How to make the Bible and Science match...a very original view

KomatiiteBIF said:

I'll see if I can find a complete online version of your books. Sometimes just having availability goes a long way. If your book were electronically available, like a scanned version, then I may be able to find or read it. I'll look on Google.

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my email is gbobmort aT gmail.com. Send me an email and I will send you a drop box invite. Google only shows part of it. I am trying to get to google books to tell them to just open it all up, but being sick has slowed me down.

PaulCyp1 said:

Matching "observation" to the Bible obviously means matching your own personal interpretations of your own personal observations to your own personal interpretations of the Bible. And the chances of error in that system is virtually 100%. Which is why Jesus never gave us a book.

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I presume you consider yourself exempt from the above 'rule' and your interp is pristine clean.Unless you can prove that someone's interpretation is pristine, then the following happens. If you are correct, then you have proved that the biblical interpretation is nothing more than interpersonal reletavism.

He gave us a Church, and promised that one Church "The Holy Spirit will guide you into all truth", and "Whatsoever you bind upon Earth is bound in Heaven", and "He who hears you hears Me". That is the only source of truth He provided for us. It is only through His Church that we have access to the truth of His teaching, and access to the truths contained in the collection of its writings it compiled into a book. Which is why those who seek truth in His Church have remained on in belief, one in faith, one in biblical understanding for 2,000 years, while those who have abandoned His Church and attempted to find truth in "the Bible alone" have fragmented into thousands of conflicting manmade denominations teaching thousands of contradictory beliefs, in just a few hundred years. Truth cannot contradict truth, so contradictory beliefs mean false beliefs.

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Given that I consider Jesus Christ as my lord and savior, the only one through whom salvation is possible, and I believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus, I consider myself part of the church, so what do you know about me that makes you think I am not part of the church?

Secondly, Christians have obviously not remained in 'one belief, one faith, and one in biblical understanding for 2000 years. This can only be true if you define christianity as those who hold your exact belief sets. That is a very interesting position. Glad I don't have the gall to hold that view.

Take care my brother.

How God Controls Evolution

Glenn R. Morton May 14, 2020

edited to add: because of the time frame I have Adam and Eve live, evolution is a necessity thus I need to explain how God controls evolution.

On Biologos, a person was concerned with what the point of God was in the face of evolution. He had become convinced evolution was real, but while reading Francis Collin's book, in spite of Collins constantly saying God was the creator, Collins never connected God with something which influenced the course of evolution. He later admired that he felt that such a God was useless. My guess is it is this 'separate magisteria' idea first proposed by atheist Stephen Jay Gould, and accepted by Collins which causes the discomfort.

""In my view, there is no conflict in being a rigorous scientist and a person who believes in a God who takes a personal interest in each one of us. Science's domain is to explore nature. God's domain is in the spiritual world, a realm not possible to explore with the tools and language of science. It must be examined with the heart, the mind, and the soul-and the mind must find a way to embrace both realms."" Francis Collins, The Language of God, (New York: Free Press, 2006), p.6

This isolates God from anything we modern people think of as real. God is a ghost of whom we can have no evidence. This whole blog is dedicated to opposing that view and showing the God is in charge of both scientific data and theological data. Collin's view makes God a harmless being who can't engage in Nature at all. I don't believe our God is that powerless.

The Intelligent Design movement thinks only in terms of either godless randomness or a designer being the two options.

" Given the existence of a designer ready and willing to do the work, why should we suppose that random mutations and natural selection are responsible for such marvels of engineering as the eye and the wing?" ~ Phillip E. Johnson, "Evoution as Dogma: The Establishment of Naturalism" First Things, October 1990, p. 18

I say, 'why not both design and randomness'? Design by use of randomness. That is what this page will discuss.

Indeed, many young-earthers feel the same way about evolution because of the randomness, feeling that God can't control the randomness.

"Sproul also warns that "if chance exists in any size, shape or form, God cannot exist. The two are mutually exclusive. If chance existed, it would destroy God's sovereignty. If God is not sovereign, he is not God. If he is not God, he simply is not. If chance is, God is not. If God is, chance is not." Hank Hanegraaff, The Face that Demonstrates the Farce of Evolution, (Nashville: Word Publishing co., 1998), p. 61

I am opposed to this view as well. Our God is greater than randomness. Randomness which is subject to rules, or limitations is quite controllable. Christians have taken the wrong approach to randomness. Below is how randomness is God can control random evolution.

We all know that some DNA mutations, maybe lots of them, result in the death of the individual. This means that there are ‘areas of nonviablity’ in what is called the phase space of DNA. The phase space is a massively multidimentional space where the number of axes is the number of base pairs. Each axis has 4 possible locations, for A,G, C, T. This space represented all possibilities for for a DNA molecule f that length. It is just a Euclidian space with several billion dimensions. Below is what such a space looks like for a 3 base pair long DNA.






Now, I also read Collin’s book and thought that in that book, God was a useless add on–he served no purpose except as word filler and I agree, Collins provides no mechanism by which God can control evolution and the random mutations that take place. But there is a way to view it where God controls the path.




Consider the Hilbert space above and lets draw walls around those nonviable mutations . I think we would end up with something like a cave system shown below, where one can randomly walk in any direction except into the walls. Given enough time, a randomly walk would fill the entire cave system.

A random walk by a dot starting anywhere in the cave will eventually be at every point in the cave. (look it up) Now consider a cloud of DNA patterns which represent a species. As the members randomly mutate they will fill the spaces which are viable sequences of DNA.When they go down different passage ways, they create two different species and it happens randomly but under God's control of the DNA phase space. In this way God controls the randomness and ensures that we would evolve.

Here are three times steps of what I think happens. Let's say life starts at the bottom of this system and let the random walk begin.







At the time above life has filled a different gallery in the cave system, meaning a new species has arisen, and the original life has gone extinct. The original cavern where life began is empty.

Let's move to one more step in time.


Now we have several galleries filled with different species. I think the reader gets the idea of how I believe God controlled evolution, indeed, made it totally deterministic via random mutations, otherwise known as a random walk. This view makes God a real player in evolution and not a useless mantra we give lip service to every four pages in our book.

In the above way, God can control what happens in random evolution and ensure that eventually we would evolve. It is design, but not of the kind the ID movement prefers. .

Religion among archaic hominids. part 1
By Glenn R. Morton March 2020..

I have long advocated for a very old Adam, older than any other writer so far as I can determine. The reason for this is that there is much evidence of religion, among the Neanderthals. Religion equates to evidence of spirituality-even a false religion shows spirituality exists. In this post, we will look at evidence of religion among the Neanderthals. After this post, I will show the evidence for religion among H. erectus Soon we will look at brain size and the curses given to Adam and Eve. We will also cover evidence of language among the erectines. Religion requires language. Then we will look at activities that would appear to require language. Religion requires words to describe concepts about abstract and symbolic objects like God., Then we will look at the genetics problem for Adam and how far back we must place an individual Adam and Eve. We then look at the problem faced by paleontology and its relation to when the earliest hominid or erectus lived and the implications for how far back Adam and Eve might live. (disclosure, some of this comes from old web pages of mine). And after we finish looking at when Adam lived, I will post a historical reading of Genesis 2-3, but this anthropological work must come first or the reader won't see why what I suggest is necessary to match the data both of science and of the Scripture.

How do we determine some prehistoric group was religious? The straightforward answer to that question is that they do things we do. The oldest temple in the world dates to 9000 BC, 11,000 years ago, long before civilization arose. It is Gobekli Tepi where stone age people built a beautiful circular temple with dazzling carvings.1 This is like some of our temples. Thus we infer religiosity to the people in Gobekli Tepi. Some prehistoric societies made female figurines, and today some religions do that as well, as part of their religious observance. We recognize spirituality by animal and human sacrifice, and behaviors similar to varied religious practices of historical people.

Worshipping Bears: Religion Among the Neanderthals

It is a given that all humans alive today are capable of engaging in religion even though some chose not to. It does appear that even the majority of atheists and agnostics believe in something supernatural or irrational. "The UK-based Understanding Unbelief project interviewed thousands of self-identified atheists and agnostics from six countries – Brazil, China, Denmark, Japan, US and UK. It found that despite their godlessness, a majority believe in at least one supernatural phenomenon or entity."

"Among atheists in the UK, for example, about 12 per cent believe in reincarnation and nearly 20 per cent life after death. All told, 71 per cent of atheists hold one or more such beliefs; for agnostics the figure is 92 per cent. Atheists and agnostics comprise about 37 per cent of the UK population, so when combined with religious people, that means a large majority of the general population believe in the supernatural."2

Because religion is widespread in the world and almost no one will deny it to modern H. sapiens, we will not review the abundance of evidence for religion among early modern humans but will go immediately to religion among the Neanderthals. The reason for this is that modern humans and Neanderthals split into two subpopulations about 800,000 to a million years ago. If both groups can engage in religion, then it implies that their common ancestor that long ago could also engage in religion. Unless of course, one believes in two Adams, one Neanderthal and one sapiens. Since I have never heard anyone suggest two Adams, I think we can rule that out.

I must start with a brief description of the circumpolar bear cult that modern humans engaged in.

"Using the Ainu of Japan as an example, the process usually takes about 2 years. After hunters capture a bear cub, the cub is raised by the village for about a year and a half. Some writers have observed Ainu women nursing baby bears while listening to missionaries speaking. The bear is beloved in the village and becomes a member of the village. Just before the Ainu move to their summer settlement they sacrifice the bear, descriptions of the ceremony apparently varied from village to village. Here is one description."

"Among the Sakhalin Ainu, after the bear is taken out of the bear house it is killed with two pointed arrows (fig. 33.4), whereas the Hokkaido Ainu use blunt arrows (heper-ay) before critically wounding the bear with pointed arrows; they then strangle the bear between two logs. Male elders skin and dress the bear, which is then placed in front of the altar (nusa) where treasures are hung (fig. 33.5). After preliminary feasting outside at the altar, the Ainu bring the dissected bear into the house through the sacred window and continue their feast. Among the Hokkaido Ainu, the ceremony ends when the skull of the bear is placed on the nusa outside the house on a pole decorated with naw; the elder recites a farewell prayer while shooting an arrow toward the eastern sky, an act that signifies the departure of the deity. The Sakhalin Ainu take the bear skull, dressed in ritual wood shavings, and the bones, eyes, and penis (if a male) to a sacred pile in the mountains. They also sacrifice two carefully chosen dogs, which are considered to be servant-messengers to the bear deities. (For the Hokkaido Ainu bear ceremony, see Munro's film and Kitagawa [19611 for Sakhalin, see Pilsudski [1915] and Ohnuki-Tterney [1974: 90-97])".

