Arabian Artifacts Undermine Human Evolution Narrative

Human evolution story is in shambles (again) after finds in Arabia, but the
Darwinian storytellers have no shame. They keep imagining new tales.

The constantly-revised story of evolution has been falsified so many times, one would think Darwinists would quit and take up truck driving. Michael Marshall should, too, after publishing his latest piece in New Scientist, “The other cradle of humanity: How Arabia shaped human evolution.” In a real sense, he is an accomplice to the paleoanthropologists’ sins by perennially giving them cover.

For review: here is the old story. Marshall retells it before dismantling it:

For decades, Africa has been seen as the cradle of humanity. The oldest known hominins arose there around 7 million years ago and stayed on the continent for a long time, evolving into various forms including those that gave us famous fossils such as Ardi and Lucy. While some groups started to wander further afield from about 2 million years ago, Africa remained central to our story. The earliest known remains of our species, Homo sapiens, also known as modern humans, are from Africa. There we emerged around 300,000 years ago, and there we pretty much remained until around 60,000 years ago, when a single out-of-Africa migration carried modern humans all around the world – or so anthropologists thought.

You can forget all that, because it’s wrong. “We had a very straightforward scenario,” says one Darwin bigot from Max Planck. A bigot is someone who absolutely refuses to even consider any other doctrine than his own, and will become hostile if challenged (see previous post).

Did you catch it? Mike just shamelessly repeated the standard Darwin miracle words: hominins “arose” — they “evolved”— we “emerged.” And for ungodly periods of time—multiple times all recorded history—they just stuck around doing nothing but making the same old stone tools, even though evolutionists admit they had brains as large or larger than ours, the ability to use fire, and were built for mobility and cooperation. If that were true, these people had incredible amounts of time to think about inventing conveniences like wheels and learning to ride a horse, but they did not until a few thousand years ago. Was there no farmland in Africa, that they had to move to the Middle East to figure it out? Were there no animals to domesticate in Africa? The story is crazy, and tossing in Darwin Years by the hundreds of thousands or millions only makes it worse. It’s a huge insult to the legacy of people groups in Africa. It’s historical chauvinism.

Wherever people migrate and settle, they are resourceful and cooperative.

But we digress. Now, there is increasing evidence of longstanding human habitation in Arabia because—no surprise to Bible believers—Arabia was a land of lakes and oases not that long ago. Marshall says it was that way just 8,000 years ago. (Darwin skeptics know to take any Darwin date with error bars of plus or minus 100%.)

So how wrong was the old story? Let us count the ways:

1. Humans did not bypass the interior of Arabia; they went right through the middle of it.
2. People groups stayed in Arabia for substantial periods of time, building monuments.
3. The monuments they built showed evidence of complex social structures, just like all people groups exhibit.
4. The monuments, Darwin dated at 7,000 years, are older than Stonehenge and the Pyramids.
5. Arabia was not a place without human history. Recently-found artwork and petroglyphs prove it.
6. The interior of Arabia is nearly uninhabitable today, but was a good place to live a few thousands of years ago.
7. Hippo bones have been found in former lake beds under the sand. Hippos need permanent water meters deep.
8. Evidence of fertile grasslands, abundant wild game, elephants and water birds has also been found.
9. Stone tools are found in Arabia resembling those in deep Africa.
10. All the “hominins” were people. “My guess is we’re going to be looking at a whole variety of potentially different hominin species, almost all of whom could probably interbreed,” says another Darwin bigot. If they could interbreed, they were all part of the human species.

Out of Africa Is Out

Consider how shocking this is. It means all the stories evolutionists have told about humans evolving from apes in the Great Rift Valley or in the caves of South Africa are wrong. It also means that a single migration into Europe 60,000 years ago is wrong.

“One model that I’ve been promoting is a multiple dispersals model of Homo sapiens through time,” says Petraglia. “Not just one event, but many events and interbreeding as they went along.” In this model, the reason genetics points to a significant shift 60,000 years ago isn’t a big out-of-Africa migration, but an increase in the overall size of the human population. “In other words, there may be genetic swamping of small populations that were present in Eurasia earlier,” says Petraglia. This would create “the illusion” of a single large dispersal, he says.

Rescuing a Scenario for Darwin

Desperate to keep his readers faithful to King Charles, Marshall gives reporters new speculations to imagine. Knowing that deep time is essential to evolutionary theory, he says there were “cycles” of climate change, causing pulses or waves of human habitation over vast ages. “Human ancestors have inhabited the Arabian peninsula for hundreds of thousands of years, at times when the climate was wetter there.” The cycle theory gives his storytelling cronies the time they need to make Lucy and Ardi “emerge” into people. Here’s a new twist on environmental selection pressure: Arabia’s sand dunes shaped apes into people.

