Do you have evidence to support that finding? What research are you referring to, or Scripture, that shows that there are more generations of man than would fit in 6,000 years?
Hi Ted.
I mentioned this briefly in another post, earlier in this thread. (Feb. 20th, 8:37 am, or thereabouts. I'd link to it but the forum won't let me until I have 50 posts.
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For years, I believed in a literal reading of Genesis 1-3. And the more I studied history and prehistory, the more I realized it couldn't be literal. There were simply too many generations of man to fit in between now and the Flood, or between now and Adam.
I've studied Egyptian chronology extensively, and although I did see evidence for somewhat overlapping parts of the conventional chronology -- for instance, the 21st and 22nd dynasties of ancient Egypt actually overlapped by about 150 years, rather than being consecutive -- what I found was that not only was there no evidence of a Flood to interrupt their history, either written or in the geological record, the people who settled in Egypt originally migrated from somewhere else. Specifically, the area of Nabta Playa, which they vistited nomadically for several thousand years before settling down for about a thousand, after which they migrated into Egypt. Before that, they lived in northeast Africa, where pottery (!) was discovered dating back to about 7000 to 8000 BCE, with much of the same motifs that we find later in predynastic and dynastic Egypt.
After researching that, I spent time studying various methods of scientific dating. Carbon-14, etc., etc. What I learned there was that, although they could be off by a certain amount, they weren't likely to be off by an order of magnitude. Also, since objects could be dated using multiple methods *that all generally agreed with each other*, the chance of all of those methods giving a false result became vanishingly small.
I also studied climate change and how it affected migrations during man's prehistory. But I digress.
Anyway, so I was left with a history and prehistory of man that goes back at least 10,000 years. But, I also determined that there are unlikely to be any generational gaps in the genealogies in Genesis. Which means...man was around before Adam and Eve.
And so I was forced, by what I studied, to confront the possibility of a non-literal Genesis.
I have several sources for this.
Pharaohs and Kings: A Biblical Quest by David Rohl. He's the one who demonstrated the overlapping 21st and 22nd Egyptian dynasties.
Genesis of the Pharaohs by Toby Wilkinson. This one shows that prior to about 3500 BCE, the Sahara desert was actually a savannah (grassland). It had been slowly drying out for several thousand years. This book describes the rock art evidence which shows that the people at Nabta Playa were the precursors of those who settled in Egypt.
Egypt: Image of Heaven by Willem Zitman. This one is partly pseudoscience, but one of the things it *does* mention that I haven't seen written about in another book is pottery discovered at prehistoric Lake Chad, in the Air Mountains (page 186) dating to 7500 BCE. It also ties together that pottery and associated rock art with the people who later settled in Egypt.
Chonometric Dating in Archaeology by R.E. Taylor and Martin J. Aitken. This one examines various scientific dating techniques to show how scientists use them, and how their accuracy is measured, especially when compared with one another. You can get this one through interlibrary loan, since it's rather expensive to buy outright.
I mainly looked at this one above after looking at sites like Answers in Genesis, and realized that although articles on AIG that dismissed scientific dating techniques often *sounded* well-researched, they often had gaping logic holes in them. Note that in my college years, I gleefully dissected books like Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, pointing out all of the logic holes in it -- mostly to people who wouldn't listen and just for the sake of argument. (Not behavior I'm particularly proud of today, but whatever.) So I play no favorites when it comes to finding logic holes in theories.
After the Ice by Steven Mithen. This was more of an overview of human migration patterns after the end of the last Ice Age.
Yes, I realize that the common explanation for the evidence for the Ice Age is Noah's Flood, but I looked at that evidence too (I own The Genesis Flood by John C Whitcomb and Henry M Morris) and eventually found it wanting. In particular, when Sir Leonard Woolley excavated Ur in the 1920's, he found a "flood" layer dating back to 3500 BC. There were similar flood layers at other ancient sites in Mesopotamia, but at different depths -- meaning, they were from floods that had occurred at different times. I would expect one gigantic flood layer if Noah's Flood were global, not lots of local floods which occurred at different times. So although The Genesis Flood book documents a lot of evidence that *could* be construed as pointing to a global flood, their analysis isn't systematic, first of all, and it does not prove that a global flood occurred beyond all reasonable doubt because there are other ways to interpret that evidence. They also leave out any conflicting evidence.
So basically, the people who would later become the Egyptians lived in North Africa originally, around 7500 BCE, then when the climate changed, migrated eastward along a narrow stretch of land that wasn't desert (at the time) to the area of Nabta Playa, then after that, when the Sahara began drying out into a desert, migrated into Egypt itself and mingled with native peoples who were already there.
That's about 10,000 years of human history and prehistory. Egypt has TONS of different genealogical records. Some covering priestly lineages, some covering king lists, etc. They can be analyzed for accuracy (see the spelled out links below, among many others) and it can be amply demonstrated that Egyptian history goes back to 3100 BC with pretty much no interruptions (for a flood or anything else).
See ggreenberg dot tripod dot com slash ancientne slash manetho1 dot html. You can also read manetho2 dot html and manetho3 dot html. These show that Manetho's king list is actually fairly accurate, it's just that the copies which survive are rather mangled in places because the copyists didn't always understand what they were copying.
At the very least, we have all of Egyptian history, a period of at least a few hundred years prior to the start of Egyptian history when we have evidence of man's existence there, prior to any written documents, then evidence of occupation before that at Nabta Playa for a looong period of time. At the very least, it stretches to before 4,000 BC, so we're past the date, according to Ussher's chronology, at which Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden would've been there.
Damon