"Although often mistaken as cruel by outsiders, the bear ceremony is a ritual whereby the Ainu express their utmost respect to their deity, and its paramount significance is a sacred act. For the Sakhalin Ainui, the bear is not important as a food source: like other hunting societies that do not regularly eat their most prestigious big game-the !Kung San of the Kalahari Desert, for instance, do not regularly eat giraffe Ainu rarely eat bear meat, and the bear ceremony is held only once a year, if that. Even so, Ainu men and women find bear meat exquisite, unparalleled by any other food."3

Ivar Lissner has a picture in his book of another way the bear was killed.4


Lissner described the Ainu beliefs. After the ritual slaying of the bear, many tribes collected the skulls of sacrificed bears and stacked them neatly in piles or neatly hung them in trees. When a bear is stripped of his hide, he looks similar to a man, so to the Ainu and maybe other bear cult tribes, the bear is a man masquerading as a bear and thus is an intermediary between them and heaven. When the bear is killed, the men eat the meat raw and drink the blood[GRM: shades of the Lords supper] and then his blood is used to anoint the hunters for the purpose of giving them success in hunting. It is believed that the bear's spirit becomes a guardian for the tribe. The Ainu use the same word for the bear's guardian spirit as they do for the North Star, so it seems that the association of the constellation of the little bear with the Pole Star goes far back in time.

But what of the Neanderthals? There are implications of religious beliefs held by Neanderthals in the collections of bear skulls found in their caves. The mere preservation of skulls need not suggest anything religious, but in some cases special attention was given to their placement, as was noted with some Siberian tribes. In one Neanderthal cave, five bear skulls were found in niches in the cave wall. The skulls of several cave bears in a group have been found surrounded by built-up stone walls, with some skulls having little stones placed around them, while others were set out on slabs.

"All this suggests some kind of bear cult, like that practiced until quite recently by the Chippewa and other North American Indians. After a Chippewa hunter had killed a bear, he would cut off the head, which was then decorated with beads and ribbons (in the period after contact with Europeans). Some tobacco was placed before its nose. The hunter would then make a little speech, apologizing to the bear for having had to kill it. Bear skulls were preserved and hung up on trees so that dogs and wolves could not get at them. Bear ceremonialism of this and related kinds had a wide circumpolar distribution--from the Great Lakes to the Ainu of northern Japan through various Siberian tribes, such as the Ostyaks and the Orochi, to the Finns and Lapps of Scandinavia. So wide a distribution of this trait, associated as it was with other apparently very early circumpolar traits, suggests great age. It is possible, therefore, that some aspects of this bear ceremonialism go back to Middle Paleolithic times."5

Middle Paleolithic times are Neanderthal times. Since we find similar things among the Neanderthals, we might very well be dealing with an 175,000 year old religion! Here is more data.

"All Mousterian burials are associated with living floors, except Regourdou, where the burial was placed in a sort of bear sanctuary in Layer IV, which was very elaborately constructed but showed no traces of regular habitation."6

An amazing statement. What is the evidence for this sanctuary?

"Ten years earlier, another French archaeologist discovered at the 80,000-year-old site of Regourdou what seemed to have been the scene of a bear cult. The carefully arranged bones of a brown bear had been placed in a stone-lined pit, along with the skeleton of a young adult Neandertal."7

Regourdou is compared with Drachenloch. Campbell and Loy write:

"The most famous example of what has been claimed to be Neandertal Hunting magic is the so-called bear cult. It came to light when a German archaeologist, Emil Bachler, excavated the cave of Drachenloch between 1917 and 1923. Located 8,000 ft (2,400 m) up in the Swiss Alps, this 'lair of the dragons' tunnels deep into a mountainside. The front part of the cave, Bachler's work made clear, served as an occasional dwelling place for Neandertals. Farther back, Bachler found a cubical chest made of stones and measuring approximately 3.25 ft (1 m) on a side. The top of the chest was covered by a massive slab of stone. Inside were seven bear skulls, all apparently arranged with their muzzles facing the cave entrance. Still deeper in the cave were six bear skulls, seemingly set in niches along the walls. The Drachenloch find is not unique. At Regourdou in southern France, a rectangular pit, covered by a flat stone weighing nearly a ton, held the bones of more than 20 bears."8

At Wildenmannlisloch we have a possible ceremonial figure, the Pseudo-Venus.

"How for instance can we to explain the discovery, in a carefully protected niche in one of the chambers of the Wildenmannlisloch, of a small figure resembling a female sculpture? Made out of the lower jaw of a cave bear, it may be either an artifact or a freak of nature. One thing is certain: the flattened planes of its 'head' were rubbed smooth by some human agency; perhaps, as Emil Bachler suggests, because the bone was originally used as an instrument for smoothing animal skins. This may be the reason why certain portions of the so-called 'pseudo-Venus' appear to have been polished. Bachler is of the opinion that the figure came into being accidentally, as a result of continual friction due to use, not as a deliberate attempt to reproduce the shape of the human head. I have examined the figure closely. The closed eyes, delicate mouth, small forehead, slim neck and back all convey an impression of careful workmanship. A second 'Venus' discovered in the same hiding place has smooth patches but no recognizable head. "Even if the pseudo-Venus was not actually made by Stone-Age man, the cave dweller must have noticed its resemblance to the figure of a girl. Why else would he have put it to one side and preserved it so carefully? The prehistorian Friedrich Behn in his book Vorgeschichte Europas, asserts that the people of the Neanderthalian race were lacking in any form of artistic impulse. The celebrated Venus statuettes of the Stone Age belong to the Aurignacian, a far later period. The pseudo-Venus may, therefore, be unique in its period, the earliest portrayal of the human figure known to have been made, or at least recognized as such, by man. It is probably the most remarkable evidence of prehistoric activity or comprehension in the world. Between four and five inches tall the Venus was found on October 21, 1926, and reposes today in the Heimatmuseum at Saint Gallen, a Paleolithic Sleeping Beauty waiting to rejoice the eye of the occasional visitor."9

As an aside, today the Neanderthals are believed to have engaged in cave painting 64,000 years ago, and there may be a second Neanderthal painting--people didn't want the initial results checked!

World's Oldest Cave Art Found—Made by Neanderthals?

and

"Pike is an affable guy with enough hair for four people. He's been collaborating with Zilhao and Dirk Hoffmann of the Max Planck Institute since 2005. Unfortunately, governmental agencies won't always collaborate with them. Six years ago, they were enlisted by archaeologist Michel Lorblanchet to date a series of red cave blotches in south-central France. Based on stylistic comparisons, Gallic researchers had estimated the art to be from 25,000 to 35,000 years ago, a period seemingly brimming with sapiens. The preliminary results from Pike's U-Th dating gave a very early minimum age of 74,000 years ago, meaning the premature Matisses likely could have been Neanderthals."
Could Neanderthals Create Art? | Science | Smithsonian Magazine


When Pike's team asked permission to return to the site for verification, the French authorities issued a regulation that banned sampling of calcite for uranium-series dating. Outraged, Zilhao hasn't set foot in France since. 'It seems that most of our critics are French scholars,' muses Pike. 'They really don't like the fact that Neanderthals painted.'" Could Neanderthals Create Art? | Science | Smithsonian Magazine






The pseudovenus is reminiscent of what some Siberian tribes do today. "The strange little wooden figures which the Orochi and Manega carve on trees or occasionally display on wooden altars are effigies of a forest spirit whom they call Bainaca ."10

At Salzenhole and Petershohle we have:

"In the Salzofenhohle, more than six thousand feet up in the Totes Gebirge not far from Aussee in Austria, the paleontologist and paleobiologist Kurt Ehrenberg found three cave bears' skulls which had been accurately ringed with stones. In all three cases, charcoal remains were discovered beside or beneath the skulls. In Petershohle, bears' skulls had been carefully deposited in small holes and niches. In a cupboard-like recess in the rock wall, four feet above the floor of the cave, five skulls, two femurs and a humerus were found all belonging to cave bears. The skulls fell to pieces in the diggers' hands during removal. The man responsible for exploring the Petershohle, K. Hormann, declared: 'These skeletal remains could not have got up there or in there by any natural means.' It seems probable therefore that they were a conscious committal to eternity and a deliberate sacrifice, not a fortuitous act but a calculated gesture toward an exalted and timeless power."11

It is quite likely that Neanderthals engaged in a religion similar to that of the Chippewa, the Finns, the Ainu and other circum-polar people today. We may actually have an example of a religion with an age of more than 176,000 years.

References

1. Klaus Schmidt, Göbekli Tepe – the Stone Age Sanctuaries. New results of ongoing excavations with a special focus on sculptures and high reliefs" Documenta Praehistorica XXXVII (2010), p. 239-256.
2.Graham Lawton, "Most Atheists Believe in the Supernatural," New Scientist, June 8, 2019, p. 14
3.Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko, Ainu Sociality Ainu: Spirit of a Northern People, (ed. By William W. Fitzhugh and Chisato O. Dubreuil, (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1999), p. 241-242
4. Ivar Lissner, 1961, Man, God and Magic, (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons), figure 87 between pp 224-225
5.Barnouw,Victor, An Introduction to Anthropology: Physical Anthropology and Archaeology, Vol. 1, (Homewood, Illinois: The Dorsey Press, 1982) p. 156-157
6 Smirnov, Yuri, "Intentional Human Burial: Middle Paleolithic (Last Glaciation) Beginnings," Journal of World Prehistory, 3:2(1989), pp 199-233, p. 220)
7.Shreeve, James, The Neandertal Enigma (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1995), p. 52
8.Campbell, Bernard G. and James D. Loy, 1996 Humankind Emerging, (New York: HarperCollins), , p. 441)
9.Ivar Lissner, 1961, Man, God and Magic, (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons),p. 189-191
10.Ibid., p. 161
11.Ibid., p. 191-192

Religion among the archaic hominids part 2
Glenn R. Morton March 2020

One of the things in Anthropology that bothers me is that if evidence of some activity among modern humans is discovered, it is automatically accepted, but if it is associated with Neanderthals, far too many automatically reject it. They also say the above sites are old, excavated prior to more modern techniques and don't prove evidence of Neanderthal religion. But they have trouble saying that about the Neanderthal altar found at Bruniquel during modern times, using modern excavation techniques and uranium dated in 2016.

At Bruniquel, France, archeologists have excavated a squarish stone structure dating to 176,000 years ago. The original article only says it is older than 47,600 years,so until I wrote this, I had been unaware of the new dating. The new dating makes this an extremely important religious site. In this cave Neanderthals built a structure in which they burned a bear. Here is a picture of the structure, made of fallen stalactites. That this is a structure made by man is clear because random falling of stalactites wouldn't cause this arrangement. Falling stalacties would land randomly.



