From these and numerous other discussions I’ve had over a period of 15 years, it seems that there are still two main theories which captivate the minds of modern humans. The ‘evolution path’ and the ‘creation path’. I have personally grappled with the conflict between the two for nearly two decades, only to discover that there is a third possibility! One which may possibly satisfy the fanatical beliefs of both sides, while opening their eyes to new realities that have emerged out of our ancient past.
While new discoveries and evidence are continually being presented, it keeps moving the finish line. Every time some smart person postulates the latest unassailable argument supported by remarkable evidence, it just stimulates more debate and controversy which inevitably leads to more discoveries and more debate. It is truly a great journey of discovery which no person should lay claim to hastily. Scientists and anthropologists will continue to differ on this subject for years to come, but I do feel a convergence of the two doctrines is unavoidable. Just recently I heard a priest talk about how he would welcome any alien species as the miracle of God’s creation. He made a clear point of differing with previous religious dogma, which places man at the centre of creation, god’s great masterpiece, and as the pinnacle of intelligence and master of the beasts.
It is impossible to argue against evolution as it has been presented to us over the past 150 years. We are surrounded by evidence everywhere which supports evolution in the animal world and in the plant world. This is not the challenge I am raising in this book. My struggle lies with the last few hundred thousand years on this planet which saw the emergence of humanity and the disappearance of the hominid creature who preceded us.
I need to quickly draw a link between the words ‘Humankind’ and ‘humanity’. I present that you cannot have humanity without humankind and therefore the two are inextricably linked, with subtle differences in our personal interpretation. So I purposely use the two randomly to illustrate this simple relationship. Evolution has played an important role in how the two have entwined as man has evolved. There are however some fascinating shortcomings in the Darwinian theory which have already been attacked endlessly by much smarter people than me.
It does seem that Darwin may not have had it all correct. Darwin actually borrowed much of his doctrine from many other scientists and brilliant people before him, sometimes seemingly distorting the theories to support his own. I trust that if he had lived today, he would most likely change his mind dramatically about his ‘natural selection’ theory based on the new evidence available.
It was not actually Charles Darwin who first coined the phrase ‘natural selection’, when he published his controversial ‘bible’ on evolution in 1859, called On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. It was another biologist by the name of Patrick Matthew in 1831, who referred to the “natural process of selection”. He saw it as a more descriptive term than ‘the feedback idea’ which was used leading up to that point. Natural selection was described as 'the properties which best permit particular individuals possessing them to survive and reproduce their own genetic variants, will increase from generation to generation, more in proportion than other individuals with less beneficial genetic structures'. In a nutshell, what this really means is ‘the survival of the fittest’. There was another concept which Darwin seems to have borrowed; the analogy of the branching tree of life, which was described by Alfred Russel Wallace in 1855.
One of the very strong points which Darwin makes is that evolution does not happen in ‘jumps’. It took about 120 years for Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe to show that evolution does happen in jumps with the help of viruses and bacteria that arrive on Earth from space in a process called Panspermia. These new arrivals from space constantly mutate, infect the cells of plants and creatures and quite quickly cause dramatic changes in the DNA structure of the host.
To demonstrate this outlandish proposition very basically, I would like you to take your mind back to your school classroom wall. Picture the poster with the chronological stages of human evolution. The ape-like creature on the left; the slightly taller ape-like creature to its right with less hair; and a slightly taller and more upright ape-man to its right with even less hair; eventually we end up with a handsome man on the extreme right representing modern humans, as the pinnacle of evolution. From ape to human, just like that. They show us these simplistic illustrations which leave children with preconceived ideas that this evolution thing is pretty well documented and understood. They do not tell the children that this is just one hypothesis of how we became human. There is a deafening silence from the anthropologists about what exactly happened in the gaps between the different stages of evolution. We would be wiser to teach our children the full truth instead of the sweetened half-truth. There are giant jumps of evolution between every creature on the evolution poster. How is that possible? What happened to the thousands of evolutionary steps between every stage? Or, did the creature on the left live for millions of years, when suddenly it gave birth to a creature which looked nothing like it? What could have sparked such a dramatic change? Clearly it was a genetically driven change, but what would have caused such a dramatic genetic deviation so quickly, when it was happy in its previous form for millennia?
At the end of the 18th century, James Hutton felt unhappy with the concept of gradual evolution when relating it to the geological activity on Earth and the principles of uniformity in geology. He stated that “The processes at work on and inside the Earth have been operating in the same general way throughout geological history. The overall environment has remained broadly the same for 500 million years, while life has changed dramatically from simple neurological beginnings, to highly complex present day forms. How could this measure of change come about in a broadly unchanging environment, if species were always optimised to their maximum extent?”.
