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One of the most common phrases we hear on the media (not that it is the
media’s fault) is the one which goes something like this: “20,000 years ago
. . .” or “30,000 years ago . . .” or some similar age estimation.
Mankind, we are told repeatedly, is ancient. Mankind, we are also told, has been
living on Earth for tens of thousands of years, in fact his lineage is supposed
to go back more than a million years.
And what we are shown, by way of evidence, is a few bones, or a few
stones which were once used to form the walls of a building (now excavated), or
some cave paintings, or some artefacts such as stone axe heads etc. Whatever the
‘experts’ dig up they immediately attach dates to, and more often than not
those dates stretch back further than 6000 years.
This of course is flying in the face of Biblical chronology, because the
Bible allows for a history not longer than about 6000 years. (4000 years from
Creation to Christ, and 2000 years from Christ to today, approximately) So who
is right – the ‘experts’ who propose that the history of Man goes back
tens of thousands of years, or the Bible?
A typical case of this assumed dating appeared this year (2001) when
human bones were discovered in Australia. They were confidently dated at 60,000
years, and described as the remains of those of an aborigine.
The question logically arises – if there were aborigines living in Australia
60,000 years ago, where are the remains? Were they so ephemeral that they made
no tools, built no homes, erected no monuments? Did they hide all evidence of
their passing? Did their population in fact remain totally static for thousands
of years, despite the fact that Australia was supposed to be wetter and more
fertile at that time?
And even more curious is the fact that, given 60,000 years, they seem to
have totally destroyed their own graves. Surely, after 50,000 years or so there
should be at least a few thousand graves? But there are almost none to show
their passing.
Taking a wider view and looking at worlds population statistics we come
up with some interesting facts. If we take the recorded world population
increase and attach a figure of only half of one percent to it, and allow for
wars, famines, diseases and disasters, we come to the current world population
in only 4000 years. So many billions of people in so short a time? Yes, this is
a reasonable estimate, yet some ‘experts’ would have us believe that Mankind
has been on this planet for tens of thousands of years, so . . .
where are all the people?
Some ‘experts’ claim that Man (as opposed to apes) has been on Earth
for 4 million years. If we work within a time span of just one million years and
give the population a half a percent increase, we arrive at a population
expressed as 10 to the power of 2100. This number is actually smaller than the
number of electrons in the whole universe. Obviously population statistics do
not support the dating which most or many people assume is correct.
It is, at present, the year 2001. At this moment there are about 6
billion people living on the planet, many of whom are crowded into cities,
where, I am sure, they get the impression that the world is very overpopulated.
This, of course, is just an illusion, because most of the world is sparsely
populated. But according to the Bible the present world population stems from a
handful of people who departed from a ship only some 4500 years ago. There is a
huge difference between 4500 and 60,000.
The current growth rate of the world’s population is about 1.7% per
year. In other words, for every 100 million people, 1.7 million are added every
year.
Starting with a handful of people (eight in all) at the time of Noah’s
emergence from the Ark after the Flood, we need only 0.5% per year growth rate
to produce the present world population.
Of course population growth has never been constant, because there have
been wars, and climate changes, and times of disease and so on. The Middle Ages,
for example, seem to have been a time of slow growth, but the Bible tells us
that immediately after the flood world population increased rapidly.
Shem had five sons, Ham had four and Japheth had seven. If we assume they
had the same number of daughters then they averaged 10.7 children per couple. In
the next generation Shem had 14 grandsons, Ham 28, and Japheth 23, or 130
children in total. That is an average of 8.1 per couple.
Let us take the average of all births after the Flood as 8.53. The
average age at which the first son was born in the seven generations after the
Flood was 35 – 29, in Shem’s line, with an average of 31, so a generation
time of 40 years is reasonable. (Gen.11:10-24). So, just 4 generations after the
Flood there would have been a world population of about 3,000 people. This
represents a population growth rate of 3.7% per year, or a doubling time about
every 19 years).
If there were 300 million people in the world at the time of Christ this
would require a growth rate of only 0.75%, or a doubling every 92 years.
So it is obvious that the present world population is about right, given
that people began to increase only about 4,500 years ago.
The
Stone Age.
There are many ‘experts’ who claim that Mankind went through a Stone
Age some 100,000 years ago. At that time they estimate the world population to
have been between one million to ten million people. However, fossil evidence
shows that for as far back as we can find, people used to bury their dead, often
along with artefacts. If there were just one million people living 100,000 years
ago, with an average generation time of 25 years, they would have buried some 4
billion people and many tons of artefacts. On the other hand, if there had been
10 million people, there should be some 40 billion bodies buried around the
world along with millions of tons of artefacts.
The ‘experts’ tell us that the skeleton found in Australia was 60,000
years old, yet the bones have survived, so where are the billions of skeletons
and artefacts left over from the millions of other people? Why have their bones
not survived too?
In reality, the number of human fossils is very small, which indicates
that if there ever was a Stone Age, it occurred only a few thousand years ago,
probably soon after the incident at Babel, when God scattered the people across
the planet by confusing their languages. Having lost or forgotten their
technology, these intelligent but wandering humans were reduced to more basic
forms of subsistence – what we might call ‘primitive’, or ‘Stone Age’
existence. (But just as a side note, it is being acknowledged more and more
today that those ‘Stone Age’ people were actually highly skilled. Their
abilities at chipping stones to form adzes and knives, their burial rites, their
artwork, all add up to reveal a lot more than ignorant, beetle-browed savages
chewing on raw meat. Just as in those modern-day ‘survivor’ stories on TV
and movie theatre, modern people are quickly reduced to ‘primitive’ means
when their technology is removed from them)
In 1788, when Europeans began to settle in Australia, it was estimated
that there were about 300,000 Aboriginal people, yet some ‘experts’ tell us
these people have been in Australia for some 60,000 years. Obviously there is no
way a mere 300,000 people could have exhausted the resources of Australia and
remained static for 60,000 years.
If we use the Bible chronology however, we come up with a far more
reasonable result. Starting with only 20 people, who may have migrated to
Australia some 3,500 years ago, and given only 0.28% growth per year, we arrive
at 300,000 people in about the time span we have allowed for. However, this same
very low rate of increase, stretched over 60,000 years, gives us a population
which is higher than there are stars in the Milky Way.
So it is apparent that, given the assumptions of the ‘experts’ we come to conclusions which are totally unbelievable, but if we accept the Bible as accurate history, we arrive at conclusions which match the available evidence. So which do we want to believe – the so-called ‘experts’, or the Bible?