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Copyright (c) 2009 Mike Bond

I cannot understand this movement called “Intelligent Design.” Either there’s Evolution, or Creation. You cannot chart a sort of middle course, saying that something or somebody was responsible for the start of everything, but that it wasn’t God.

We may dispose of this, for its very name makes no sense. So, too, can we dispose of Creationism. Or can we? The Creationists maintain that the world is 10,000 years old and that man, in his present form, is a mere 6,000 years.

The extraordinary fact to bear in mind is that the above hypothesis was calculated in the 18th. century by James Ussher, bishop of Armagh. At that time, the Bible was considered the inerrant Word of God, and the good bishop, in an effort to date the beginning of mankind and the world, came up with the following conclusions.

He started with Adam, calculated his age as 930 years when he died, and from there counted seven generations until he reached Methuselah, who died at a sprightly 969 years.

His grandson, Noah, fell off the twig when he was 950 years of age, and Ussher was then able to pinpoint the date of Creation as 4004 B.C. One of his successors, a Dr. John Lightfoot, came up with even more startling accuracy. He stated that Adam was created at 9 a.m. on the 23rd. October! No-one was prepared to argue this date and incredibly it may still be seen in the margins of some modern Bibles.

Despite positive proof to the contrary, that man did indeed walk the earth a great deal further back than that, everyone was reluctant to argue Lightfoot’s findings, and studies were held back for many years because of this.

Now this has been disproved emphatically and absolutely for many years. I won’t even enter into the argument about Darwin’s “Origin of Species.” Yes, there are gaps, but generally speaking, he was basically correct.

The world is now thought to be 4,600,000,000 years old, but this doesn’t necessarily blow Creationism out of the water, if this is the belief to which you hold. It’s simply wrong science to say that man peeks over a gap of 6,000 years.

There may very well be a God who created Heaven and Earth. It’s simply that Bible scholars cling to their beliefs with such tenacity, despite anything to the contrary, that they’re simply not prepared to consider absolute proof.

Dinosaurs tramped the earth a mere 70,000,000 years ago. Henry Gee, senior editor at the scientific journal “Nature,” reports that a human-like skull has been found in Chad which could be as old as 7,000,000 years. The significance of this find is that it is of such great age, it comes from a time when modern humans hadn’t long diverged from the time when chimpanzees would have emerged.

So, there we have it. Far from man and woman suddenly arriving, (from where?) in their present form a few thousand years ago, leading scientists are finding that the beginnings of humanity seems to be going farther and farther back than was ever imagined.

Remember, too, that dating has improved in leaps and bounds from even thirty years ago. Scientists may now pinpoint an artifact dated, say, 30,000 years old to literally months, not years.

So let’s clear the drawing board, as it were, and have a look at where we really did pop our heads over history’s horizons.

In 1980, some limestone caves in Atapuerca, Northern Spain, yielded a treasure trove of knowledge. Scientists have discovered 32 people in a 45 foot shaft named “La Sima de los Huesos,” (The Pit of Bones). They’re dated to around 300,000 years and make up 75% hominid fossils between 100,000 and 1.5 million years old.

Now these chaps had well developed brains and were skilled huntsmen. Even before this, however, we had “Homo ergaster,” some 2,000,000 years ago. We’d have recognized him and her as related to us. They were largely hairless, tall and slim. They had a limited range of sounds, and probably communicated more by signs.

The first people to arrive in Briton appear in Boxgrove, West Sussex about 500,000 years ago. Close, but no cigar. The oldest goes to a site in East Anglia, where a man dating back to 700,000 years was discovered in June 2002.

At the Boxgrove site, a heavily built man was found, his size calculated at around 6 feet tall and weighing about 200 lbs. As an aside, the oldest weapon yet discovered was a wooden spear head, some 250,000 years old. It was found at Clacton-on-Sea in Essex.

This brings us to the Neanderthals, and we’ll have a look at them in the next article.

I must thank the BBC Home Page, Science and Nature, for some of the information in this article.

It’s fascinated me for a long time from whence we came. How did it really all start? And why do Creationists still insist that their dates are correct? It flies completely in the face of all sound scientific evidence. But more and more is being discovered every day, it seems, and while I’ve admitted that there are gaps, errors, and puzzles yet to be fathomed, science is closing in on much more accurate data and in so doing, making the lives of our distant ancestors more exciting as time goes by.