Question about the "neanderthals"

[River88]

I have a question for Christians here who do not believe in evolution... how do you explain the neanderthals? I heard they never existed, and the "reamains" were a hoax. So how do other Christians who don't believe in evolution explain this?

 

[Bushido216]

They usually try to say something like scientists only found part of one skeleton and he probably had MS.

However, that fails to account for the countless other specimens we found, including children, who all had that hunched body structure.

 

[Ark Guy]

A little while ago I saw a show on TV called Origins produced by Cornerstone Television out of Wall PA. The host of the show, Russ Bixler had a guest on named Dr. Jack Cuozzo who is an orthodontist of 30 years.
The show was most interesting and covered the topic of human longevity.
Dr. Cuozzo talked about the neanderthal man and their appearance. One of his points were that studies show that the human head does not stop growing as we age. He cited references from a study done by a Dr. Rolf Gordon Behrents, from the U of Michigan while he was working on his Ph.D.
Dr Behrents work involved the measurement of people heads when they were 19, late 40’s and some at age 80.
What was discovered was that the head changed in this fashion;
the brow ridge came forward
the jaw came forward
the nose got bigger
the chin came forward
the cheeks came forward and flattened out
the teeth came forward
the back of the head started to point out
Some of the measurements show that the nose moved 1.3 mm in 30 years while the browridge moved forward and upward 1.5 mm and the cheek bone moved 1.1 mm in the same 30 year period.
Dr. Cuozzo’s son in law then took the same data and plotted it and extrapolated the growth out to 300 then 500 years. The 500 year age would be about the age of Noah and some of the other early bible characters that lived for a long time. At 300 years,he show the pictures that showed mans jaw was square at the gonial angle and the face was moving forward and downward. At 500 years there was no chin point , a very long face and a huge brow.
His conclusion is that the large browed neanderthal man was just an old human and the features are a natural manifestation of aging .

 

[Bushido216]

Okay, first he was an orthodontist and this research was outside of his field of expertise. Second, show me a scientific article in which this is referenced. You won't find any. Second, don't you think that the kind of morphology found in neanderthals would be really freaking obvious in old people today?

As well, how do you explain the skeletal remains of children with common morphology to their elders?

 

[Buck72]

Okay, first he was an orthodontist and this research was outside of his field of expertise.

Oh brother, we can have a FIELD DAY with this sort of disqualification!!

Charles Lyell was a lawyer
Charles Darwin was an apostate seminary graduate

Yet just these two men alone have put more of their conjecture in your head than any real scienist. Come on! I could go for hours on the NON-SCIENTIST evolutionary "founders". Ugh.

Second, show me a scientific article in which this is referenced. You won't find any.

Translation: "Show me an evolutionist that agrees with your finding".

Second, don't you think that the kind of morphology found in neanderthals would be really freaking obvious in old people today?

What if people a few thousand years ago lived to be REALLY, REALLY OLD...like the Bible says? I bet their brows would get kinda hunky after a few hundred years.

 

[Chi_Cygni]

But people lived to lesser ages in the past.

No one has ever found a skeleton with evidence of great ages.

There are scholars who claim the ages in the Bible are mistranslations.

 

[Ark Guy]

But people lived to lesser ages in the past.

No one has ever found a skeleton with evidence of great ages.

There are scholars who claim the ages in the Bible are mistranslations.

There are also biblical scholars that claim Jesus was myth...your point?

 

[Bushido216]

Oh brother, we can have a FIELD DAY with this sort of disqualification!!

Charles Lyell was a lawyer
Charles Darwin was an apostate seminary graduate

Yet just these two men alone have put more of their conjecture in your head than any real scienist. Come on! I could go for hours on the NON-SCIENTIST evolutionary "founders". Ugh.

Translation: "Show me an evolutionist that agrees with your finding".

What if people a few thousand years ago lived to be REALLY, REALLY OLD...like the Bible says? I bet their brows would get kinda hunky after a few hundred years.