Bednarik (1996, p. 104) writes:

"The cave of Bruniquel in southern France has just produced fascinating new evidence. Several hundred metres in from the cave entrance, a stone structure has been discovered. It is quadrilineal, measures four by five metres and has been constructed from pieces of stalagmite and stalactite. A burnt fragment of a bear bone found in it was radiocarbon analysed, yielding a 'date' of greater than 47 600 years BP. This suggests that the structure is the work of Neanderthals. It is located in complete darkness, which proves that the people who ventured so deep into the large cave system had reliable lighting and had the confidence to explore such depths. Bruniquel is one of several French caves that became closed subsequent to their Pleistocene use, but were artificially opened this century." "This appears to have been the ritual sacrifice of a bear. It is also the first proof that man went deep into caves long before they painted the walls."12

Work stopped at Bruniquel for some time because the lead anthropologist died. Then in 2016 new work was done which makes Bruniquel an even more remarkable site and almost conclusive of religion among the Neanderthals. The radiocarbon date obtained in the 1990s had only said the site was older than 47, 600 years, but didn't say how old. In 2016, Jacques Jaubert and a large team dated the structure by uranium dating. They say:

"Uranium-series dating of stalagmite regrowths on the structures and on burnt bone, combined with the dating of stalagmite tips in the structures, give a reliable and replicated age of 176.5 thousand years (±2.1 thousand years), making these edifices among the oldest known well-dated constructions made by humans. Their presence at 336 metres from the entrance of the cave indicates that humans from this period had already mastered the underground environment, which can be considered a major step in human modernity."13

So the oldest well dated construction is of a site where bears were burned, deep in a dark cave. It was made by Neanderthals. At such an old date, there were no modern humans in Europe who could have constructed this thing. This is a bear sacrifice by Neanderthals.

Modern humans also worship in caves, so this is a very human type of activity. Even early Christians worshipped in a cave:

"He described a circular worship area with stone seats separated from a living area that had a long tunnel leading to a source of water and said the early Christians hid there from persecution. "14

Furthermore, the Maya often made sacrifices in deep dark hard-to-get-to-areas of caves:

"Historical and ethnographic accounts have long noted that Maya groups, including those still in existence, regularly conduct ritual activities in caves near their communities. Maya religion focuses strongly on the earth, Brady asserts. Caves, often in conjunction with mountains and water, embody the earth's fundamental power and lie at the center of a four-cornered universe. Maya caves frequently contain cenotes, openings to underground water sources that further establish the cave's sacred status." 15

One of the most famous of these Maya sites is Actun Tunichil Muknal where a maiden was sacrificed. To get to this Maya site requires a mile long trek including hiking, wading, and underwater swiming. They didn't go there because it was easy to get to, just like at Bruniquel.

"The cathedral-like ceiling is gigantic and glistens from the cave crystals. Enormous stalactites hang from the ceilings connecting to stalagmites creating giant pillars. The cave contains all shapes and sizes of pottery- even as big as beach balls. Archaeologist found remains such as nuts, seeds and spices inside the pots. Ceramics inside the cave were marked with kill holes indicating that they were used specifically for ceremonial purposes. “The Monkey Pot” is one of the four found in all of Central America".

"At the end of the highest chamber lies the magnificent “Crystal Maiden”. The skeleton of a 20 year old Mayan woman who’s death was believed to be a great sacrifice to appease the rain gods. This skeleton is covered in calcium carbonated crystals from the river flooding and receding over time. The magnificent maiden has drawn thousands to this sacred cave."16

To me it seems inescapable that Bruniquel is a Neanderthal religious site. It seems silly to think they went 336 meters, 1000 feet, into a dark cave just to barbeque the bear for dinner. Those who want to exclude Neanderthals from humanity's circle can only do so by totally ignoring things like Bruniquel. The conclusion I draw here is that if Neanderthals were ritually sacrificing bears 176 thousand years ago, Thus, to say they couldn't do it at Drachenloch, Regardou, Petershohle, Wilddmannlisloch and other sites at 80,000 years ago is illogical. The possibility that Neanderthals passed their bear cult religion to modern humans is a quite fascinating and quite likely idea. The circumpolar bear cult may be at least 176,000 years old.

Further evidence of Neanderthal religion comes from Nahr Ibrahim. At Nahr Ibrahim, Lebanon, Neanderthals ritually sacrificed a deer. Marshack writes:

"In the Mousterian cave shelter of Nahr Ibrahim in Lebanon the bones of a fallow deer (Dama mesopotamia) were gathered in a pile and topped by the skull cap. Many of the bones were unbroken and still articulated. Around the animal were bits of red ochre. While red ochre was common in the area and so may have been introduced inadvertently, the arrangement of the largely unbroken bones suggests a ritual use of parts of the animal."17

The ochre was proven to have been brought in from elsewhere by the discoverer (Solecki, 1982). This site is greater than 40,000 years old and so is likely Neanderthal.

Religion among the Erectines.

I am only going to present one example of erectine religion. It is so good, and so modern, it is hard for me to see this not being a religious altar. Imagine yourself in a jungle and you enter a currently deserted village, but you know people have lived here maybe last week. You see a big stone in the middle of the village and it is flanked on each side by a bison or cow horn. At the foot of the big stone is a broken human skull. Would you think you have stumbled into a people with a religion involving human sacrifice? I would say this is the theme of Indiana Jone's movies--human sacrifice and cannibalism. If you don't think this is evidence of relition, you are very rare and maybe a bit suicidal. Most people will recognize the religious significance of such a setting, turn around and flee as rapidly as possible. Motifs like this have been used in movies for a century because the movie makers know that the viewers will recognize the symbolism.

There is just such an altar found at Bilzingsleben, Germany, made by H erectus. The excavators, Dietrich and Ursula Mania have found a 27-foot-diameter paved area that they say was used for "special cultural activities"18

Gore writes:

"But Mania's most intriguing find lies under a protective shed. As he opens the door sunlight illuminates a cluster of smooth stones and pieces of bone that he believes were arranged by humans to pave a 27-foot-wide circle. 'They intentionally paved this area for cultural activities,' says Mania. 'We found here a large anvil of quartzite set between the horns of a huge bison, near it were fractured human skulls.'"19

Exactly what I described above. I would contend that the symbolism here, if found in a modern village, would be enough to cause one to turn and flee for his life. Such an arrangement of objects would immediately be interpreted as evidence of religion, and a hostile religion at that. Bilzingsleben dates to around 425,000 years ago. Not only that, it was an H. erectus skulls found there at the foot of the anvil stone.

references

12. Balter, Michael, 1996, "Cave Structure Boosts Neandertal Image", Science, 271, p. 449
13. Jacques Jaubert, et al, "Early Neanderthal Constructions Deep in Bruniquel Cave in Southwestern France", Nature volume 534, pages 111-114. p111.
14 Is this Christianity's FIRST church? " Daily Mail, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1025558/Is-Christianitys-FIRST-church-Cave-70-beloved-God-worshipped-Christ-alive-found.html
15.Bruce Bower, "Sacred Secrets of the Caves," Science News, 153(January 24, 1998):56-58, p. 56
16 https://www.belizeatmcave.com/
17.Alexander Marshack, , 1990 "Early Hominid Symbol and Evolution of the Human Capacity," in Paul Mellars, The Emergence of Modern Humans, (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1990), pp 457-498 p. 481
18.Mania D., and U. Mania and E. Vlcek, 1994. "Latest Finds of Skull Remains of Homo erectus from Bilzingsleben (Thuringia)", Naturwissenschaften, 81,,1994, p. 124; See also Mania, Dietrich and Ursula Mania, 1988. "Deliberate Engravings on Bone Artefacts of Homo Erectus," Rock Art Research 5:2: 91-107, p. 92.
19. Gore, Rick 1997. "The First Europeans," National Geographic, July, p. 96-113, p. 110.
20. Johanson, Donald and James Shreeve, Lucy's Child, (New York: William Morrow and Co., Inc., 1989), p. 221
21. See Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess, HarperSanFrancisco, 1989). 22. Appenzeller, Tim, “Art: Evolution or Revolution?”, Science 282(Nov 20, 1998),, p. 1451-1452
23. see M. D. Gvozdover, "The Typology of Female Figurines of the Kostenki Paleolithic Culture," Soviet Anthropology and Archeology, Spring 1989, p. 57, Voprosy antropologii, 75:1985, pp 27-66, 24. Marshack, Alexander, "The Berekhat Ram Figurine: A Late Acheulian Carving from the Middle East," Antiquity 71(1997), p. 328
25. Bednarik, Robert G., “The Earliest Evidence of Palaeolart,” Rock Art Research, 20(2003):2:89-135, p. 96
26 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ossuary
27. Dean Falk, Braindance,(New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1992)p. 181-182
28..Mead, Simon, et al, “Balancing Selection at the Prion Protein Gene Consistent with Prehistoric Kurulike Epidemics,” Science, 300(2003):640-643,, p. 640
29. Ibid., p. 643
30. Bruce Bowen, “Ancestral Cut-ups,” Science News, 155(1999):315
31. Dean Falk, Braindance,(New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1992), p. 183
32 Silvia M. Bello , Simon A. Parfitt, and Chris B. Stringer, "Earliest Directly-Dated Human Skull-Cups" PLOS One, February 16, 2011, https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0017026
33. George L Murphy, Roads to Paradise and Perdition: Christ, Evolution, and Original Sin, Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, June 2006, p. 114

I’m at the ER thinking they are going to hospitalize me. When I get out, I will continue.

thanks Runner for your comments. Before I get to them I want to tell a bit about my hospitalization iI mentioned a couple of days ago--they thought I had covid, but it seems that it is likely the cancer comeing to see me--to kill me. I sent this out to my kids this morning after I woke up, still weak and nothing really fixed from the hospital visit. For those who don't know, I have outlived 3 prognostications of my death from the cancer I have, the first of which was 2005. I am an outlier's outlier on the statistical charts. I should not be here, but eventually we all owe a death and will march through that famed valley. But I had a praise this morning. I sent this to my family:


If one isn’t looking for God’s comfort, one will never see it. I have mentioned to some of you how irritating it is when I get in my car and my phone starts playing that free U2 album with a song that says, ‘you have a face that’s been saved from beauty’. This is background.

Yesterday my covid doctor told me that my cancer doctor here had nothing more to offer me for my cancer. As I contemplated ‘being on my own now’, and looking at the long walk to get the newspaper, I decided to drive to the end of my driveway to get the paper (lazy I know but safer). When I got into the car, instead of that irritating U2 song, the song that came up was Andrew Peterson’s “Darkness Before the Dawn” which never ever comes on when I get in the car—wish it did. This morning it did. And in that small thing was God’s comfort—the lyrics, especially this part

So I'm waiting for the King
To come galloping out of the clouds while the angel armies sing
He's gonna gather His people in the shadow of His wings
And I'm gonna raise my voice with the song of the redeemed
'Cause all this darkness is a small and passing thing

This is the storm, this is the storm
The storm before the calm
This is the pain, the pain before the balm
This is the cold, the cold
It's the cold before the warm
These are the tears, the tears before the song
This is the dark
Sometimes all I see is this darkness
Well, can't you feel the darkness
This is the dark before the dawn --copyright Andrew Peterson

Thank you Andrew Peterson.

This is exactly like the cheer up I got in 2016 when, the week the cancer went to my bones & I was a bit bummed, and God showed me how Quantum mechanics demonstrates the immateriality of the soul. God is very good



Let me ask a question of you. Can you point me to a verse that says Adam looked just like you? It isn't in my Bible. Did Jesus say that he only saved people who look like you? How much variation is too much variation. Past generations of Christians didn't think Native Americans were children of Adam.