In other words, we are all ultimately from Africa – it’s just that we need to reconsider our notion of where Africa ends. The Arabian landscapes shaped our species as surely as the savannahs, forests and coasts of Africa. The interior of the Rub’ al-Khali may be a searing desert today, but once upon a time it was home to our distant ancestors.

Once upon a time. Once upon a time. That is the language of fairy tales, where apes “emerge” into people over millions of years, and big brains “arise” to endow them with language and art and agriculture and civilization – but only after a magic mutation switched on the civilization-making gene relatively recently by another miracle. After that miracle, modern humans were building rockets to the moon in a few thousand years. Who can believe that?

Genesis 10 gives names of people groups and where they dispersed, matching extrabiblical sources.

The “rich record of prehistoric art and artefacts” they are finding, Darwin-dated to 10,000 years, does not rule out the fact that the earlier “hominins” also had artistic abilities. “Much of the evidence of their presence has eroded away.” Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. At a site Darwin-dated at 8,000 years ago, there are life-size carvings of camels:

“They look like sculptures coming out of the rock,” says Guagnin. Many people must have been involved in their creation: raw materials for tools had to be brought in from 30 kilometres away, and the sculptures are so high that scaffolding may have been needed. “We think there was a lot of communal effort,” she says.

Marshall then trots out the usual line of human ancestors: Homo erectus, Neanderthal Man, Denisovans, and the new Nesher Ramla skull (see 26 June 2021). Desperately trying to retain some story of evolution, he has to admit,

Emerging evidence reveals Arabia to have been inhabited from as early as 500,000 years ago. The list of hominins whose eras fit this time span and who may have lived there is quite long.

And they were all interbreeding. They were all human. Imagining them to be primitive for half a million years insults their memory.

Wherever they are found, humans have a “human nature” that is exceptional and very different from animals.

The craziness in the evolution story evaporates if these people groups, known to be smart, social, intelligent and mobile, did all these things only a few thousand years ago. How long does it take to carve a rock sculpture? Probably a week or a month. How long does it take to build a mustatil, a huge stone monument? Maybe a few years or decades, depending on the number of workers committed to it.

illustration by Brett Miller

The Biblical chronology from the Table of Nations (Genesis 10) makes way more sense than the evolutionary half-million years. People groups dispersed rapidly after the Flood, especially after the confusion of languages at Babel. Wherever they went, they took language, intelligence and creativity with them. Since multiple languages presented a new difficulty for post-Babel wanderers, it took awhile to invent symbols for writing them. Egyptian hieroglyphics were an early attempt, but alphabets came soon after. In the earliest monuments, such as at Gobekli Tepe (10 March 2009—another shock to the evolutionary story), images of animals may have had symbolic meaning.

The farther dispersing groups traveled, the more hardships they faced. Small clans may have inhabited caves for short periods of time, perhaps a few decades or centuries until the post-Flood ice age declined. In small groups, inbreeding could have led to misshapen bones and skulls like those of “Homo erectus” that are found from China to Africa. While distant tribes were building boats to reach Indonesian and Mediterranean islands, their contemporaries were building cities in the Fertile Crescent. The more generations passed, the more the memories of the Flood and the true God were corrupted into local myths and false religions.

Who needs ten thousands or hundreds of thousands of Darwin Years for all this? The dates are flawed. Within one century a lot of change could have been evidenced in tool technologies, artistic styles, and social projects. Creationists have the very same evidence: bones, artifacts, tools but without the obligatory Darwin Years that fog up the interpretation. They regularly publish ideas about how the various evidences fit the Biblical account. Darwin bigots refuse to acknowledge them. Well, what do evolutionists have to show for their expertise? Scenarios (stories) repeatedly changing and being falsified. Annual proclamations that “Everything we know is wrong” (26 July 2015).

Marshall already admits that the genetic evidence misled scientists for decades. Since genes don’t come with compasses on them, why not turn the “Out of Africa” story around? Maybe it was “Into Africa” instead. From Babel, early travelers reached Africa. People are smart enough and curious enough to move around. If large groups decided to move into Africa and settle all over that continent at first, a few could have decided to move back out for various reasons, crossing through Arabia or staying for awhile.

People are much smarter than paleoanthropologists give them credit for. Tossing long ages into the Darwin stories does not make them better; it adds problems. It makes them more implausible. It insults the people who left their marks all over the world. But that’s what Darwinism needs, isn’t it? Insults. People and animals have to vary so that they can be ranked as “primitive” and “evolved” so that the fittest can be selected. Evolution is therefore inherently racist (Evolution News, 3 Aug 2021). Darwinists need “hominins” that they can rank with “modern humans,” with white Europeans always ending up on top. Darwinians’ legacy of racism has been horrible (16 Sept 2020, 2 Sept 2020). Secular scientists are just now coming to grips with it (3 June 2021) although it is too little too late.

Why is anybody listening to these losers? We have written records of human history. In their haste to expunge Genesis from science, the Victorian Darwin bigots created a monstrosity of storytelling that will always—of necessity—be false.