Since the unearthing of ‘Lucy’ and ‘Mrs. Ples’, the ‘Taung skull’ and the ‘Turkana boy’, which were all landmarks in the field of archaeology, thousands upon thousands of fossil skeletons of hominids and other human ancestors or relatives have been found. Just when we think we have a clear picture of how humans evolved, and a better understanding of the great apes that lived alongside them, we are faced with a new discovery which forces us to rethink some of the fundamentals. Just recently, two major discoveries shook our views quite dramatically. In September 2003 ‘Ebu’ was unearthed in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores. Standing at only about 1 metre tall, she is the smallest adult hominid known. It is estimated that Ebu lived from around 95,000 years ago until as recently as 13,000 years ago. This was the first time we actually realised that we were not alone on this planet until relatively recently, but shared it with people from another species! Because Ebu was not a simple Homo sapiens, she was apparently human.
Another discovery was made about the great ape family, in Spain during 2005, near Barcelona. Salvador Maya-Sola and Miquel Crusafont unearthed a fossilised skull and partial skeleton of a great ape, Pierolapithecus catalaunicus. This great ape is thought to have lived in the Middle Miocene period between 12 and 13.5 million years ago, when the great apes which include gorillas, chimpanzees and humans, split from the lesser apes like gibbons and siamangs. Although it is possible that this was the ancestor of the great apes, the major difference is that this great ape could not swing through the trees. I mention these examples of very recent discoveries to prove the simple point, that the more we seem to think we know, the more surprises we receive to remind us that we know very little. We should keep an open mind at all times and realise that while we evolve as humans, our evolving genome forces us to ask more complex questions and discover even more staggering answers.
Let us now take a journey into our human past to realise how young and fragile our species is and how little time we have spent on this Earth. This is an important journey we need to take, to place the argument between creation and evo
lution squarely on the table. Armed with this knowledge, we will postulate a new combination of the two theories, which will offend neither those who believe that God made all life on Earth, nor the evolutionists who cling onto the Darwinian doctrine of natural selection. We will however need to stress the important differences between ‘God’ & ‘god’. A little technicality with universal implications, which seems to have evaded the attention of humanity for millennia.
• 2004 AD - The modern Olympics return to Greece where it started in 1896, displaying the human struggle to hold onto peace, camaraderie and fair competition.
• 1903 AD - Wilbur and Orville Wright make the first claim to have flown a heavier than air machine - the aeroplane.
• 1452 AD - Leonardo da Vinci is born to become the central and most influential figure of the Renaissance period.
• 570 AD - Muhammad was born in Mecca. Inspired by the Jewish and Christian monotheism, he went on to recite the Koran which was inspired by the angel Gabriel. This book united the Muslims under the principles of Islam and gave birth to the youngest of the world’s great religions.
• Year 0 - This actual date is debatable. Birth of Christ, the start of the modern calendar. Jesus Christ introduced a revolutionary new philosophy of love and peace among humanity. This was a dramatic break from the Old Testament of the Bible and he was seen as the ‘Messiah’ by some and a traitor by others. Jesus was probably the most influential and the most controversial human to have walked the Earth. His gospel inspired prophets, kings and presidents, but it was also abused as a symbol of power by dictators and religious groups even before he was born and this abuse is still continuing today. The debate goes on: Was he the son of God in the body of a man, or just a prophet who was pushed by the needs of the people of the day? Or maybe he was someone with ‘special’ powers in a place and time when humanity needed a new direction and a message of hope.
• 31 BC - Foundation of the Roman Empire.
• 776 BC - First Olympic games are held in Greece.
• 1200 BC - Iron Age begins.
• 1224 BC - Death of Rameses the Great.
• 2000 BC - Abraham living in Canaan.
• 2500 BC - Stonehenge stone circle built.
• 2570 BC - The Great Pyramid of Giza is completed. (Speculative theory, not conclusively proven.)
• 2900 BC - First monetary system introduced Mesopotamian Shekel.
• 3000 BC - Bronze Age begins. Oldest artefacts depicting wheeled carts in Mesopotamia.
• 3500 - 3700 BC - Traditional date for the oldest cities known to date. Uruk in southern Mesopotamia - Modern Iraq and Tell Hamoukar further north.
• 4000 BC - More evidence of cities. Tell Brak in modern Syria shows evidence of administrative buildings andtraders. A seal stamp from the 5th millennium BC has been found there.
• 5000 BC - Earliest known writing. Balkan-Danube Script, originating from Europe along the Danube river, not yet deciphered.
• 6000 BC - The plough is invented.
• 8000 BC - Mammoths go extinct on the Siberian mainland.
• 9000 BC - Colonisation of the Americas.
• 9600 BC - The last Ice Age ends. The world enters a warmer period which still persists to date.
• 10,000 BC - First domesticated crops. Evidence of the earliest villages and the oldest known pottery from the Jomon period of Japan. This period is also thought to have been when dogs were first domesticated.
• 20,000 years ago - The last Ice Age is at its peak.
