Short Answers to Good Questions: Dinosaurs

Source: InfoMofo, CC BY-SA 2.0, via flickr

How do you know dinosaurs survived the flood, and what made them go extinct?

The Bible tells us that at least two of every animal "in whose nostrils was the breath of life" (Genesis 7:22), was saved in the Ark. Therefore, we can be certain that there were dinosaurs on the Ark, and that they survived the flood.

What happened to them afterwards? Well, the same thing that happened to the saber-toothed tiger, the Dodo and the passenger pigeon. Climate, natural disasters or predators (perhaps all three), conspired to wipe them off the face of the earth. The Ice Age, following immediately after the flood, must have been hard on them, as well as all the volcanic activity happening at that time.

Why doesn't the Bible mention dinosaurs?

It would be something of a wonder if the Bible did, since the word “dinosaur” wasn't invented until 1841, over a thousand years after the last books of the Bible were written. What the Bible does mention is something called a “dragon.” And the further back you go in history, the more accounts of “dragons” you find, and often in quite prosaic situations. Old accounts of dragons mention them eating cattle and stealing sheep, not eating dwarves and stealing gold.

Not only does the Bible mention dragons, but God's description of the large "behemoth" in Job 40:15-24 sounds a lot like a large sauropod.

There are reports from all around the world of dinosaurs existing side by side with humans after the flood. Interested? You can find a few of them here.

 

How did the dinosaurs fit on the Ark?

A very good question, with a very simple answer. Noah would have taken young dinosaurs on the ark, not huge full-grown ones. A newly hatched Sauropod weighted only 11lbs., and was not much bigger than a large goose—the ones Noah brought were certainly bigger than that, but still very small compared with an adult.

Short Answers to Good Questions: Weren't the Pyramids Built Before the Flood?

 

In the third century B.C., Ptolomy II commissioned a priest named Manetho to compile a history of Egypt. Manetho did so. Then, in 1904, Eduard Meyer created the Sothic cycle in 1904 to give Egypt a unified calendar that aligns Egyptian regnal years with modern historians’ B.C. Dates.¹ And these two sources, Manetho's history and Meyer's Sothic cycle, are the foundations of traditional dates for Egyptian history—traditional dates which contradict the time line found in the Biblical genealogies. For instance, if you take all of the Pharaohs mentioned by Manetho, and stack their rules together, you have the Pyramids being constructed well before the flood, and Egypt, as a nation, predating the 2242 B.C. date of the Tower of Babel.

But should the Pharaoh's rules be stacked one on top of another? Carbon dating² and many Egyptologists say no. Professor J. H. Breasted, author of History of Egypt, called Manetho’s history “a late, careless and uncritical compilation, which can be proven wrong from the contemporary monuments in the vast majority of cases, where such documents have survived.”³ In fact, if other sources are compared with Manetho's history, as David Down when he compiled his revised chronology, not only do we find that Egypt was founded not long after the tower of Babel, but we also find evidence of the Hebrew slaves in Egypt, of Joseph's famine, and many other Biblical references.

So does (Manetho's) Egyptian chronology contradict the Bible? No, not unless you “stack” the pharaohs, and disregard nearly every other source.

If you are an Egyptologist yourself, I expect you will find this brief layman's explanation unsatisfactorily vague. For more information, try:

Unwrapping the Pharaohs: How Egyptian Archaeology Confirms the Biblical Timeline, by John Ashton, Master's Books (2006)

D. Rohl, Pharaohs and Kings: A Biblical Quest (New York: Crown Publishers, 1995)

Or, if you are a layman looking for a more detailed explanation, you can find one here.

1D. Mackey, “Fall of the Sothic Theory: Egyptian Chronology Revisited,” TJ 17 no. 3 (2003): 70–73, available at  www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v17/i3/sothic_theory.asp.

2Radiocarbon dating of artifacts from Egypt’s Pre-dynastic period and First Dynasty, Reported September 4th 2013 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, by Michael Dee and colleagues.

3D. Mackey, “Sothic Star Dating.”

Short Answers to Good Questions: Where did the different people groups come from?

If the eight people that came off the Ark were a middle brown color, where did all the variations of skin and eye color, face shape and eye shape come from?

Photo by Ciao Ho

 

After Babel, the human race dispersed across the globe in small groups isolated by language. Without constant intermarriage between the tribes, the genetic information each group carried determining eye color and skin color became more distinct, more concentrated, as time went on. To speed the process, certain characteristics were singled out through various selection pressures (environmental, sexual, etc.). For instance, those with darker skins who lived in cloudy, cool environments, were more susceptible to vitamin D deficiencies, and died off, leaving the lighter skinned genes to dominate that people group. Lighter skinned people are more apt to develop skin cancer, and died off in hot tropical areas. Natural selection combined with environmental factors to discriminate between the fit and the fittest for each climate.

For more information see:
Adam + Eve = All Skin Tones?
Darwin and Racism
The New Answers Book, Ken Ham, et all. Chapter 17

Short Answers to Good Questions: Was Pre-Historic Man More Intelligent than We Are?

Why do you believe that pre-historic men were more intelligent than the average modern man?
 

If you believe the Bible, you know that all humans came from one specially created pair: Adam and Eve. And it is logical to conclude that Adam and Eve, in the day of their creation, were genetically (that is, mentally and physically), perfect. But did the fall destroy that perfection? Obviously the cellular countdown to old age and ultimate death began at that moment,¹ but other than that, was their genetic code altered? I would argue not. The genes for the human race were so perfect that after 1600 years of degeneration, six humans had enough information in their DNA to repopulate the earth and form the diversity of “races” we see today.

So why do most people believe pre-historic man was an idiot? First, because they assume we worked our way up from apes, which are clearly less intelligent than we are. Second, because we tend to assume that anyone with less technology than we have must not be as smart as we are, an idea that falls apart immediately upon inspection. Our technology is the result of the combined knowledge of thousands of men across the centuries, as preserved by the humble printing press. It is not the fruit of our individual intellectual prowess. Could you build a computer from scratch? Does using one make you any smarter?

Since the time of the flood, we have lost genetic information, a lot of it. No six people living today could populate a planet with their genes--or at least not a planet full of healthy people. And it only makes sense that our intelligence has declined along with everything else.

Want to read more?

'Human Intelligence Peaked Thousands of Years Ago' The Independent
Savages and ancestors: A historian looks at the idea of human evolution before Darwin
Neanderthal Man Was An Innovator
New Evidence Debunks 'Stupid' Neanderthal Myth

1Salk Institute. "What makes us age? Ticking of cellular clock promotes seismic changes in chromatin landscape associated with aging." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 4 October 2010.