Ken Ham and other young-Earth creationists maintain that the universe is about 6,000 years old. (They claim the Bible says this. Go check and see if it actually does. I’ll wait.)
Here are eight more things that wouldn’t exist if what Ken Ham says were true.
1. A 45,000-year-old hand axe found on Crete. Archaeologists found it while searching for “tools employed by seafaring people who had plied nearby waters some 11,000 years ago.” So instead of finding human tools twice as old as Ken Ham’s universe, they found human tools more than seven times as old as Ken Ham’s universe.
2. A 12,000-year-old Natufian cemetery, where mourners left flowers in the grave: “In a series of recently excavated graves near Mt. Carmel, Israel, that are dated to 13,700 to 11,700 years ago, a team of archaeologists from the University of Haifa and elsewhere found impressions made by flowers and other plants apparently buried beneath the dead.”
3. A 120,000-year-old case of fibrous dysplasia. Discovered from a tumor in the rib of a Neanderthal who lived in what is now Croatia.
4. A 16-foot-long, 72 million-year-old dinosaur tail recently unearthed in northern Mexico. Scientists say it’s from a hadrosaur. Ken Ham says it’s from a victim of Noah’s flood.
5. A 23 million-year-old lizard fossil, preserved in amber, also found in Mexico.
6. Equus lambei, an extinct species of horse that “roamed the Yukon more than 700,000 years ago.” Equus lambei was in the news recently after scientists successfully sequenced the DNA of its genome.
7. The 50 million-year-old fossils of “ancient crocodiles … fish, freshwater shells and plant impressions” stumbled on by excavation workers at a railway station in Brisbane, Australia.
8. Doggerland. The North Sea wasn’t a sea at all 20,000 years ago, when “Global sea levels were as much as 400 feet lower than today, Britain was part of Continental Europe and terra firma stretched from Scotland to southern Norway.”
Where the North Sea now sits once was Doggerland, home to:
Human hunters, who caught fish and fowl and gathered plants. Archaeologists sifting through seabed artifacts have developed a sketchy portrait of these human societies: Perhaps 10,000 people or more, clustered here and there in grass huts in waterside camps.
But this homeland was doomed. Water began encroaching around 18,000 B.C. as a natural climatic shift melted the ice sheets mantling Scandinavia. Seismic surveys and ice cores from Greenland, among other evidence, suggest sea level rose by as much as six feet a century during a series of melting events. As coastlines retreated, the northern North Sea formed, and when temperatures jumped again, the southern North Sea became an archipelago of low islands.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In