Secular Anthropology Fails Consistently
By assuming long ages and by underestimating human creativity and mobility, evolutionary anthropologists keep getting surprised by evidence.
A number of recent articles about human history and anthropology illustrate the perennial motto of evolutionary anthropology: “everything you know is wrong.”
Ancient man: Ann Gibbons writes, once again, about how human evolution stories are being revised. In Science Magazine, she focuses on the surprises coming out of DNA comparisons that show extensive interbreeding between groups long thought to be separate human species. Her headline is “Revolution in human evolution.” There have been so many revolutions among anthropologists for so many decades, the field resembles the government of a banana republic.
Stone tools: Science Daily seriously suggests that it took 6,000 years for early humans who lived 650 miles apart to share tool-making techniques. That’s the length of all recorded modern human history. If they were anatomically and mentally similar to us, and smart enough to make stone tools and hunt large animals, why did it take so long?
Farming first: Anthropologists at Tel Aviv University cavalierly doubled the earliest date of agriculture in the Middle East from 12,000 years to 23,000 years, nonplussed that their new date represents 100% error from prior estimates. But can such drastic conclusions be drawn by looking at weeds on a seashore campsite? The most useful quote is buried in the story:
“While full-scale agriculture did not develop until much later, our study shows that trial cultivation began far earlier than previously believed, and gives us reason to rethink our ancestors’ capabilities,” said Prof. Sternberg. “Those early ancestors were more clever and more skilled than we knew.“
Meanwhile, Science Daily shows that anthropologists are still trying to figure out when and how humans moved from hunting and gathering to agriculture.
Antikythera: Another article about the Antikythera shipwreck was posted by Live Science. This is the Greek shipwreck that provided evidence that ancient Greeks were smart enough to make an astronomical computer. The “floating museum” or “Titanic of its day” is still yielding up secrets, including “ceramic vessels, parts of marble statues, bronze statuettes, bronze coins, gold jewelry, gemstones, glassware and human skeletal remains.”
Early Americans: Science Magazine reports on how views continue to change about when and how the first people migrated into the Americas. No matter how many tens of thousands of years they toss around like peanuts, they are mystified. “Researchers agree that more genomes from modern and ancient Native Americans are needed to unravel the mysteries,” Michael Balter writes.
Amazon civilization: New Scientist‘s headline is telling: “Myth of pristine Amazon rainforest busted as old cities reappear.” Live Science points out that early explorers were more reliable than modern scientists:
Although the Amazon is often thought of as pristine nature, over the past few decades, archaeologists have discovered evidence of numerous large, complex societies that may have inhabited Amazonia in the past. While these findings contrast with the small Amazonian societies anthropologists investigated in the 20th century, they are in line with initial eyewitness accounts of Europeans from the 16th and 17th centuries.
At least 83 species of plants were domesticated by the societies, the article goes on to say. 20th century anthropologists believed they were looking at primitive tribes when they explored Amazonia. New Scientist quotes at an old document that got it right hundreds of years ago:
The first Europeans to penetrate the Amazon rainforests reported cities, roads and fertile fields along the banks of its major rivers. “There was one town that stretched for 15 miles without any space from house to house, which was a marvellous thing to behold,” wrote Gaspar de Carvajal, chronicler of explorer and conquistador Francisco de Orellana in 1542. “The land is as fertile and as normal in appearance as our Spain.”
Aboriginal rock art: Hundreds of thousands of rock art sites are found throughout Australia, but little is known about when the art was made. A team of physicists, chemists, archaeologists and geologists will be spending three years trying to answer the question, PhysOrg reports. Is this statement credible? “No rock art dates are available yet – though indications are that some rock art is very recent, while other rock art traditions may be tens of thousands of years old.” Expect that they will be surprised when they finish their work.
The evidence all fits a much younger age for mankind. Is a young earth a straitjacket for science, forcing all data into just a few thousand years? This is a frequent argument by atheists and all long-agers. Actually, the straitjacket is Darwinian evolution. No matter the evidence, it must be stretched out to fit tens and hundreds of thousands of years so that Darwin’s doctrine of man’s emergence from apes is not desecrated. Who can believe that early humans didn’t share their toolmaking secrets for 6,000 years, or didn’t change their rock art styles for tens of thousands of years? It’s absurd.
Considering how smart and restless humans are, it is unreasonable to assume they stayed in place for thousands of years without learning how to farm, ride a horse or build homes. Evolutionists have no explanation for what lucky mutation switched on in a hominid brain to cause the emergence of language, art or civilization. The Bible says that humans were farmers, artists and builders from the start – right after Eden. That makes sense. With creative minds in the image of God, and fully-equipped bodies with opposable thumbs, muscular arms and legs, curiosity and wanderlust, why not? Humans quickly moved out on all the frontiers, expanding over the world twice: before the Flood, and after the Flood. You can believe that and marvel at the Bible’s fit to the evidence, or you can follow the secular crowd and find yourself wrong – over and over and over again.