Since I already know the answer to the above question--that no where does God specify that his plan of salvation is only for those who look like us-- then the question is, how much variation. On Palm Sunday this happened, Luke 19:

39 Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Jesus, “Teacher, rebuke your disciples!”
40 “I tell you,” he replied, “if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.”

We know that God didn't need his disciples to shout praises because he could have made a bunch of stones do that. We humans are not as important as we like to think we are. God doesn't need us, we need him.

Now, Let's look at your 'reconstruction'. No one seems to think about what goes into one of those 'reconstructions', nor how they are biased.

"Some evolutionary exhibits and reconstructions of extinct man have been carried out with the elaboration of details and assumption of omniscience which are not justified by the scientific data on hand. It is absolutely impossible to infer from the human skull the morphological details of the eyes, the ear, the tip of the nose, the lips, the form and distribution of hair and the color of the skin hare and eyes. so that I think the laugh was on the side of the archbishop because the scientists have overreached themselves and gone beyond their evidence." ~ A. E. Hooten, Ape's Men and Morons, (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1937), p. 60 cited in Arthur C. Custance, The Fallacy of Anthropological Reconstructions, Doorway Papers 33, (Ottawa: Privately Published, 1966), p. 4

So, in some sense, your picture, while interesting, is also unscientific. Does the image bearer have to have a certain kind of nose? Eurasian noses are different than African noses. When I lived in China I learned a derogatory for Europeans is 'Da bi zi'. meaning Big nose. And some Europeans do have very big noses. Your picture has a guy will no nose. So what does nose shape or hair have to do with the image of God? Does this guy not deserve salvation because he has werewolf syndrome?



Or does this nose put this child outside the realm of salvation?


Or what about my wife's down syndrome uncle whose intelligence was, well, not very good. Does his lack of intelligence place him outside the plan of salvation. It seems to me that if you post funny looking drawings and say if Adam looks like this then the Bible is false, then it seems you are saying the above examples are oustside the plan of salvation.

I am sorry I was interrupted by a trip to the covid floor of the local hospital, truly a place one doesn't want to go but some of the best people in the world work there. As I will soon show the two curses given to Adam and Eve are only curses if one doesn't already have a big brain. In other words, the curses are the effects of a bigger brain, which implies that Adam and Eve may have looked like your picture presumes. That doesn't make the Bible false, it makes false a bunch of false beliefs about what you think the bible says.

You wrote:

In an effort to make the Flood myth literally true, it seems to me that you are making almost everything else in Genesis false. The descriptions of Adam and Eve and the generations preceding the Noah and the Flood do not in any way describe chimpanzee-sized hominids with chimpanzee-sized brains using tools "similar to those used by modern chimpanzees." They describe reasonably sophisticated humans with fully-formed language capabilities and an established agricultural society. Orrorin tugenesis or any succeeding hominid species for the next several million years would not have been building anything resembling an Ark.

Click to expand...

I would point you to a post showing that brain-size has little to do with intelligence.

You wrote:

Young Earth Creationism is certainly one way to deal with Genesis.

Click to expand...

It is a way to handle Genesis but not via science. I am a former yec and left because nothing matched the scientific data.

The possibility that the first humans were made in God's image at some point by breathing Spirit into an existing hominid species is another.

Click to expand...

Given that there is only one existing hominid species--Homo sapiens, this kinda begs the question as far as I am concerned. I chose an extinct but unspecified hominid species as Adam. I don't say it was the one you pictured (not that that picture is at all correct).

Lastly, one can simply accept that Genesis is mytho-historical and is not (or intended to be) history or science.

Click to expand...

This is accommodationalism. It is interesting to me that the arguments presented by this last camp are the same arguments atheists use to tell us to dis-believe christianity. To me, this is the path the French took in WWII--just hold your hands up in surrender. Secondly, when people say the Bible was not intended to be taken as history or science, they never tell you where they get that idea. Did God talk to them directly and communicate his intentions? This idea that we know God's intention is wholly an invention of the human mind. Neither Genesis, nor God tells us what his intention was. Nor does the human writer tell us what the intention was. The idea that you or anyone else has claim to god's mind about what his intention was in writing these verses is hubris in the extreme.

Before you try to turn tables on me, All I am saying is that Genesis CAN be scientifically true if we chose it to be, and my way offers a path for that. If you think you know what God's intention was and that it was for Genesis not to be taken literaly, then God has spoken to you in a way he never spoke to me. Glad you are that intimate with the mind of God. I am not. I don't know God's intention, but if it is to spin meaningless yarns about a creation that never happened as described, then I would have doubts if he is really a god!

The path I offer is a way to hold to science and to uphold a historical Scripture. If you don't like it or think, as you say, that my view is wholly outside the pale of understanding of Genesis, fine. I don't care. I have run the race I think God set before me. That is all that matters to me.

After 50 years of looking, I finally have a way for Scripture to match modern science---something none of the options you laid out do. I don't want to deny science like the YECs do. I don't want to raise my hands in surrender to the atheist view of Genesis like the accommodationalists do. I want science and a true Bible!

Since the issue of the small brain size came up, this is a good time to talk about the two curses God put on the primal parents :


Eve's curse and brain size extracted from here

Glenn R. Morton April 25,2020

Above I have spent some time defending the big brained scenario for what species Adam and Eve were. Some people might prefer that view. Below, I am going to use a Biblical reason for why I believe Adam and Eve had a brain-size about half our present value or smaller.. At this point I am shifting to look not at the scientific evidence but at the Biblical evidence. I think one of the interesting possible interpretations of Scripture has been totally overlooked for millennia. Most didn't have the scientific knowledge to understand what it said, but for the past 100 years we have and no one seems to have seen it. Both the woman's curse and the man's curse in Genesis 3 involve a future big brain!

Most liberal Christians (defined as not believing there is any scientific/historical information in Genesis 1-4), place Adam within the past 10,000 years. Such a position for Adam makes an utter laughing stock of everything done and said in Genesis 3. That is, assuming they believe Adam was an individual rather than a population. I call this the Johnny-come-lately Adam because he is really too late in time, even by Biblical evidence. Let's look at some of the things Johnny- come-lately Adam is too late for.

Sally-come-lately Eve is too late for pain in childbirth to mean anything.

Pain in Childbirth Genesis 3:16:To the woman He said, “I will greatly multiply Your pain in childbirth," (NASB)

If someone cursed me right now with having trouble walking, it would mean nothing. I already HAVE trouble walking from side effects of a drug trial. Or if they cursed my hair to turn gray when it is already gray, or as a friend said, 'it would be the same as if He cursed you with ugliness." LOL, So, big deal.

That must be how Sally-come-lately Eve felt when God told her she would have increased pain in childbirth. Sally-come-lately Eve would say: "Big Deal. Big Guy! Haven't you heard millennia of screaming women in labor who are cursing what their husbands did to them?" Thus, the curse is no curse at all!

Further Gen 3:20 says Eve was "Mother of all living." Sally-come-lately Eve certainly couldn't have been the mother of all the other women alive with her, 10,000 years ago in the Neolithic. Nor could she be the mother of all living until maybe the last century or two. Why? The other day I spoke about Tasmanians being isolated from the rest of humanity from about 12,000 years to 1642 AD.(1) To say Eve was the mother of all living 10,000 years ago would have been a farce, yet that is what the liberal position on Genesis does to it. It makes everything a farce. Let's go back to looking at the pain in childbirth issue.

Pain in childbirth arises from the size of the baby's head vs the size of the birth canal. Bipedalism requires that the legs be close enough together so that the person can walk without a waddle. But this causes the pelvic opening to be small. Intelligence requires large brains and thus large cranial sizes. These two conflicting features lead to the tight fit of the infant through the birth canal. Wendy Trevathan wrote a book advocating that the problems relating to human deliveries and produced selective pressures which led to the nearly universal human practice of midwifery. Further, the change from the ape style birth to the human style birth required that the large brained infant be born prematurely and spend much of what would be neonatal time outside the womb, increasing the intelligence of the infant, who has a world of sensory perception while the brain is developing.

"The human pattern of pre-and post-natal brain growth and development is very unusual relative both to other mammals and to other primates. At birth, human babies' brains are small--only about 30% of their adult size, as opposed to about 50% in other primates--although their gestation time is long for an animal of their body size. Unlike other living species, humans maintain the pre-natal rate of brain growth for approximately a year after birth, resulting in an unusually large brain size relative to body size."(2)

Basically we are born a year too early. Most other primates with small brains, give birth to infants with brains 1/2 of the adult size, but if humans did that, no woman would be able to walk, or, alternatively no child would survive birth. Thus, human infants are born with brains 1/3 the size of the adult and yet still it is a tight fit through the birth canal.

"A modern human baby, with its large skull, negotiates the birth canal by entering with the head oriented transversely. It then rotates 90 degrees into a sagittal position before exiting the canal facing the sacrum, that is, with its back toward the mother's face. A human mother is therefore in a bad position to assist in delivery, since her infant is exiting 'down and back,' away from her helping hands. Furthermore, pulling an emerging human infant up toward the mother's breast would bend it against the normal flexion of its body and would possibly result in injury. Interestingly, the human delivery pattern is very different from that of nonhuman primates, in which there is no fetal rotation (babies are sagitally oriented throughout birth) and newborns exit the canal face-to-face with their mothers. In this pattern, mother monkeys and apes routinely assist in delivery by reaching down and pulling emerging infants up and toward their chests in a curve that matches the normal flexion of the babies' bodies." (3)

So monkey and apes can pull their own babies out of the birth canal, human mother's can't. they need help in bad situations. How long has this birth pattern been in existence? At least since the time of H. erectus 1.6 million years ago . The famous Lucy (AL 288-1) didn't have this problem. Ruff comments.

"It has been cogently argued by Tague & Lovejoy (1986), based on the obstetric pelvis of AL 288-1, that birth in Australopithecus afarensis would have occurred with the fetal cranium in a transverse orientation throughout, i.e., without the pelvic rotation characteristic of modern humans, and that secondary altriciality of the infant need not have been present. In contrast, based on the relatively small size of the birth canal of KNM-WT 15000, it has been argued that secondary altriciality must have been present in Homo erectus, i.e., that the infant must have been born in a relatively helpless state. Furthermore, the anthropoid shape of the pelvic inlet/outlet in this male juvenile, even allowing for growth to adulthood and sexual dimorphism in pelvic shape, indicates that a transverse non-rotational birth mechanism would have been highly improbable." (4)

Because of this data, it makes much more sense that Eve have been a small brained hominid because otherwise there is no meaning to the curse of increasing her pain in childbirth. She would have already had it.

Now to tie up the final item, pain in childbirth. Among mammals there are two patterns of brain growth. The first pattern is called altriciality. In this pattern the animal is born helpless and extremely immature. The brains of altricial animals are usually half the size of the adult's, and double in size by adulthood. Because of this it takes lots of parental effort to raise the young. Animals following this pattern usually have litters and perform this care for multiple offspring at once. Cats, with their blind and helpless kittens are altricial. The other pattern is precocial. In this pattern the offspring are usually born single and from birth are able to get around quite well. Their brains are nearly adult size at birth. The are alert and all their organs are functioning. An example of this pattern is the horse, the wildebeest etc., where the young will run with the herds within minutes.

