One of the mind boggling and often times confusing discoveries of modern science is that human-like creatures have existed on Earth for hundreds of thousands of years. And yet, these so-called "early humans" repeatedly failed to "take dominion" over all the Earth. They also failed to manifest the kind of creativity and dynamic discovery and technology development abilities that we now commonly take for granted in human beings. At some point in time, God created a new kind of "human animal", one that bore His image and was designed to fulfill a spiritual destiny unlike any creature before.
In this post, we will explore an article titled New neural network differentiates Middle and Late Stone Age toolkits to see if we can discern when the "new humans" became active on Earth.
The article details the application of machine learning to characterize attributes of stone tools and identify what differentiates Middle Stone Age and Late Stone Age toolkits and when those changes occurred.
The oldest of what are termed Middle Stone Age toolkits date to about 300 thousand years ago and occur with the earliest Homo sapiens fossils. MSA tools remain in use until about 30 thousand years ago. In contrast, Late Stone Age toolkits show up about 67 thousand years ago and continue in use until the recent past. This transition is considered a major cultural change, and is therefore interesting in terms of identifying when God created human beings in His own image.
In particular for this study, tool assemblages from Eastern African sites where used because of the rich collection of stone tools from well excavated and dated archeological sites. Toolsets spanning from 130 thousand to 12 thousand years in age were used for the study.
The findings of this study are consistent with the concept that God created Adam and Eve in the Middle East around 70,000 years ago and that their offspring gradually spread throughout the Earth, including back into Africa. By 67,000 years, humans bearing the Image of God may have migrated back into Africa, admixing with existing populations. By 30,000 years ago, all non-image bearing human populations would expire.
Another tantalizing possibility is that the very last, most clever, of the "pre-image bearing humans" were created around 67,000 years ago in Africa, bringing the LSA toolkit with them and that Adam and Eve were created after them. Resolving the question of when God bestowed His image on humans cannot be fully resolved by this one study alone. But it does highlight a time period of critical interest. In this series, I am using the anthropological marker of "moral story telling" to attempt to diagnose when Image-Bearing humans first appeared. It is not clear that the difference between MSA and LSA toolkits identifies this transition.
One possibility that I am exploring is that God created human beings with the "substantive" ability to bear His image around 70,000 years ago, possibility in East Africa. But only later, in Adam, did God also grant the functional (dominion) and relational (moral story telling) aspects of the Image of God. These first might be the "sons and daughters of man" in one sense while Adam and Eve's offspring were the "sons and daughters of God". Again, this study alone cannot validate or invalidate this theory, but does point to 67,000 years ago as an interesting time of transition.
No comments:
Post a Comment