southern Arabia were based on the Greek alphabet, and that the area's high civilization, heavily influenced by the Greeks, probably dated back no further than about the 5th century B.C.

This thesis, which has been advanced since the mid-1950's, has been rejected by most American linguists and archeologists. The Americans say that the alphabets of southern Arabia derived, not from the Greek alphabet, but from northern Semitic alphabets such as the Phonecian, from which the Greek alphabet was also derived. But the Pirenne hypothesis has helped keep the matter of South Arabian chronology somewhat doubtful.

Commenting on Dr. Sauer's archeological work in general, Hershel Shanks, editor of Biblical Archeology magazine, said: ''He's very good on chronology. If he says it's 10th century or 13th century, it probably is.''

From Washington, Dr. Gus W. Van Beek, curator of anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution, said Dr. Sauer's project in Wadi al-Jubah was potentially important. Dr. Van Beek also believes in the plausibility of a Queen of Sheba visiting Solomon, although her visit would have been for trade and economic reasons, the normal modern explanation, rather than to test Solomon's wisdom.

Dr. van Beek cautioned, however, that carbon 14 dates could be misleading, and that further samples needed to be taken. Dr. Sauer agrees, and has pointed out that the piece of wood from Wadi al-Jubah that the carbon 14 test dated in the 13th century B.C. could already have been a century or more old when it was put to use in that settlement, and thus much older than the pottery and other signs of human culture found in the same layer. Civil War Hampers Research

Dr. Van Beek's own archeological research in southern Arabia makes him think that high civilization in the area dates to perhaps the 10th or 11th century B.C., when it was imported from the Tigris-Euphrates Valley and the eastern Mediterranean coast, but not as far back as the 13th century.

Dr. Van Beek was a member of a major expedition in southern Arabia in the early 1950's that was organized by Wendell Phillips and included the eminent biblical archeologist William F. Albright. Dr. Van Beek conducted detailed investigations at Hajar Bin Humeid, a site south of where Dr. Sauer has been working. Hajar Bin Humeid was part of the ancient kingdom of Qataban. Today the site is in Southern Yemen, a Marxist country where a civil war was recently fought.

One reason that southern Arabian archeology is filled with uncertainties is that careful work in Yemen and Southern Yemen has been hampered by insecurity. The Phillips expedition abandoned its equipment and fled Sheba's capital by truck one morning, saying their lives had been threatened by hostile tribesmen. Now, more than three decades later, Dr. Sauer's archeologists are usually accompanied by armed Government guards. Domestication of the Camel

The Wadi al-Jubah is a valley that Dr. Sauer believes was once inhabited by people who made their living as the people at nearby Marib did, by irrigated agriculture, exploiting the water that periodically rushes down from the rainy mountains to the west. He suspects the ancient inhabitants also traded in frankincense and myrrh derived from plants native to southern Arabia and East Africa.

A key to the spice trade was the domestication of the camel, which some scholars date around the 12th century B.C. The camel was the only pack animal able to negotiate the long waterless marches between southern Arabia and the markets to the north, including Egypt and Mesopotamia as well as the Israel of Solomon.

Dr. Van Beek, Dr. Sauer and others argue that the reason the Queen of Sheba visited Solomon was to help assure that her incense would be properly distributed. Israel was strategically located between empires and was itself enjoying its wealthiest period. The temple in Jerusalem was said to have consumed huge quantities of incense. As for the gold and precious stones in the biblical account, they too might have come from southern Arabia or East Africa.

Unfortunately, the account of Sheba in the Bible provides few other details, and the elaborate tales about the Queen that have been told for centuries seem to have originated elsewhere. Some legends gave her a name: Nikaule in Greek, Bilqis in Arabic, Makeda in Ethiopic. Ethiopian stories about the Queen of Sheba became extraordinarily rich, and are still written in an alphabet closely related to the ancient Sabaean alphabet. Ethiopian tradition held that the country's kings were descendants of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Other Problems Are Posed

Despite the leanings of some modern archeologists, the Biblical Queen of Sheba still poses many problems, according to Dr. Sauer and others.

For one thing, the ancient inscriptions of southern Arabia name many kings but no queens. There were queens elsewhere in ancient Arabia, according to Assyrian documents, but apart from the Biblical story and related traditions, no evidence has appeared of a queen in southern Arabia.

Dr. Karl Lamberg-Karlovsky, director of Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology, has followed Dr. Sauer's work with what he calls ''constructive skepticism.'' The carbon 14 dating is ''very tenuous,'' he said in a telephone interview. He also said there was no hard information on the relations between Wadi al-Jubah, Marib and Sheba, and little data to link the area with camels and camel caravans.

Dr. Lamberg-Karlovsky said it was jumping to conclusions to link Marib, Sheba and Wadi al-Jubah with a story in the Bible. Such stories, he suggested, sometimes cloud historical and scientific issues. Archeologists still know very little, he said, about the cultures of ancient southern Arabia.

Other archeologists, including Dr. Sauer, agree about the extent of archeological ignorance. The large mound of Marib, Sheba's capital, has barely been scratched by archeologists, and the Government of Yemen, whose capital is Sana, has responded cautiously to proposals to cut into it.

But Dr. Van Beek and others said the Dr. Sauer's approach was sound. His group has been conducting excavations that generally involve the painstaking analysis of every bead, bone, seed and shard.

One member of Dr. Sauer's project has been Albert Jamme, a leading expert on inscriptions from southern Arabia. Dr. Jamme was the chief epigrapher for the Wendell Phillips expedition in the early 1950's.

Other archeologists in the project include Jeffrey A. Blakely, William Glanzman and Abdu O. Ghaleb, all graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania, and Michael Toplyn of Harvard. The project is under the auspices of Harvard's Peabody Museum, Pennsylvania's University Museum and the American Schools of Oriental Research. The project has been largely financed by the American Foundation for the Study of Man, founded by Wendell Phillips. Mr. Phillips, who also made a fortune in the oil business, died in 1975.

http://www.nytimes.com/1986/02/04/science/was-there-a-queen-of-sheba-evidence-makes-her-more-likely.html?pagewanted=all