Now, according to Walker and Shipman(5), altricial species almost never have bigger brains than precocial species. The reason is that for all mammals save one, the brain grows rapidly during gestation but then grows less rapidly after birth. There is a kink in the graph of brain size vs. time which occurs at birth. Altricial species whose immature state at birth and subsequent slow down in the rate of growth forever remain behind the more maturely born precocial species.

What humans seem to have accomplished is the trick of keeping the brain growing at the embryonic rate for one year after birth. Effectively, if humans are a fundamentally precocial species, our gestation is (or should be) 21 months. However, no mother could possibly pass a year old baby's head through the birth canal. Thus, human babies are born "early" to avoid the death of the mother. Walker and Shipman write:

"Humans are simply born too early in their development, at the time when their heads will still fit through their mothers' birth canals. As babies' brains grow, during this extrauterine year of fetal life, so do their bodies. About the time of the infant's first birthday, the period of fetal brain growth terminates, coinciding with the beginnings of speech and the mastery of erect posture and bipedal walking." (6)

This pattern of growth has huge implications. Every other primate doubles their brain weight from birth to adulthood. But due to the early birth of humans, we triple our brain's birth rate. Our last 12 month of fetal growth rate of the brain occurs outside the sensorially deprived womb. The vast quantities of sensory input during the first year of life affects the rate and nature of the neural connections. Because of this year of helplessness, parents must provide close physical and emotional support for the infant. Unlike chimp babies who can cling to their mother's fur, human infants cannot even hang on to mother in spite of having the hand reflex. The mother has no fur because she sweats and she sweats because of a big brain which is why she gives birth to her child early. This early birth then requires the mother to care for the infant and increases the bond between mother and child which partially makes us human.

So, what is the birth pattern in Homo erectus? It is human. Shipman and Walker(7) point out that the adult Homo erectus cranial capacity was 950 cc. If they followed the ape-like pattern of doubling their brain size after birth, they would need to be born with a brain size of around 400 cc. Following the discovery of a nearly complete Homo erectus skeleton, the approximate size the erectus birth canal is known. A head with a 400 cc brain is 10 cm too big to fit through the birth canal. Estimates place the maximum fetal brain size able to fit through the erectus birth canal at just 231 cc(8). Homo erectus had a human pattern of birth and must have endured similar pain in childbirth.

A study of Homo rudolfensis which lived eight hundred thousand years earlier than the 1.6-million-year-old Homo erectus studied by Walker and Shipman above, also had a human birth pattern of trebling its brain size from birth to adulthood. Homo rudolfensis stood about 5 foot 8 inches tall and was quite human in form below the neck(9). Steven M. Stanley showed that the birth canal of a Homo rudolfensis would only be able to pass a fetal head of about 210 cc. The adult of this species had brain sizes in the range of 760 to 900 cc. This data would strongly imply that pain in childbirth of the type experienced by human mothers extends back at least 2.4 million years to the initial appearance of Homo rudolfensis.(10) The birth pattern means that Homo rudolfensis children would also be born as helpless as any human or erectus baby which would require long periods intensive care. This would lead to an intense period of bonding between mother and child as also occurs among humans. And the enlarged brain would most likely have meant hairlessness among the rudolfensis also. In short, this birth pattern means they had many of our traits which are theologically associated with the Fall.

To close, it would appear that there is a single underlying cause of God's curse for the man and woman and it is an increase in brain size. This increase also caused the loss of hair requiring clothing when mankind eventually inhabited northern climes. Homo erectus is found in European Georgia 1.6 million years ago. Without fire or clothing, he would have been unlikely to survive the more severe winters in that area.

The fact that Homo erectus and Homo rudolfensis were saddled with the problems given to Adam and Eve after the fall has theological implications for the status of Homo erectus and Homo rudolfensis, the time during which Adam lived as well as who is eligible for salvation. I have long contended that humanity in the theological sense is much older than most Christians are willing to admit. If sweat and increased pain in childbirth and clothing are not signifying of humanity and the Fall, what then does theologically separate us from mere animals?

It is also intriguing to me that the ancient Hebrew writer would choose as a curse for man and woman, two different maledictions which can be caused by a single phenomenon--an increase in brain size. This single cause also would require the loss of hair and the subsequent need for clothing. There is no way that the Hebrew writer could have had the knowledge to purposefully construct this tale. Is this a fortuitous conjunction of statements or is it divine inspiration? I firmly believe God inspired the writer and while he didn't understand it, we can today.

References

1 Jared Diamond, “The Evolution of Guns and Germs,” in Evolution: Society, Science and the Universe, ed by A. C. Fabian, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 602.
2P. Shipman and A. Walker, "The Costs of Becoming a Predator," Journal of Human Evolution, 18, 373-392, p. 385.
3.Bernard G. Campbell and James D. Loy, Humankind Emerging, (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), p. 272

4.Christopher B. Ruff, "Climate and Body Shape in Hominid Evolution," Journal of Human Evolution (1991), 21, 81-105, p. 93
5. Alan Walker, and Pat Shipman, 1996, The Wisdom of the Bones, (New York: Alfred Knopf). , p.220-222
6. Alan Walker, and Pat Shipman, 1996, The Wisdom of the Bones, (New York: Alfred Knopf), p. 222
7.Shipman, P. and A. Walker, 1989. "The Costs of Becoming a Predator," Journal of Human Evolution, 18, 373-392, p. 388-389
8. Alan Walker, and Pat Shipman, 1996, The Wisdom of the Bones, (New York: Alfred Knopf), p. 226-227
9. Stanley, Steven M., 1998, Children of the Ice Age, (New York: W. H. Freeman), p. 164
10. Stanley, Steven M., 1998, Children of the Ice Age, (New York: W. H. Freeman), p. 160-163

Adam's curse is a bigger head extracted from here

Genesis 3:19 says: By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food.

It is fascinating that Adam is cursed with sweat. A Neolithic Johnny come lately Adam couldn't be cursed with sweat because he already had the human sweating mechanism. Adam would say, "Big Deal, Big Guy! Have you seen what all humans have to do to earn a living here in the hot Neolithic summers?"

The rest of this section is from an old web page of mine on sweat. It is no longer up:

Dean Falk, one of the world's leading authorities on hominid brains, advanced a theory in which the hominid brain could not grow any bigger than the cooling system attached to it. The theory originated from a comment by her mechanic. She writes:

"It was an 'aha' experience, if ever I've had one, and the weirdest combination of events led to it. First, the engine in my 1970 Mercedes needed major surgery. I took it to Walter Anwander (a whiz) in Lafayette, Indiana, who completely rebuilt the engine. One day, while enumerating the wonders beneath the hood (about which I definitely needed schooling), Walter pointed to the radiator and told me 'the engine can only be as big as that can cool.' I didn't think much about it at the time." (1)

The brain, like that engine, can only be as big as the cooling system it has. If the brain overheats, the brain is ruined just like overheating a car engine will ruin it. In the brain the blood acts as the coolant. The brain has several emissary veins which go from the interior of the skull to the skin of the face. These veins are part of the "radiator" system. When a person is cold, blood flows from the cranium outward in these veins. But when a person exercises and becomes overheated, the blood flow reverses and blood flows into the cranium. The reason for this reversal is that the skin of the face (the brow included) acts as a radiator, cooling the blood which then enters the brain to cool that organ. Some of the veins are preserved in the skulls of extinct hominids (and man) in the form of emissary foramina (a foramina is a hole in the skull (2). Thus a record of the size and number of emissary foramina are preserved in ancient skulls for anthropologists to examine. Falk notes:

"It was beautiful. For the past two million years, the increase in frequencies of emissary foramina kept exact pace with the sharp increase in brain size in Homo. Clearly, the brain and the veins had evolved rapidly and together. I saw that Cabanac's letter was right and that I had unwittingly charted the evolution of a radiator for the brain in my earlier work on emissary foramina. As Anwander had said about my car, the engine can only be as big as the radiator can cool. Apparently, the same is true for heat-sensitive brains."(3)

But emissary veins are only part of the cooling mechanism in mankind. Sweat is the reason that the facial skin cools and the cooling of the skin cools the blood destined for the brain. What do we know about sweat?

The human sweating system is unique among mammals. Bernard Campbell describes the function of sweat glands:

"The sweat glands fall into two groups: the apocrine and eccrine glands. The apocrine glands secrete the odorous component of sweat and are primarily scent glands that respond to stress or sexual stimulation. Before the development of artificial scents and deodorants, they no doubt played an important role in human society. In modern man these glands occur only in certain areas of the body, in particular in the armpits, the navel, the anal and genital areas, the nipples, and the ears. Surprisingly enough, glands in the armpits of man are more numerous per unit area than in any other animal. There is no doubt that the function of scent in sexual encounter is of the greatest importance even in the higher primates and man. "The eccrine glands, which are the source of sweat itself, have two functions in primates. Their original function was probably to moisten friction surfaces, such as the volar pads of hand and foot to improve the grip, prevent flaking of the horny layer of the skin, and assist tactile sensitivity. Glands serving that function are also found on the hairless surface of the prehensile tail of New World monkeys and on the knuckles of gorilla and chimpanzee hands, which they use in quadrupedal walking. Glands in these positions are under the control of the brain and adrenal bodies, and in modern man an experience of stress may produce sweaty palms.

"The second and more recently evolved function of the eccrine glands is the lowering of body temperature through the evaporation of sweat on the surface of the body. The hairy skin of monkeys and apes carries eccrine glands, but they are neither so active nor so numerous as in man. Modern man is equipped with between two and five million active sweat glands, and they play a vital part in cooling the body. The heat loss that results from the evaporation of water from a surface is enormously greater than that which could be expected to occur as a result of simple radiation. The fact that sweat contains salt necessitates a constant supply of the mineral if man is to survive in a tropical climate.

