Archeologists dug up something from Canaanite days and the story we heard is the story we always hear: this was an advanced civilization. Surprisingly advanced. We have no idea how they did what they did without power tools.
I should have a dollar for every report like this one:
An archaeological dig in Jerusalem has turned up a 3,700-year-old wall that is the largest and oldest of its kind found in the region, experts say.
Standing 8 meters (26 feet) high, the wall of huge cut stones is a marvel to archaeologists. “To build straight walls up 8 meters … I don’t know how to do it today without mechanical equipment,” said the excavation’s director, Ronny Reich. “I don’t think that any engineer today without electrical power [could] do it.”
“You see all the big boulders — all the boulders are 4 to 5 tons,” adds archaeologist Eli Shukron. Canaanites built it.
Just once I’d like to hear archeologists say “My god! these people were stupid! It’s a wonder they figured out how to procreate!” But no! It’s always about how smart they were!
This is not what you expect from the evolution model. It’s as if the Evolutionists’ Parade – that troupe of creatures emerging from the slime, each more upright then the one before – reverses itself and marches back into the “primordial soup” from which it came. Folks are supposed to be dumber back then, not smarter. They’re supposed to be like that 2001 Space Odyssey ape straining his feeble brainpower to capacity, suddenly realizing he can use dry bones as clubs, and consequently, clubbing everything in sight – all to the ecstasy of Survival of the Fittest evolutionists! Instead, we find case after case in which those ancients without fuss (or power tools) did things that we still don’t know how to do.
A Canaanite wall is small potatoes. Likely, the Egyptian pyramids offer most striking example of Smart Ancients Syndrome (SAS). To this day we don’t know how they built them. How did they get multi-ton cut blocks over 400 feet up? A gently-sloped inclined plane would be a mile long; “packing it down” enough to support the weight tough to imagine. There’s no trace of any ramp today. Surface stones of the pyramids are cut within 0.01 inch of perfectly straight. the gap between them is 0.02 inch – modern technology cannot do better – and filled with a cement stronger than the blocks they join. Height to base is a multiple of pi. Height of a side to its hypotenuse is a Fibonacci multiple. Interior shafts point precisely to various stars at certain times of the year.
One can get lost in pyramid claims. Alas, I haven’t the time nor incentive to check them out. Is the Great Pyramid really at the exact center of earth’s land mass – that is, does a north-south meridian and an east-west latitude passing through the structure really encounter more land than one drawn anywhere else? It’s no wonder that some have thought space aliens built these things, and others have thought they hold some prophetic significance.
But if evolutionists are taken aback by such engineering marvels, they fit well with how the Bible presents matters. According to the Bible, we are not ascending from cavemen. We are descending from Adam. That’s why the early Bible record has humans living to 900. Centuries later it is 500. Later still it is 200. Didn’t it get down to around 30 in the Dark Ages before applications of hygiene (not discoveries, since the Hebrews knew it 2000 years before) and later scientific advances brought it back up to the present 80, like a correction in a bear market? Those ancients were not inferior to us; they were superior. They were not dumber than us; they were smarter.
Well…. if they were really smarter than us, why didn’t have cars? Why didn’t they go to the moon? Why didn’t they read the genome? I can hear the objections now. The answer is that knowledge accumulates. The invention of the printing press speeded it up, as did the invention of the computer. So, just as you can accumulate wealth in a declining stock market, collective human accomplishment forges ahead even as our individual capacities deteriorate.
One is reminded of God’s words from Genesis 11:6:
Look! They are one people and there is one language for them all, and this is what they start to do. Why, now there is nothing that they may have in mind to do that will be unattainable for them.
They’re supposed to be dumber than us. Even Geico knows that. “So easy that a caveman can do it,” goes the slogan. It’s from the evolutionist model. But against all evolutionist expectations, those “cavemen” weren’t all that dumb. We could learn some things from them.
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EDIT: Hmmmm. Not saying it dovetails in all respects, but here is supplemental material from a geologist and carbonate sedimentologist, under the title Ancient People Were Smarter Than Us.
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