I fail to see your point about Lyell and Darwin. I don't know much about Lyell, but Darwin spent his lifetime taking courses and being the student of many, many esteemed experts in their respective fields. Regardless, it was a different time and many of the pioneers of modern day science worked out of their respective fields, it's the way things were done. Today, however, that's not the way it works.

And no, I was looking for a peer-reviewed publication on the subject. Have you ever noticed that most creationists post their works in non-main stream publications? No one knows they exist.

And show me how people could possibly live longer than they do today, given that they have less medical knowledge and fewer ways of combating disease, poorer ways of gaining food and a host of natural factors just aiming to kill them.

 

[Ark Guy]

bushido:
And show me how people could possibly live longer than they do today, given that they have less medical knowledge and fewer ways of combating disease, poorer ways of gaining food and a host of natural factors just aiming to kill them.

The means are numerous.

For example, here's one. What if the genetic pool right after the creation contained no illness.

Of course if you want to claim that the old ages presented in the book of Genesis weren't quite like what was written, then just what are they analagous to?

 

[River88]

A little while ago I saw a show on TV called Origins produced by Cornerstone Television out of Wall PA. The host of the show, Russ Bixler had a guest on named Dr. Jack Cuozzo who is an orthodontist of 30 years.
The show was most interesting and covered the topic of human longevity.
Dr. Cuozzo talked about the neanderthal man and their appearance. One of his points were that studies show that the human head does not stop growing as we age. He cited references from a study done by a Dr. Rolf Gordon Behrents, from the U of Michigan while he was working on his Ph.D.
Dr Behrents work involved the measurement of people heads when they were 19, late 40’s and some at age 80.
What was discovered was that the head changed in this fashion;
the brow ridge came forward
the jaw came forward
the nose got bigger
the chin came forward
the cheeks came forward and flattened out
the teeth came forward
the back of the head started to point out
Some of the measurements show that the nose moved 1.3 mm in 30 years while the browridge moved forward and upward 1.5 mm and the cheek bone moved 1.1 mm in the same 30 year period.
Dr. Cuozzo’s son in law then took the same data and plotted it and extrapolated the growth out to 300 then 500 years. The 500 year age would be about the age of Noah and some of the other early bible characters that lived for a long time. At 300 years,he show the pictures that showed mans jaw was square at the gonial angle and the face was moving forward and downward. At 500 years there was no chin point , a very long face and a huge brow.
His conclusion is that the large browed neanderthal man was just an old human and the features are a natural manifestation of aging .

Thank you for the explanation...very satisfying! God bless you!

 

[Ark Guy]

River88,
I'm sure if you do a google search on Dr. Cuozzo you'll discover more information.

Of course I would also imagine the evos have an anti-Dr. Cuozzo page.

 

[lucaspa]

He cited references from a study done by a Dr. Rolf Gordon Behrents, from the U of Michigan while he was working on his Ph.D.
Dr Behrents work involved the measurement of people heads when they were 19, late 40’s and some at age 80.
What was discovered was that the head changed in this fashion;
the brow ridge came forward
the jaw came forward
the nose got bigger
the chin came forward
the cheeks came forward and flattened out
the teeth came forward
the back of the head started to point out
Some of the measurements show that the nose moved 1.3 mm in 30 years while the browridge moved forward and upward 1.5 mm and the cheek bone moved 1.1 mm in the same 30 year period.
Dr. Cuozzo’s son in law then took the same data and plotted it and extrapolated the growth out to 300 then 500 years.

Ark Guy, do you have the references? Doing a PubMed search on Behrents and then looking at Related Articles I find these articles that seem to be relevant:
1: Behrents RG. The biological basis for understanding craniofacial growth during adulthood.Prog Clin Biol Res. 1985;187:307-19. Review. No abstract available. PMID: 3903761 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]2: Behrents RG. The continuity of mandibular form in mandibulofacial dysostosis.J Dent Res. 1982 Nov;61(11):1240-2. No abstract available. PMID: 6958720 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]3: Israel H. Age factor and the pattern of change in craniofacial structures.Am J Phys Anthropol. 1973 Jul;39(1):111-28. No abstract available. PMID: 4351575 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
As you can see, there are no abstracts available. Before I go ahead and order them via Loansome Doc, I would like to know if they are the ones.

