Where is Adam? When was Adam? In my view if Adam is not real, then the
Fall is unlikely to be correct. But the data of paleoanthropology makes
it really hard to pinpoint a late date for Adam. This data is even more
problematic for Christian harmonization than is geology. But most
Christians don't know a lot about that subject and therefore a lot of
views are proposed which simply won't work. They WANT a late date (<50,000
years) for him (see ~Hugh Ross, The Fingerprint of God, (Orange: Promise
Publishing, 1991), p. 159-160; Hugh Ross, "Art and Fabric Shed New Light
on Human History," Facts & Faith, p. 2). Dick's Mesopotamian view also
advocates a recent Adam. Here is why that view won't work. There will be
a lot of quotations with references.
Adam had a language. (see Genesis 2) Homo habilis left fossil evidence of
a language!
"But monkeys don't have language and humans do. Are [141/142] there
morphological manifestations of human brains that (a) correlate with
functional lateralizations including language and (b) are capable of
leaving traces in the hominid fossil record? Indeed there are. Shape
asymmetries of the frontal and occipital lobes, known as petalias, exist
in human brains (and to a lesser degree in brains of monkeys and apes) and
are statistically associated with handedness in humans. Further, a
characteristic sulcal pattern associated with Broca's speech area in left
frontal lobes is present in human but not in ape brains. Both humanlike
petalis and the pattern of sulci associated with Broca's area have been
detected on endocranial casts (endocasts) from the early part of the
hominid fossil record.
"The oldest evidence for Broca's area to date is from KNM-ER 1470, a
H. habilis specimen from Kenya, dated at approximately two million years
ago. From that date forward, brain size 'took off,' i.e., increased
autocatalytically so that it nearly doubled in the genus Homo, reaching
its maximum in Neanderthals. If hominids weren't using and refining
language I would like to know what they were doing with their
autocatalytically increasing brains (getting ready to draw pictures
somehow doesn't seem like enough)."~Dean
Falk, Comments, Current Anthropology, 30:2, April, 1989, p. 141-142.
Animals use tools to make a nest or obtain food (Kathy D. Schick and
Nicholas Toth, Making
Silent Stones Speak, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), p. 53,54)
Only man makes a tool and uses it to make another tool to use for a third
purpose. The earliest evidence of this is 1.5 million years ago.
"Although wood generally does not preserve well in the ancient
archaeological record, we can find indirect clues of the use of wood in
various ways. sometimes a tool seems to have been made to mount on a
handle (in recent prehistory and in modern times usually made out of wood
or bone). We don't see any good evidence of this, however, until much
later, only within the last hundred thousand or so years. Another sign is
a distinctive alteration, seen, seen through a microscope, of the edge of
stone artifacts used to work wood. ON 1.5-million-year-old flakes from
Koobi Fora, Lawrence Keeley from the University of Illinois identified
signs that suggested they had been used for scraping wood. Making what,
we don't know -- possibly some other tool."~Kathy D. Schick and Nicholas
Toth, Making Silent Stones Speak, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993),
p.160
Man engages in art, including body art--tattoos, body painting. No animal
does this.
"Specimens of ochre have been reported from some of the oldest
occupation or activity sites known from the Lower Paleolithic period in
the Old World, including Bed II at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, Ambrona in
Spain, Terra Amata in France, and Becov in Czechoslovakia. The use of
ochre apparently increases during the Middle Paleolithic period in the
Mousterian tradition and becomes common in the Upper Paleolithic period."
D. Bruce Dickson, The Dawn of Belief, (Tuscon: The University of
Arizona Press, 1990), p. 42-43
"The presence of worked ochre in Bed II at Olduvai Gorge suggests that the
beginning of this 'attack' may even predate the appearance of Homo erectus
and begin instead with Homo habilis or the australopithecines more than
1.5 million years ago."~IBID. p. 44
I cited yesterday the 3 million year old Makapansgat pebble and the
330,000 year ols Golan Venus. The Makapansgat pebble is a skull-like
pebble that was apparently carried by an Australopithecus Robustus for 3
miles back to his cave. The "skull" had brow ridges just like the
Australopithecus. They may recognized their own mortality via that
pebble.(see Desmond Morris, The Human Animal, (New York: Crown
Publishing, 1994), p. 186-188.)