"It has been observed that like almost all mammals, primates sweat very little. Even hunting carnivores, such as dogs, lose heat by other means, such as panting. Sweating has evolved as a most important means of heat loss in man, a fact that is surely correlated with the loss of his body hair. The apparent importance in human evolution of achieving an effective means of heat loss indicates without doubt that early man was subject to intense muscular activity, with the production of much metabolic heat; he could not afford even the smallest variation in body temperature. With such a highly evolved brain, the maintenance of a really constant internal environment was a need of prime importance in human evolution."(4)

With this need to dissipate heat in order to maintain a constant brain temperature, hair becomes a problem. Hair traps the sweat and hinders evaporation. Zihlman and Cohn relate:

"How might early hominids have dissipated the heat load generated internally, as well as externally from the sun? One way is through the skin. The skin of modern humans contrasts with that of other, nonhuman primates in four features: 1) humans have a great density (over two million) of functioning eccrine sweat glands over the entire body surface; 2) loss of the apocrine sweat glands has been associated with hair loss, and has occurred except in the ano-genital and axillary regions; 3) hair follicles are diffuse and hair shafts are noticeably reduced in size; 4) skin pigment ranges from dark to light.
"How might these features be interpreted in a functional and evolutionary way? There is the remarkable thermo-regulatory function of eccrine sweat glands. Sweating can deliver two litres of water to the skin surface in two hours and carry off almost 600 calories of heat. Hair tends to trap moisture, so that sweat evaporation is more effective with reduced hair. Interestingly, the number of hair follicles in humans is similar to that in chimpanzees and gorillas, but the much reduced size of hair shafts in humans gives a hairless appearance."(5)

Why do we have hair on our head? Zihlman and Cohninform us:

"Hair retention on the head is probably important in protecting the scalp from the sun's ultraviolet rays and may assist in stabilizing the temperature of the brain. Human populations are variable in the amount of body hair present, but in all of them the skin surface is hairless enough to permit efficient heat loss from sweating."(6)

Radiatively, hair on the top of the head absorbs the solar heat and re-radiates most of it. An absorbing layer can reduce by half the amount of energy reaching the top of the skull.

When is it likely that mankind needed this cooling mechanism for heat removal? Probably fairly early. For modern men even moderate exertion on the savanna increases the heat production by 100% over the resting levels. Since Homo erectus was as large as we are(7), similar exertions on the plains would yield similar heating. Even the smallest Homo erectus has a brain which is over twice as large as that of the chimpanzee which can get by without sweating. Homo erectus would need to sweat. Since he needed to sweat, then he needed to be relatively hairless as we are.

If he were relatively hairless, then the Homo erectus who lived in Georgia (former USSR)(8) would have been ill-equipped to handle the winter temperatures below zero Fahrenheit which occur from time to time in that area. He would have needed clothing. Because of these considerations, Anthropologists like Brian Fagan were forced to conclude,

"For Homo erectus to be able to adapt to the more temperate climate of Europe and Asia, it was necessary not only to tame fire but to have both effective shelter and clothing to protect against heat loss. Homo erectus probably survived the winters by maintaining permanent fires, and by storing dried meat and other foods for use in the lean months."(9)

This is a very human set of behaviors and Homo erectus was found in European Georgia 1.6 million years ago.

Johnny-come-lately Adam and Eve too late for Clothing

Because of the big brains, H. erectus, Neanderthals and H. Sapiens living in colder climates had to have clothing millions of years prior to Neolithic Adam and Eve. They were as hairless as we are, and they had bigger brains than we have. The Biblical account indicates that Adam and Eve didn't know they were naked. Anyone in Neolithic times would have known they were naked. Late Adam and Eve just ignore everything said in the Scripture.

Neanderthals had to have clothing to live in glacial age Europe:

"The life of a Neanderthal band in the intensely cold environments of the Europe of 75,000 years ago can never have been easy. The means to survival were fire, some form of skin clothing and adequate winter shelter, and an ability to store food. It is probably no coincidence that some of the densest Neanderthal populations lay in the sheltered river valleys of the Perigord region in southwest France."(10)

Further, there is good evidence that they sewed close-fitting clothing.

"In the Mousterian horizon of Combe Grenal, Professor Francois Bordes has recovered bone needles, indicating beyond doubt that classic Neanderthal men made tailored fur clothing. The severity of the periglacial climate would not have permitted men to survive unless they were capable of making sophisticated clothing."(11)

Not only that archaeologists have found what certainly appears to be the remains of a Shaman's cape,

"But the Neandertals' true humanity revealed itself in the actions of their souls. At the 50,000-year-old site of Hortus in southern France, two French archaeologists in 1972 reported the discovery of the articulated bones of the left paw and tail of a leopard. Their arrangement suggested that the fragments were once the remnants of a complete leopard hide worn as a costume."(12)

A lot of people don't know the potential evidence that H. erectus was spread far afield from Africa by 1.8-1.4 million years ago. Tattersall reports the following controversial sites for Acheulean tools, which if they are correct, H. erectus was spreading abroad. Tattersall names the following places13)

'Ubeidiya has yielded Acheulean tools dated to 1.4 Myr.

Longupo found stone tools dated at 1.9 Myr

Riwat Pakistan stone tools 1.6 Myr

Dmanisi mandible 1.8 myr

Since they have found several H. erectus skulls at Dmanisi since Tattersall wrote that, I would argue that the Dmanisi hominids also had to have clothing of some sort. We know that they too were hairless. The January average temperature of that area dips down to about 5 C below 0. A hairless man, like erectus or us, would freeze to death in such temperatures without clothing. Thus, we can say that some form of clothing has existed for 1.6 million years, at least.

Johnny-come-lately views of Adam and Eve simply ignore Genesis 3.

Moral choices, rationality, religion and Johnny-come-lately Adam

Genesis 2:16-17 You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; 17 but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.”

This simple statement says many things about man. It says that he knew enough to make moral choices. It also says he had to have an understanding of logic and consequences--that is, rationality. If Adam is a Neolithic farmer he is too late for the start of that as well. And that means religion. Logic and rationality are required for the production of a stone tool.

"The removal of an individual flake is a simple action requiring only minimal organisational ability. In order to manufacture all but the most rudimentary stone tools, however, flake removals must be related to one another in a fashion yielding the appropriate configuration or pattern. If a stone artefact presents a pattern of flake removals that could only have been organised by means of reversibility and/or conservation, then it must be concluded that the maker possessed operational intelligence. I will show that the later Acheulean artefacts from the Isimila Prehistoric Site present such patterns."(14)

It took a lot of foresight, logic and rational thought, not to mention an aesthetic sense, to create the West Tofts hand-axe, the tool of H. erectus and archaic H. sapiens for about a million years or more. See picture.

“Even the Lower Palaeolithic hand-axe makers showed interest in fossils. A hand-axe discovered at West Tofts, Norfolk, England has a mollusc shell prominently displayed in the middle of one of its sides. Obviously the maker of this tool had seen the fossil shell that lay embedded in the flint, but, more significantly, he must have worked around the shell in order that, when he had finished flaking the tool, the fossil would be in the centre. This is not the only hand-axe to have such a natural form of in-built decoration. Another, found at Swanscombe, Kent, England, has the fossil of a sea-urchin visible on its surface, and again all the indications are that this was both recognised and valued by the tool-maker. “(15)

Logic and rationality certainly preceded Johnny-come-lately Adam.

Conclusion

The late placement of Adam in history, the view preferred by many modern commentators makes an utter mockery of everything said in Genesis 2-3. Nothing said or proclaimed there is true. This should not be the view of people who think that the Scripture contains the way of Salvation. How can such a false book (in their view) really be trusted to tell us the metaphysical truths that we are unable to verify. If so much stuff that we can verify is false, what guarantee do we have that the theology and metaphysics of Scripture is real? This is why a historical reading of Genesis is necessary--it is necessary for the trustworthiness of scripture.

It is also intriguing to me that the ancient Hebrew writer would choose as a curse for man and woman, two different maledictions which can be caused by a single phenomenon--an increase in brain size. This single cause also would require the loss of hair and the subsequent need for clothing. There is no way that the Hebrew writer could have had the knowledge to purposefully construct this tale. Is this a fortuitous conjunction of statements or is it divine inspiration? I firmly believe God inspired the writer and while he didn't understand it, we can today.

References

1. Dean Falk, 1992 Braindance,(New York: Henry Holt and Co.) p. 156

2.Dean Falk, 1992 Braindance,(New York: Henry Holt and Co.) p. 153

3. Dean Falk, 1992 Braindance,(New York: Henry Holt and Co.) p. 159

4. Bernard Campbell, 1974. Human Evolution, (Chicago: Aldine Publishing). p 280-282

5. Adrienne L. Zihlman, and B. A. Cohn, 1986, "Responses of Hominid Skin to the Savanna," South African Journal of Science, 82:2, p. 307-308.

6.Adrienne L Zihlman,. and B. A. Cohn, 1988, "The Adaptive Response of Human Skin to the Savanna" Human Evolution, 3:5(1988):397-409. p404.

7.Ruff, Christopher B., 1993, "Climatic Adaptation and Hominid Evolution: The Thermoregulatory Imperative," Evolutionary Anthropology, 2:2, p. 53-60, p 56

8. Larick, Roy and Russell L. Ciochon, 1996, "The African Emergence and Early Asian Dispersals of the Genus Homo."American Scientists, 84(Nov/Dec, 1996).p 548-550

9. Brian M. Fagan, 1990. The Journey From Eden, (London: Thames and Hudson) p.76

10.Brian M. Fagan, The Journey From Eden, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1990), p.83

11.J. B. Birdsell, Human Evolution, (St. Louis: Rand McNally, 1972), p. 283

12.James R. Shreeve, The Neandertal Enigma, (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1995), p. 52

13.Ian Tattersall, "Out of Africa Again...and Again?" Scientific American April, 1997, p. 60-67

14.Thomas Wynn, "The Intelligence of Later Acheulean Hominids," Man, 14:371-391, p. 375

15.Richard Rudgley, Secrets of the Stone Age, (London: Century, 2000), p.

The Barbarian said:

I assume you are speaking of the Black Sea Flood that unindated a huge area of the Middle East about the right time. There are still some problems to be resolved, but I think it's likely that you're right. Your "fountains of the deep" interpretation is novel, but reasonable.

I'd like to hear more, if there is more.

Click to expand...

Hi Barbarian.
No, I am not speaking of the Black Sea flood which was postulated in 1998 by William Ryan and Walter Pitman. That view, which held that the Black Sea area, north of Turkey dried out and was reflooded within a year, has now been geologically disproven. For that flood to be true, the water would have had to have flowed from the Mediterranean into the Black Sea--opposite of the flow direction today. The Black Sea was said to have been 450 feet lower than the level of the Mediterranean. Unfortunately, Marine Geology in Oct 2002 ran an entire issue laying out the evidence against this scenario including proof that the water always flowed from Black Sea to Mediterranean and never went into reverse. Ryan was an author in that issue and didn't bother to defend his own theory, which is a sure sign the guy had given up on it.

There were loads of biblical problems with the Black sea flood, like, no high mountains covered, and given the topography it would force people to move 20-50 inland each day and thus should have been named, 'Noah's long march' rather than Noah's flood.

There is plenty more, and if my health holds up, I will get to it.

What I am proposing is older, Black Sea flood was supposed to have happened 7450 BC or so, mine is 5.3 myr ago at the time when hominids first appeared on earth. Go look up Wiki on the Zanclean flood. and here is a video of that.

Putting Adam back 5.3 myr ago All sorts of things in the Bible fall into place.

1. This the only flood in earth history that matches the Biblical description exactly.
   
   
2. Only at this time did the rivers of Eden 1 flow into the same place. It is amazing to me that the Biblical description of Eden is an exact match for the geography of 5.3 myr ago in the eastern Mediterranean region… The Tigris and Euphrates, the Gihon which encompasses Cush can only be the Nile, and the Pison which flowed out of Havilah which the Bible places in Arabia, all were in Eden. Their positions are marked on the PBS map below showing the locations I believe they entered the basin in based upon interpretations of 3D seismic data shown in the literature. That a river was at each of these locations is certain. One could of course squabble about the name. They do match what Scripture says about Eden.
   