Now, what I see is 5 problems.
1. The original measurements and linear change to 80 years. Is that valid? Without the original papers to look at I can't know.

2. The extrapolation. Can you really make a linear extrapolation like that of the bones? After all, once the suture lines in the calvaria close, the shape of the cranium is pretty well fixed.

3. Are the neandertal skeletons really 500 year old individuals? In this case you are looking only at the head, but what about the rest of the skeleton? Since Noah is after the Fall, he is prone to all the degenerative diseases we have, including such things as osteoarthritis.

4. The mtDNA evidence that says neandertals and sapiens are not the same species. Why would Noah's mtDNA be so very different from Cro-Magnon's or yours and mine?

5. The tools found with neandertals. These are always a more primitive tool set than found with Cro-Mangnon and other sapiens. What's worse, if Neandertals represent Noah, then they would know metal working since Noah had to know that in order to build the Ark -- unless you are suggesting he made the Ark with stone tools. But if that is the case, why didn't Noah have as good a stone tools as the Cro-Magnon contemporaries? You would think that living longer would give him time to experiment and discover better stone tools than people living before and after him.

When you look at all the data, Cuozzo's hyothesis becomes weak at best, and it looks to me like it is refuted outright.

 

[lucaspa]

bushido:
And show me how people could possibly live longer than they do today, given that they have less medical knowledge and fewer ways of combating disease, poorer ways of gaining food and a host of natural factors just aiming to kill them.

The means are numerous.

For example, here's one. What if the genetic pool right after the creation contained no illness.

Of course if you want to claim that the old ages presented in the book of Genesis weren't quite like what was written, then just what are they analagous to?

How could that be? We are not talking the human gene pool, but microorganisms. Why would none of them make humans sick? If disease entered the world after the Fall, then disease is present at Noah's time, isn't it?

They are analogous to looking back in time and thinking that your grandfather had it better than you. We still do that today even tho it is us that live in a "Golden Age". You still hear people wish for the "good old days".

If you look at the other religions of the time, they also have ancient heros that lived a long time. Everyone at the time thought that there had been a previous time when people lived longer than they did.

This legend may have a basis in fact. Hunter-gatherers generally do have a longer life expectancy than subsistence farmers. Farming and herding does provide a more regular diet and does increase the amount of food produced per acre, which in turn means an increased population. But the side effects are a more restricted diet with vitamin deficiencies, the danger of famine, and the increase in disease due to poor sanitation and the close proximity of all those people. That all tends to reduce lifespan. Farming is also harder work than hunting-gathering. So people tend to age faster.

So the long lives in Genesis 4-5 may represent looking back to their hunter-gatherer past when people did live longer than 30 years.

 

[lucaspa]

River88,
I'm sure if you do a google search on Dr. Cuozzo you'll discover more information.

Of course I would also imagine the evos have an anti-Dr. Cuozzo page.

In TheBear's thread on how to have a good discussion, it was decided that posting sources is a positive thing to do. You obviously got your Cuozzo information somewhere. I would think it would be the polite and courteous thing to do to tell us where and give us the site. Thank you.

 

[Ark Guy]

Why don't you evos simmer down? sheeze.

I presented where I got my information in my earlier post. If you don't agree with Dr. Cuozzo so be it. To be honest I really don't care. I was just reporting what he had said on a tv program.

Why is there so much hate presented by the Theo-Evos?

 

[Bushido216]

Because you post nonsense such as that and pass it off as real science.

That could be it.

 

[Chi_Cygni]

The following is on the www.flood-myth.com site. I have heard other references to this in the past and it seems to make more sense than people living 500 years or more.


The numbers in Genesis 5 were mistranslated
It is not possible to show in this small web page a complete analysis of the Genesis 5 numbers. For the technical details and arguments see chapter 7 in the Noah's Ark book.

