Our Backward View of History

Neanderthal Skull

Just watched a BBC video on Neanderthals and the "new discovery" they were human because of their ability to create art. I found this "breakthrough" rather underwhelming because, our accumulated knowledge of this human population showed that they carefully buried their dead in a ceremonial way indicative of belief in an afterlife and they are also known to have created musical instruments, the "Neanderthal flute" being one such relic.

The video shows the results of their exploration of a cave that is part of Gibraltar. Their determination it was a Neanderthal cave is an interesting one in that we are not told how it was determined. Presumably some human bones were discovered that match the body and cranial characteristics of skeletons found in the Neandertal Valley of Germany. Of course, the anthropologists quickly attribute to tens of thousands of years to their residence in the cave (which in itself is difficult to fathom if they were normal, curious human beings constantly in search of food and habitation). 

The real root of this problem regarding our human history is the speculation about deep time when, in fact, our knowledge of time is badly in need of reform. The closest anyone has come in trying to explain time was Stephen Hawking in his book, A Brief History of Time. Here he postulates that time began with a "singularity", but, upon further investigation, this simply turns out to be a meaningless tautology because singularity means spacetime. Ergo, Hawking postulates that time originated with spacetime. This is tantamount to saying that rain comes from water from the sky. It tells us absolutely nothing. But, in one of his lectures, Hawking did admit that our universe and our earth had to have had a beginning, time-wise. Here he was on the right track, to be sure, because time is built into our smallest particle of matter, radioisotopes. In radioisotopes, time is expressed in half lives. Carbon 14 has a half life of 5730 years, which is to say, that half of its isotope mass disappears in 5730 years. And in the following 5730 years, half of its earlier mass disappears. Through this understanding, it is therefore evident that Someone started the clock ticking because there would be no Carbon 14 existing if all of its radioactive mass had disappeared. 

Because of science's inability to grapple with this "big question", it is therefore quite fatuous to speculate on the age of Neanderthals or anything else they deem old. In fact, it is fatuous to believe Neanderthals are our ancestors in any direct sense because they could, in fact, be a European population group of peoples whose ancestry lie in the Middle East or Africa without relation to other population groups around the world. 

It is geological stratigraphy that provides that basis of our age determination methods. The notion that some relic or fossil is just so old is based on the rock environment it is found in. Despite the suspicion that radiometric dating--scientific dating--was discovered nearly 100 years after Lyell's Principles of Geology, and made to agree, the determination of a geological column was decided upon in a very arbitrary way. The fact that the geological strata is almost never found in the accepted order, is even a further travesty of academic integrity.

"The rocks do date the fossils, but the fossils date the rocks more accurately. Stratigraphy cannot avoid this kind of reasoning, if it insists on using only temporal concepts, because circularity is inherent in the derivation of time scales."—*J.E. O'Rourke, "Pragmatism vs. Materialism in Stratigraphy," American Journal of Science, January 1976, p. 53.

There are many means of determining the age of our universe and its earth, some of which provide us with relative ages and others providing us with absolute ages, and the majority of them vary dramatically from conventional radiometric means. For example, the known number of exploding star remnants (super novas) indicates an age of the universe that is only some six thousand years old. This relatively youthful age of our universe is seemingly corroborated by the Faint Sun Paradox and the decomposition of comets orbiting the sun. The magnetic decay of the earth's north and south poles sets up a trajectory that would make it impossible for our earth to be more than 10 thousand years old--another fact seemingly corroborated by the amount of mud accumulated on the sea floor and the recent discovery of T. Rex soft dinosaur tissue and its accompanying DNA existence.

So to insist on some Neanderthals as our evolutionary ancestors would seem to be wildly precipitous in light of these other age determination methods. 

Ancient histories by pagan Romans and Greeks couples with medieval histories attest to an earth that was peopled from humans originally from Mesopotamia thereby giving credence to their dispersion on the Plain of Shinar just as the Bible records. Raphael Holinshed states that the first human derived from Japheth populated Europe 200 years after the Great Flood. The History of Rome by Livy traces Italy's foundation to the Trojan defeat in its war against Sparta. And as far as the pre-Flood earth, we can only depend on the Bible for that murky period although other ancient histories testify that Seth's ancestors inhabited Egypt giving rise to the Seti name among its ancient Pharoahs living in the Post-Flood world. The

Bible, along with many pagan peoples' records, also verify that the ancient world existed with human giantism and dramatic longevity. The fossil record certainly verifies that almost every life form we know of today existed in the antidiluvian world in some giant form. At least every year, new fossil remains are turning up recording giant boas, bears, dragon flies, oysters, clams, iguanas, tigers, that existed in that pre-Flood world. There are precious few human fossils but, among them there are remnants of human teeth, skulls and skeletal parts (femurs, tibias, etc.) indicating giant human as well. The best documented example was the Giant of Castelnau but other giants were found in the same Bronze Age grave site in Montpellier, France. Yet skeletal parts of many giants were also discovered in North America and recorded in local newspapers (assuming none of these were hoaxes). 

Our interpretation of history is badly damaged and in need of repair. Anthropology is supposed to be looking for the truth but, perhaps as the late primate specialist, Lord Solly Zukerman, intoned is closer to the fact: "Paleontology is closer to parapsychology that science: (from Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Frontiers of Public and Private Science ) Too bad that those with their feet on the ground and perceptive minds are ridiculed for their logical conclusions regarding our past. But then, who ever believed for a moment that scientific truth was established by the majority opinion?