   
   
   
   PBS Messinian Geography2282×1282 797 KB
   
   

Below is an enlargement of this map showing what would be a huge area on the desert floor lushly watered by four different rivers. The area from the lake to the Levant coast is absolutely huge, but, as I said, would have been watered by 4 big rivers each of whom was mentioned in Scripture. The sediment from these four rivers would have created a land of intersecting deltas and built up a land gently sloping to the brine lake. It would have looked much like southern Louisiana only larger, and as with the Okovango delta in the Kalahari desert, much wildlife would have flourished there (see PBS video at end) or see my list in this Biologos post.
!




3. It was just at the time when the earliest hominids appeared on earth. The earliest known as of this writing is A. kadabba dated to 5.6 myr. A flood at this time, when humans are brand new can be anthropologically universal and the theology of the young-earthers can be correct. If all the humans are confined to that basin, then when the flood happened, they all died. One doesn’t have to reject Noah’s flood as myth if we place the flood in the Mediterranean basin at this time.

4.One couldn’t easily walk out of this area so an ark was necessary. The Mediterranean basin is huge, an equal distance from one end to the other the same as crossing the USA. As air is pushed out of the basin, it would have created weird air fronts at the tops of the basin as the evicted air pushed outward away from the basin, and I feel certain it would have rained all around the rim of the basin, again making it difficult for someone to walk to safety.

In Mesopotamia where many put the flood, I want to ask why didn't Noah et al, just climb the Zagros Mountains a two day walk away?

5, It covered high mountains. This is the only local flood ever proposed that could cover 15,000 foot high mountains. Gravity models of the basin strongly suggest it was that deep or even deeper in parts. Note that in the model below they place the original Messinian surface, the red line in both models, at 7 km below sea level. Even after 2 km of salt is deposited, the depth of the basin would be more than 5 km below sea level.


Gravity model of eastern Gulf1114×1002 333 KB


7.The length of time is approximately correct. Modeling of fluid flow shows that, depending upon how large the breach in the Gibraltar dam was, it would fill in between 8 months and 2 years.

Interestingly the western part of the basin would partially fill before the eastern Mediterranean even started filling. It is estimated that the eastern Mediterranean would require about 200 days to fill after the partial filling of the western basin. This is quite close to the 150 days of water prevailing recorded in the Scripture.

8.An object floating on the waters could have easily landed in southern Turkey, which the Bible calls the mountains of Ararat!. The Bible does use the plural for mountains, not the singular, so the Bible doesn’t say mount Ararat. Again, in Mesopotamia where so many place the flood, the ark would flow south into the Indian Ocean so how did it land in Turkey?

9.The curses are explained because Adam really was a smaller brained hominid. Giving these curses to any Homo sapiens would have been a big so what? They already had pain in childbirth and sweat of the brow problems. See above or here

10.Only a deep basin explains the strange and weird hydrology going on in Eden. One has a hard time finding anyplace like that above sea level today.

11. Explains the rainbow, or rather lack there of.

12.Explains how a land on earth could never have been rained on--Mesopotamia always got rain.

13.Explains the phrase--there was no man to till the ground. I know most people believe there was farming and technology before the flood, but I don't. I think translators have inserted their view of what life was like into the translation, just like people have placed King Aurther into the Age of Chivalry when in fact he was a 5th century barbaric warlord.. See technology 1, technology 2, Tubalcain and iron, and Was Noah a Farmer?

I know of no other flooding event in geologic history that can satisfy the above check list. I also know of no other apologetical view that accounts for so many of the interlocking pieces of Genesis and gives us a way to view this as real, divinely inspired history. The story of Noah could not have been handed down via oral tradition. Nor could the rivers of Eden have been handed down that way. It was due to Divine inspiration. How was anyone to even have a clue that the rivers of Eden match an actual geography--albeit not at a time anyone likes? But do our 'likes' determine what is true? I don't think so.

I love how our theologians have simply given up on Eden as shown by the quote below:

"Some have gone further and claimed the geographical allusion is to a fantasy. For Cassuto, 'The Garden of Eden according to the Torah was not situated in our world.' Skinner claimed: 'it is obvious that a real locality answering the description of Eden exists and has existed nowhere on the face of the earth...(T)he whole representation (is) outside the sphere of real geographic knowledge. In (Genesis 2) 10-14, in short, we have...a semi-mythical geography.' For Ryle, 'The account...is irreconcilable with scientific geography.' Radday believed that Eden is nowhere because of its deliberately tongue-in-cheek fantastic geography. McKenzie asserted that 'the geography of Eden is altogether unreal; it is a Never-never land.' John C. Munday, Jr., "Eden's Geography Erodes Flood Geology," Westminster Theological Journal, 58(1996), pp. 123-154,p. 128-130

What are they going to do when faced with a real possibility for a real Eden? I think they will still deny any chance of Eden being real. I have already had that experience with a well known theologian.

But to give up on Eden, is also to give up on the Fall, which is the basis for why Christ came and why he died. I agree with H. G. Wells that if the Fall didn't happen, Christianity collapses:

"If all the animals and man have been evolved in this ascendant manner, then there would have been no first parents, no Eden, and no Fall. And if there had been no Fall, the entire historical fabric of Christianity, the story of the first sin and the reason for an atonement, upon which current teaching bases Christian emotion and morality, collapses like a house of cards." H. G. Wells, The Outline of History, (Garden City: Doubleday, 1961), p. 776-777

I am showing how, in an evolutionary world we can still have a primal pair--Adam and Eve. And if they existed, then so did the Fall! And if we have the Fall, Christianity stands like a giant granite mountain, not like a house of cards. I firmly believe, after 50 years of searching that Christianity has no reason now to shrink and cower in the face of science. Christianity and the early stories of Genesis are historically true.

The Barbarian said:

The trend in hominids has been to wider hips:

It requires a wider pelvis, and a greater angle of the femur from the hip, giving bipedal hominins a knock-kneed posture that makes for efficient bipedal movement. You are quite right that the large skulls of human babies require a greater pelvic opening. This is why most human females have wider hips, and can run less swiftly than most males.

What people often miss, is that this arrangement makes for highly efficient long-distance movement. A human can generally outdistance almost any other animal over the course of days. General Stonewall Jackson's "foot cavalry", during the Civil War could easily exceed thirty miles in a day, the customary limit for cavalry movement. I wonder how he kept them in boots.

Click to expand...

I couldn't agree more. It appears however that human women's hip size is about as wide as it can get without turning them into waddlers. I can't find the quote right now and my kids are coming to see me today because they think I am dying soon. They may or may not be correct, but I will take every day God gives me and praise him. So, since I don't have time to back up that statement I will offer this:

"if human babies were also born face forward, their mothers would have a much easier time. Instead the evolutionary modifications of the human pelvis that enabled hominids to walk upright necessitate that most infants exit the birth canal with the back of their heads against the pubic bones, facing in the opposite direction as the mother (in a position obstetricians call 'occiput anterior'). For this reason, it is difficult for the laboring human mother-whether squatting, sitting, or lying on her back to reach down and guide the baby as it emerges. This configuration also greatly inhibits the mother's ability to clear a breathing passage for the infant, to remove the umbilical cord from around its neck or even to lift the baby up to her breast. If she tries to accelerate the delivery by grabbing the baby and guiding it from the birth canal, she risks bending its back awkwardly against the natural curve of its spine. Pulling on a newborn at this angle risks injury to its spinal cord, nerves and muscles." Karen R. Rosenberg and Wenda R. Trevathan, "The Evolution of Human Birth," Scientific American, Special Addition, Aug. 25, 2003, pp 81-85, p. 83

"Knowing this and believing that this practice is driven by the difficulty and risk that accompany human birth,we began to think that midwifery is not unique to contemporary humans but instead has its roots deep in our ancestry. Our analysis of the birth process throughout human evolution has led us to suggest that the practice of midwifery might have appeared as early as five million years ago, when bipedalism constricted the size and shape of the pelvis and birth canal." Karen R. Rosenberg and Wenda R. Trevathan, "The Evolution of Human Birth," Scientific American, Special Addition, Aug. 25, 2003, pp 81-85, p. 83

If midwifery did start that long ago, then that again supports the age and time at which I place Adam and Eve!

Does a Small Brain make you dumb part 1 extracted from here
Glenn R. Morton still here on 5/23/2020

The obvious objection to moving Adam back that far is that as one goes back in time, brain size generally gets smaller. I think this is one of the biggest stumbling blocks to the acceptance of my views. The picture below shows the range of brain sizes (cranial capacity) of various groups of fossil men. The data is taken from a variety of sources and the numbers vary from place to place about the range, and about the volume of individual specimens. That is to be expected from different methods of measuring these volumes and from different cut off values for what is normal.

So, as we look ahead we need to frame this issue correctly. Does brain size impact whether or not a being has the image of God? Where is the Bible verse that backs up this idea, I can't think of one? This is a deep and dangerous question. Why? because if we tie brain size to the image of God, we would be making the same mistakes that the Spanish made when they came to the New World. They justified their treatment of Natives by saying that they could not be descendants of Adam--meaning, they didn't have the image of God. If you don't know who Bartolome Las Casas is go look him up on Wiki. He fought for Native American rights against overwhelming odds, and lost. But the important thing for this discussion is that the early Spanish held the view that Native Americans were not human.

"Las Casas had a good deal of influence on the powers back home, as did another cleric, the Dominican Bernardino de Minaya. Minaya deserted Pizarro in disgust and went to Rome to persuade Pope Paul III to issue a papal bull in 1537 that rejected the idea of Indians as mere brutes and declared them capable and desirous of embracing the Catholic faith. Not only that, the bull proclaimed, even those Native Americans who chose not to follow Christ were not to be enslaved or have their property taken. This was too much. Bristling with secular outrage, Emperor Charles ordered all copies of the bull confiscated and prevailed on the pope to rescind the bull altogether. For his efforts Minaya was thrown into jail by the head of his order."7

So, as we go through the data below, we want to be sure that we are not saying that those with smaller brains but normal intelligence are not capable of carrying the image of God. Why? Because if we view them that way, for the purpose of maintaining that early hominids couldn't have carried the image of God, then it affects how we treat them. If small brained early hominids can't carry the image of God because they have small brains, then can small brained H. sapiens carry the image? Such a view would be appalling. All modern humans can carry the image of God regardless of their brain size, and if we accept that as a given, then upon what basis do we reject the earlier hominids with the same brain sizes? I will discuss the issue of their technology vs ours below, but technology and invention are not the mark of a carrier of the image of God. How many patent applications does the average person submit?