The oldest of the antediluvians listed in Genesis 5 was Methuselah who has become the epitome of longevity because he was reported to have lived 969 years. Noah was given an equally incredible age of 950 in Genesis 9:29. There are three serious problems with the Genesis numbers: men do not live to be nine hundred years, men do not father children when they are over a century old, and why did they wait so long to have children? All three of these problems disappear if we make two simple assumptions: the Septuagint (the ancient Greek version of Genesis) has the original numbers and each of the numbers has one decimal place in modern notation. The original Genesis numbers were not written in decimal notation. Instead the numbers were recorded in an archaic, pre-cuneiform, sign-value, Sumerian number system, similar in some ways to Roman numerals.

The fantastic stories about these men living over nine hundred years and not getting around to fathering their children until they had lived a century or two, are the result of an ancient mistranslation of the original numbers. Except for Noah, each young man fathered his first son during his late teens or early twenties, just as young men do today, and they lived into their seventies or early eighties. Noah lived to be 83 years old and Methuselah lived to be 85. The river flood of 2900 BC occurred when Noah was 48 years old and he had been king for ten years.

Nearly all modern translations of Genesis are derived from the Masoretic (Hebrew) Text, because it is generally the most reliable. But there are also two other versions of Genesis: the Samaritan (in an early Hebrew script) and the Septuagint (a Greek translation of an early Hebrew text). The Septuagint numbers were closer to the original numbers, because when scholars translated the Hebrew Pentateuch (which includes Genesis) into Greek at Alexandria, Egypt about 280 BC, they used a Hebrew text that was edited in the 5th and 4th centuries BC. This text was centuries older than the proto-Masoretic Text selected as the official text by the Masoretes after 70 CE, a text that was already corrupted by scribes trying to correct what they thought were errors.

Noah was a Sumerian king of Shuruppak during the Jemdet Nasr period which ended with the river flood of 2900 BC. The Genesis 5 numbers, representing ages of Noah and his ancestors, were based on records written in clay before the river flood in an archaic (pre-cuneiform) Sumerian number system. Contemporaneous records of the deaths of each king and other wealthy land owners in Shuruppak were probably created by taxation scribes, so that tax collectors would know who was responsible for paying the real-estate taxes. These separate records were dated by year name and stored with similar death records in the temple archives in Shuruppak from before and after the flood of 2900 BC. These records included Noah's death.

The flood story was first written in clay during the Early Dynastic IIIa period (ca. 2600-2500 BC). The scribe who compiled the flood story from various oral traditions about previous floods may have been the same scribe who searched the archives for records of Noah and his ancestors and calculated the Genesis 5 numbers from raw birth and death records which the scribe found in the archives. The scribe calculated the Genesis 5 numbers using an archaic Sumerian number systems that was used only in Shuruppak and only during the Early Dynastic IIIa period.

When the compiler of the Genesis 5 numbers calculated the years/seasons data in years and tenths of years, he used one of several number systems then in common use. He used one or more archaic number sign for tens, a different sign for units and a different sign for tenths. This is called sign-value notation. A scribe familiar with these archaic signs might still have difficulty interpreting them correctly if he did not know in which number system they were written and the context in which they were written. Hundreds of years later during the Old Babylonian period (1800-1600 BC), when a different scribe translated these numbers into cuneiform in the classical Sumerian sexagesimal number system, he erroneously assumed that the archaic numbers were written in the Sumerian proto-sexagesimal number system designed for counting discrete objects such as animals, when actually the numbers were originally written in a number system designed for counting volumes of grain. This error converted tens of years to hundreds, years to tens of years, tenths of years to years, and also inflated the ages at death. Genesis 5 was based on these mistranslated numbers.

Attempts to justify the large numbers of Genesis 5, even by those who dismiss them as mythical, are often based on the still larger numbers found in the Sumerian King Lists which have tens of thousands of years for each king before the flood. These cuneiform tablets give the numbers in shar, the cuneiform sign for 3600. For example Ziusudra, the Sumerian Noah, ruled for 10 shar years, usually translated as 36,000 years.

But the sign for year was misunderstood by a scribe who translated the original pre-flood king list into sexagesimal cuneiform numerals. The scribe was apparently not aware that on his received tablet the old U4 diamond-shaped sign that resembled shar was not shar and did not mean 3600. The U4 signs were the old way of writing years.The Sumerian Noah reigned for 10 years, not 10 shar years. The Sumerian king list numbers were mistranslated by an ancient scribe, just as the Genesis 5 numbers were mistranslated by another ancient scribe.

