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An international team

Last week, I explained that what scientists previously identified as diluvian (remains from the Flood) came to be classified as deposits from a long Ice Age. The reason the deposits had been classified as diluvian is that they were unstratified, as if deposited by a single Flood. It was prior to the advent of radiocarbon dating. So how did they determine which deposits were older and which latest?

Charles Lyell (mentor to Charles Darwin) suggested that the age of deposits depended on the type of animals found among the remains. He suggested there was first an age when hippo's roamed Europe, to be followed by an age of reindeer, then woolly mammoths. Édouard Lartet (1801-1871) refined these eras. These currently go by the name of human artifacts found in the same deposits (Aurignacian, Archallean, Mousterian, Gravettian, etc,), but are essentially the same eras that Lyell and Lartet pulled from their zoological hats.

Darwin's Descent of Man (1871) soon created another way of judging age: signs of evolutionary development. Some of those buried in the diluvian remains, as one found in Germany's Neanderthal Valley, had barreled chests and short bowed legs. According to Rudolph Virchow, founder of the science of pathology, here was a victim of rickets. But Darwin's bulldog Thomas Huxley declared it the most ape-looking man he had ever seen and similar to the present inhabitants of Australia. The most advanced of these cavemen had to be responsible for the beautiful drawings on the walls at Cro-Magnon. Surely, the latter had to be the ancestors of Europeans.

Recently, DNA test show Neanderthals intermarrying with Cro-Magnon. What that means, of course, is that these are the same species! Anthropologists have long known that Neanderthal skeletons are fully within the range of living humans. In ancient times as today, living in caves is associated with poverty. That and the lack of sunlight are also associated with rickets. May we awake from our evolutionary slumber. 

Read more Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon man

A distinguished biblical archaeologist, one of the first Americans to view NAMI's evidence, studied the structure of finished and unfinished timbers lying beneath massive amounts of volcanic rock and ice. He compared what he was seeing to ships that archaeologists have found beneath the Egyptian Pyramids that may date from the same era. But what most impressed him that evening was learning of NAMI's methodology: their having been led to the discovery by investigating and recording native traditions.

That has not been the method of recent American Ark searchers who prefer to be guided by the latest technology: satellite photographs and ground searching radar. Technology greatly assists with archaeology, but so does local knowledge. I learned that NAMI had been forced to choose between trusting the locals versus Americans with the latest technology. They chose to believe the locals and were rewarded by this discovery.

But there was a time when Americans likewise esteemed the value of local traditions. The American scholar Edward Robinson (1794-1863), often regarded as the founder of biblical archaeology, used what he learned from local natives to identify the ancient cities of the Bible. The majority of his identifications have withstood the test of time. In Robinson's day, Americans were known in Europe for their leveling tendencies: treating the low and high born with the same respect. Many Americans abroad were from missionary families and more inclined than colonial Europeans to value what they learned from natives.

Read more about the knowledge of natives versus the latest technology

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