The other thing we need to think about as we learn about the brains below is the issue of what is consciousness/soul, and does it arise from the material object of the brain. If we were to remove half the heart from someone, they would die. If you remove half the liver, they won't die because filtering the blood is simple compared to what the brain would have to do to create consciousness. So why when some brains are severely damaged does the consciousness seem whole? If consciousness/soul were a product of our entire brain then removing half of it should remove half the functionality of consciousness, yet as you will see, it doesn't. The way I interpret this data,, along with information from quantum mechanics, is that soul/consciousness is not material.

Dumb and Dumber

Over and over I have been told that hominids with small brains are incapable of carrying the image of God, because they have small brains. Well, some modern humans have small brains as well. But I want to preface what comes next. Yes, if you have a small brain today, as a modern H. sapiens, you are increasingly likely to be less and less intelligent the smaller your brain gets, BUT, there are small brained H. sapiens today who have normal intelligence, which says, it isn't the size that matters but the connectivity or some other factor. One further BUT, the small brained hominids in the record were never designed to have big brains like ours and they had to be pretty smart to avoid being eaten by lions, tigers, and bears. The average human with a hominid size brain today couldn't make stone tools, indeed, most big brained people can't make stone tools, not even the simplest Oldowan tools. But these small brained people were making stone tools with ease. Small brained humans are defective, but small brained hominids of the past were NOT defective, meaning, the comparison is one of apples to oranges and is invalid. With that lets play the limbo game: How low can you go?

Daniel Lyons

Years ago, I bought a copy of Guinness Book of World Records to obtain one fact, what was the smallest normal brain? It said that Daniel Lyons brain was the smallest one on record. Since I have been researching this topic again, I decided to further chase down information on Mr. Lyon. I found Newspaper articles on him from early 1908, but a scientific article wasn't published until 1910, after further lab work. This second article on Mr. Lyons tells about his life,

"According to Dr. Larkin's records Daniel Lyon died on the tenth of October, 1907, from asphyxia due to edema of the glottis. He was Irish, 46 years old, five and one-half feet high, and weighed 145 pounds. No relatives have been discovered and it is not known that any survive. At the time of his death he lived at 409 E 17th St., New York City, and was a watchman for the New York Contracting Company at the Pennsylvania Terminal, 34th St. The legal representative of that company says that 'from all reports there was nothing defective or peculiar about him, either mentally or physically.' No photography or hat measurement has been obtained. No information has been gained by inquiries addressed to his alleged fellow-workmen or former places of residence, but Dr. Larkin was informed that he could read and write; that we was regarded as competent and in full possession of his faculties; and that as a laborer he had worked in one position for twenty years. There seems to be no reason why he should not be regarded as of ordinary intelligence; "8

His death at age 46 meant he barely passed the life expectancy for a manual laborer of that time, which was 45.6 years for the average male.9 Everything about this man says average, yet his brain was half the size of the normal human brain!

"Shortly after death the brain was removed in the presence of Dr. Larkin and the coroner's physician, Dr. Philip O'Hanlon. No head-measurements were made, but it did not appear to be unusual in either size or shape. the brain filled the cranium; there was no excess liquid, and no evidence of compression. Upon accurate scales the brain was found to weigh exactly 24 ounces, or 680 grams, about one-half the average for male Caucasians. It was placed immediately in ten per cent. formalin, and there remained until sent to me more than two years later."10

It isn't like these two doctors were country bumpkins in Yahoosville. This was New York City and they had to autopsy people who died without a medical person in attendance. According to the Newspapers,(this account probably came from the NY City papers and was reprinted in Colorado) O'Hanlon had performed thousands of autopies,

"It is one of the most remarkable brains I have ever seen , said Dr , O'Hanlon , who has made thousands of autopsies , and it shows that the size of the brain does not necessarily : measure the intellect of man ."11

Wilder concludes his 1910 article with this,

"This brain is not ape-like. Even were it still smaller it is distinctly human....

…

"Upon the present occasion attention is particularly directed to this exemplification of the possibility that ordinary human intelligence may apparently coexist with a brain of only one-half the ordinary size, exceeding that of certain apes by only 180 grams (about six ounces), and not quite double the size of the brain of a congenital idiot."12

Using a brain density of 1.045 g/cc we find that the volume of his brain is 650 cc. So, let's see where Mr. Lyons lies on the chart of brain size.



Mr. Lyon's brain is at the lower range of Homo habilis!!! Surely we can't deny that Mr. Lyon's carried the image of God in 1907 just because he had a small brain, but normal intelligence, could read and write, and hold down a job for 20 years. This shows very clearly that intelligent consciousness is not tied to brain size. It is tied to the connections it makes, or it is something above and apart from the material world.

My brother died a horrible death by brain cancer. The cancer ate one hemisphere of his brain--it had been turned to liquid. Yet, he was lucid until a few days before his death--with half a brain. Intelligence, the image of God are not related to size, at least not straightforwardly, and indeed as we will point out below, maybe not tied to the material world.

At this point I am going to ask a question, in light of Mr. Lyon's brain, should we extend the range of normal brain size down, like in the chart below, making Mr. Lyons at the bottom end of human normal brain? After doing this, empirically, looking at this human range brains of normal intelligence we see that it covers the entire span of our evolutionary fore-fathers, with the exception of the Australipithecines.

But we are not through,

Microcephaly with normal intelligence

John Travis wrote:

“In microcephaly, the cerebral cortex grows unusually slowly and reaches a size no bigger than that of early hominids.”13

Microcephaly is a very sad disease in which the brain of the human ceases growth, either in utero or shortly after birth.

ScienceDaily says this:

"The microcephaly genes have been hot candidates for a role in the evolutionary expansion of the human brain because mutations in these genes can reduce brain size by about two-thirds, to a size roughly comparable to our early hominid ancestors" Microcephaly genes associated with human brain size"14

According to Rushton, the average human brain is about 1265 cc.15 Two thirds of that is 421 cc. So, one must wonder when one reads the medical literature (yes, my quest for information has even gone there), and one sees these papers saying microcephalic patients can have normal intelligence:

"We describe nine patients with an apparently new genetic disorder characterized by: 1 (microcephaly with normal intelligence; 2) “bird”‐like facial appearance; 3( cellular and humoral immune defects; and 4) increased risk for lymphoreticular malignancies.." 16

"The authors describe a family with two children with microcephaly and normal intelligence, in which acute lymphoblastic leukemia developed in one of the siblings.."17

They performed intelligence tests on these children and concluded:

"In the two siblings in the family reported, average or low average intelligence was confirmed on performance testing, and they therefore fit the description of familial microcephaly with normal intelligence"18

Ok, so maybe they won't be physicists or surgeons, but there are plenty of big-brained people who perform average or low average too. Are we to deny these normally intelligent people the image of God merely because their brains are small and abnormal?

"We report on 3 sibs (2 boys and a girl) with a previously apparently unrecognized combination of anonychia congenita and microcephaly with normal intelligence." 19

Yes, I had to look up anonychia congenita, it means no finger nails. But to the point, all these people have small brains, but normal intelligence. But we are not through. So now, our table is filling up with small brained humans of normal intelligence. Our picture now looks like:

Hemispheridectomy Patients

Some people as children have epilepsy so badly that the only solution is to remove one hemisphere of the brain. Isn't life just a bowl of cherries when parents have to face that decision; remove half your child's brain or watch him die as the epilepsy kills off the other half of his brain. These patients, unlike Mr. Lyons, have an abnormal brain after the surgery. Daniel Lyons had a small but normally configured brain. Can non-normal configuration carry normal intelligence, normal consciousness/soul? The answer is surprisingly yes. These patients are located on the chart above in the area of Mr. Lyon's brain but the structure is quite different. I wrote in Adam, Apes and Anthropology, Dallas: DMD Publishing, 1997, p. 159-160 (reference numbers changed to match this paper's references:
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"Other people with other types of brain damage also can have normal intelligence. The two halves of the brain are called hemispheres. These hemispheres are connected by a cable of neurons called the corpus callosum. Occasionally people will develop severe epilepsy in which the epilepsy starts in one brain hemisphere and spreads to the other hemisphere. The resulting electrical storm can threaten to destroy the healthy hemisphere. In severe cases, the only solution is to remove the diseased half of the brain. This procedure is done only as a last resort to save the life of the individual. It is called a hemispherectomy.

"Effectively this procedure results in a human being with a brain size of around 600-650 cubic centimeters. This is smaller than the brain size of a gorilla, and is within the range of the australopithecines. Yet the effect of this drastic reduction in brain size does not result in a corresponding decline in intelligence. Most patients with hemispherectomy end up with IQs averaging one standard deviation below normal.20 It is not what we would consider an advantage, but it is certainly great enough to be human.

"Another type of procedure, called a hemidecortication severs the frontal cortex from the rest of the brain. Even this procedure when performed early in life does not totally destroy intelligence. Patients with this procedure have post-operative IQs averaging 70.21 However, one of these patients has been reported to have an IQ of 103.

"Smith performed a long-term study of infants who had hemispherectomies. He wrote:

"At a 25-year follow-up; each had obtained a college degree and had enjoyed a successful career as an executive, following a right hemispherectomy in one case and a left hemispherectomy in the other. Thus, as Smith noted, the findings demonstrate that at birth each of the two cerebral hemispheres contains the neuroanatomical and substrate necessary for the development of normal or even superior adult language and verbal and nonverbal cognitive functions."22

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Cutting out half the cortex doesn't stop someone from functioning. These brains are damaged brains, but the brains of habilis and erectus are not damaged, but normal evolved organs that give their owner enough intelligence to survive in a tough setting. It gives them enough intelligence to make stone tools, control fire, make clothing, and shelter etc. I think that is the mistake everyone makes, comparing damaged people with low intelligence and thinking somehow, that applies to fossil man.

Consider this, even speech can be recovered even if the speech center is removed. A question I will discuss below is, "Is it that the brain has spare capacity or is it that the soul/consciousness doesn't arise from the material brain?"

"Instances of extensive recovery from brain damage suggest that the brain has spare capacity. In a follow-up of 50 infantile hemiplegics who sustained surgical removal of all neocortex of one hemisphere for intractable seizures or other injuries, Wilson (1970) reported that all but one developed normal speech or recovered it completely irrespective of which hemisphere had been removed (Wilson, 1970, p. 166). Smith and Sugar (1975) carried out a comprehensive neuropsychological follow-up on a patient at ages 21 and 26 who had had left hemispherectomy for seizures as a 5 1/2-year-old boy. He demonstrated superior language and intellect, including WAIS verbal IQ of 126 and performance IQ of 102, had graduated from a university, and was working as a traffic controller. Normal psychological function also was observed in 279 cases of hydrocephalus with onset before the end of the first year of life (Berker et al., 1983). Most remarkable is one young man in whom a CAT scan shows ventricular dilatation occupying over 95% of the intracranial space. When tested on the Michigan Neuropsychological Battery at age 25, he had graduated from Sheffield University with honors in mathematics, had a verbal IQ of 140 and performance IQ of 130, and had been successfully employed for several years.23


References found here

Barbarian. I translate the chinese at the bottom of your post as 'savage noble earth'. Ye man shen tu
How far off am I?