• 30,000 years ago - Neanderthals die out. They lived mostly in what is now Europe. It is important to note that modern Homo sapiens lived at the same time and probably side by side with Neanderthals.
• 35,000 years ago - Cave paintings in Europe.
• 40,000 years ago - Traditional date for the origin of Material culture.
• 50,000 years ago - Colonisation of Australia.
• 75,000 years ago - Clothing invented. The oldest beads were discovered in South Africa dating back 77,000 years, right to the middle of the stone age.
• 90,000 years ago - Modern humans start migrating out of Africa into Eurasia.
• 120,000 years ago - Widespread use of pigments like ochre in Africa.
• 170,000 years ago - Mitochondrial Eve. The first female ancestor of all living humans. This date varies from 150,000 - 250,000 based on various interpretations by scientists.
• 170,000 years ago - Adam is born. From the Y chromosome passed down only through males, it has been calculated that ‘Adam’, the first man on Earth, was created at this time. This date also varies by the same margins as ‘Eve’.
(It is curious to see that Adam and Eve seem to have been created at the same time - this will form a very convincing part of our story in later chapters.)
• 200,000 years ago - First anatomically modern humans make their appearance.
It seems that there may be a clash in this time line - did other humans exist before Adam and Eve? This is also part of the puzzle which seems to corroborate our theories in later chapters.
Source: New Scientist 2004
This was the easy part of the journey back in time, because we really only covered the journey of one species; Homo sapiens and Homo sapiens sapiens, the more civilised version of the earlier. There is a very fine line between the two, and scholars are still at odds about where the one suddenly became the other – a slightly more ‘streetwise’ version of its prior self. There was possibly a period during which the two relatives may have crossed over and lived side by side, and the clay tablets certainly give us enough evidence to take such suggestions seriously. This part of our archaic history has however been rewritten many times before and probably will be rewritten many times again, until we are presented with irrefutable evidence from some credible, unquestionable source. What we will take from this evidence is anyone’s guess, but it would have to be pretty convincing to draw mass appeal from a generally uninformed global populace. The funny thing is that such evidence has existed for thousands of years, without us taking any notice of it. It’s as if we emerged out of those prehistoric times as an ignorant species, and for some obscure reason forgot everything we had been through. Could this phenomenon have something to do with our shortened lifespan? A curious anomaly, which is way out of step with the many years our distant ancestors apparently lived? If that is the case, then why is it that we only live for an average of 70 years, while the biblical characters and others before them are shown to have lived for as long as 900 years and even more? The answers are all well documented in the enigmatic clay tablets which we will uncover in later chapters.
But for now, the next part of our journey back in time gets very interesting because we have to really use our imagination and powers of visualisation. That is what most anthropologists will want from you, as the evolutionary jumps between the fossilised hominids become very large. While evolutionists expect us to buy into the fantastic story of human evolution, in the same breath most scholars will also tell you that there are anything from 20 to 50 evolutionary steps between each identified genus or species. Unfortunately we have had no proof or evidence of any of these ‘in-between steps’ of evolution. What this really means is that we face a dilemma of many missing links, and not just the ‘missing link’ that we often joke about. I know that we have all spotted a potential candidate for the missing link in our neighbourhood, or a potential candidate for Homo neanderthals, but you can rest assured that you are mistaken. But then on the other hand, maybe not!
Let us go back to around 30,000 years ago. This is the time when Neanderthals apparently disappeared from Earth. The debate around Neanderthals has been raging since the first skeleton was discovered in 1857, just two years before Darwin published Origin of Species. But it seems that Darwin simply ignored this momentous find as it did not really fit his model of evolution. Many theories have been postulated about this species, mostly depicted as wild savages who were much more primitive than hu
mans. This seems a little arrogant and probably premature since we now know that the Neanderthal brain was on average 1,200 - 1,750 ml, which would make it approximately 100 ml larger than modern humans. If you consider that we only use 3% - 10% of our brains, just think of what the Neanderthals would have been capable of today.
In 1999, the skeleton of a child was unearthed in Portugal. It was dated back to 25,000 years ago. It had very strange features which looked like it could be a hybrid between modern human and Neanderthal. This prompted scientists to extract small fragments of DNA from three different Neanderthal specimens, which showed that they were not closely related to any present-day human population. Neanderthal anatomy on the other hand is essentially human in scope, with the same number of bones as humans, which function in the same manner. There are however minor differences in thickness and strength. Based on some rigorous dental studies, it seems that Neanderthals may have had a greater longevity than modern humans, which may have also affected their anatomy.
The reason I am taking you on this little journey, which I trust will end before you get too bored, is purely to illustrate the complexity and contradictions that have been troubling this field of science for centuries. From these high levels of speculation and uncertainty, others like myself, can take some respite that although I do not have a Ph.D behind my name, I do understand the fields of gambling, speculation and deduction.
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