The Sumerian King List mentions the flood after the reigns of SU.KUR.LAM and his son Ziusudra. The Genesis 5 list ends with the flood after the genealogy of Lamech and and his son Noah. Lamech was SU.KUR.LAM and Noah was Ziusudra. They were father and son and both were kings of Shuruppak. The names on the Sumerian King List prior to SUR.KUR.LAM were also kings but were not Noah's ancestors. Noah's Genesis 5 ancestors were contemporaries of the kings on the Sumerian King List. Chapter 7 of the Noah's Ark book determines which of Noah's ancestors in Genesis 5 were contemporaries with which Sumerian king.

The earliest of Noah's ancestors in Genesis 5 was "Adam" (which means "man" in Hebrew) a nameless ancestor who was the first person to own Noah's ancestral land in Shuruppak. The "Adam" of Genesis 5 was not the first man; he was the first of Noah's ancestors to own recorded Shuruppak real estate. His actual name has been lost. The Genesis 5 genealogy begins about 3113 BC and spans almost the entire Jemdet Nasr period which ended with the river flood of 2900 BC. Shuruppak was first built during the Jemdet Nasr period. No Shuruppak real estate tax records existed prior to 3113 BC because Shuruppak had not yet been built. Click here for a table of the reconstructed numbers from Genesis 5.

The Genesis 5 numbers were mistranslated by an ancient scribe who confused archaic proto-sexagesimal number signs with cuneiform sexagesimal number signs. The numbers in the Sumerian king lists were also mistranslated by an ancient scribe who confused the archaic sign for year with the cuneiform sign for 3600. For a detailed analysis of these numbers, see chapter 7 of the Noah's Ark book.

 

[lucaspa]

Why don't you evos simmer down? sheeze.

I presented where I got my information in my earlier post.

With all respect, you didn't. You said it was Cuozzo but never exactly where you got it. Not a website, not a book

If you don't agree with Dr. Cuozzo so be it. To be honest I really don't care. I was just reporting what he had said on a tv program.

It's not a matter of agreement. It's a matter of searching for truth. You presented a number of claims that you said were truth. We are discussing whether they really are truth or not.

Why is there so much hate presented by the Theo-Evos?

What specifically did you think was hateful about my posts? Be specific, please. Contradicting your claims by itself does not qualify as hateful.

 

[lucaspa]

Chi_Cygni, while the problem of ages in your post is fascinating, and does refute the interpretation of the vast ages, the text still has some problems.

1. I have never heard of an independent source for Noah outside Genesis. This is saying Noah was a king, which is not mentioned in the Bible. Now, is the discussion of the clay tablets for real -- do we have the clay tablets -- or is it speculation on the author's part and presented as fact?

2. The article fails to mention that there is an earlier Flood story in the Gilgamesh epic -- the story of Unt-napushtim. The Noah story seems to be plagiarized from that, but this article fails to mention it and acts as tho the story were original in the Bible.

3. The article fails to mention that there are two Flood stories -- the J and P -- that were woven together by the Redactor of Genesis but which can still be easily separated.

4. "The Sumerian King List mentions the flood after the reigns of SU.KUR.LAM and his son Ziusudra. The Genesis 5 list ends with the flood after the genealogy of Lamech and and his son Noah. Lamech was SU.KUR.LAM and Noah was Ziusudra. "

This seems a real stretch. Just because there is a king's list doesn't mean that Lamech and Noah were the kings. There were lots of other people living at the time other than the kings! This is speculation presented as fact and causes me think that the age numbers are also speculation presented as fact.

 

[Karl - Liberal Backslider]

What I'm amazed about with Cuozzo's version of events is how it is that even the skeletons of Neanderthal children show the same features he puts down to advanced age.

I think his model is pretty much dead in the water.

If the creationist side put half the critical thought into their own models as they do into mainstream ones I think they'd find they had precious little left.