Possible warfare 80,000 years ago. (for the date see Goren Burenhult _The
First Humans_ San Francisco: Harper, 1993), p. 49)
"Careful study of the hip region of one of the men buried at the
Mount Carmel cave of es-Skhul has shown that at death, or shortly
after, this individual had recieved a dreadful wound from what
must have been a wooden spear like those described from a
previous age; the weapon had been driven in with such force that
the head penetrated the head of femur and emerged into the pelvic
cavity."~Grahame Clark and Stuart Piggott, Prehistoric Societies,
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), p. 60
Stone tools. Only mankind is known to make stone tools. Kathy Schick and
Nicolas Toth tried to teach a chimp to make stone tools.
"Their subject, Kanzi, a star in communication experiments, showed an
immediate interest in having sharp flakes available to cut cords that held
a fruit-containing box closed. He got the idea of striking flakes from a
core, but even after many months of training he was still nowhere near the
skill level of the Oldowan toolmakers. The latter clearly understood the
major properties of the stones they worked and selected the most effective
points at which to strike an inevitably irregular core. NOt so Kanzi, who
never mastered the idea of striking stone at the optimum angle. His best
products are rather like the 'eoliths' that so confused early
archaeologists: rocks randomly banged together and flaked as they rolled
along riverbeds. Toth and colleagues concluded from this that the early
hominid toolmakers ahd a much better cognitive understanding of what
toolmaking is all about than any modern ape is able to acquire. And from
that they hazarded that in hominid prehistory there must have been a stage
of stoneworking that preceded the Oldowan, but that by its nature it would
be difficult or impossible for archaeologists to identify or to
discriminate from the results of natural forces. Still, these experiments
give some idea of what one might need to look for."~Ian Tattersall, The
Fossil Trail (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p.207
Oldowan tools are the earliest stone tools and they are found 2.7 million
years ago.
"For those prepared to accept the presence of flaked artifacts as
indirect evidence of the existence of Homo the antiquity of the
genus can be extended back to 2.7 Ma, the date of the earliest
stone tools at Kada Gona in the Hadar region of Ethiopia."~A. T.
Chamberlain, "A Chronological Framework for Human Origins," World
Archaeology, 23:2, 1991, p. 143
Only mankind tames fire. This was accomplished 1.0-1.8 million years ago.
"Both A. robustus and Homo cf. habilis are known from Members 1 and
2. Only A. robustus remains, from nine individuals, have been recovered
from Member 3, although Homo is assumed to have been present. Tools of
the Devloped Oldowan tradition are found throughout the sequence and no
important faunal difference exists between Members 1, 2 and 3, suggesting
that they are all within the time range 1.0-1.8 Myr BP. Moreover the
environmental conditions prevailing during the accumulation of these
Members seem to be similar.
"Burnt bones, apparently absent in Members 1 and 2, appear
recurrently in Member 3: an average of six 10-cm-thick levels per m2
contain burnt bones. In one 1-m2 test pit (W3/S3) burnt fragments were
found in 20 separate vertical levels. In W3/S3 there is a scatter of bone
pieces, fractured stone, bone tools and remains of A. robustus throughout
the depth of the profile. The recurrence of burnt fragments in this and
other grid-square profiles suggests that fire was a regular event during
the accumulation of Member 3 sediment, rather than an isolated
phenomenon."~C. K. Brain and A. Sillen, "Evidence from the Swartkrans cave
for the earliest use of fire," Nature, 336, Dece. 1, 1988,
p. 464-465
Only mankind scalps his fellow man. This is first observed at 300-400,000
years ago.
scalping 300-400 kyr see p. 184
"Interestingly, we also begin to pick up evidnece for the intentional
defleshing of human remains, as evidenced, for example, by stone tool
cut-marks on the forehead and withing the orbit of the Homo
heidelbergensis cranium from Bodo. Whether this scalping indicates
cannibalism (which seems a little unlikely) or some other ritual behavior
is anybody's guess. From this point on, too, stone tools began to
decrease in size, although some of the older forms were preserved; for
example, small handaxes were made on flakes, rather than on large cores
borken off much larger boulders as was the practice in Acheulean
times."~Ian Tattersall, The Fossil Trail (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1995), p. 244.
unless we move Adam far back in time. Doing this is consistent with the
paleoanthropological data. To insist that humanity is a recent (<50,000
years) creation violates a whole lot of data.
glenn
Foundation,Fall and Flood
http://members.gnn.com/GRMorton/dmd.htm