New Discoveries About Human History Change EVERYTHING | Dr. Nathaniel Jeanson

so this episode will begin to look at some of the earliest stages of human history we've been working generally speaking from the presence backwards in time Beginning by looking at the question of who do we living peoples come from given all all of our diversity and differences ethnically linguistically culturally what's the connections among us and then we've been moving backwards in time and saying how do we connect back to these ancient peoples could there be relationships between these ancient cultures and you and me that we didn't appreciate before and my goal is partially apologetic so that if you're a creationist you'll have new tools to defend your faith and if you're not a creationist watching you'll have your views challenged and that beyond all of the apologetic purposes we'd be moved and prompted towards marveling at the stories of who we are and how we got here and ultimately that we praise God for his Sovereign rule of History that's something every person needs to wrestle with by the time we finish this we've seen all these connections is history one random length chain of events that have no purpose no goal or is there a sovereign hand that guides all this and what does the scripture tell us so my goal is that people would Marvel Now if you look at the mainstream account for who we are and how we got here the story of human Origins begins primitive and brutish and animal-like we're not humans at the beginning the immediate ancestors to humans are ape-like creatures they're not capable they're not Advanced they're not intelligent by human standards they're animals and then at some point about 200 000 years ago roughly on the Savannahs of Africa the first anatomically modern humans arose but then there's another big pause so to speak the next 100 000 years again roughly speaking because these numbers change in the mainstream scientific model for about a hundred thousand years they just roam Africa so to put this in perspective we've been talking about heavily the history of civilization the last the most recent four thousand years of History well the hundred thousand years of Africa is the history of civilization 4 000 years played over and over and over again it's 25 times worth of that so you get some sense then for the enormous amounts of time built into the evolutionary model So eventually people come out of Africa they have to deal with the Ice Age especially if they're in the northern hemisphere some of them live in caves it's still a primitive existence finally maybe about twelve thousand years ago the Agricultural Revolution hits this allows for the advancement of the human race use the evidence for advancement in ancient structures like Stonehenge the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids we see cities like Petra this is some of the old world examples if you go to the new world you see that pre-columbian People's Building sites on top of mountains like Machu Picchu but Humanity doesn't really kick into an advanced stage until the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution where technology Grows by gigantic Leaps and Bounds and we see things like trans Atlantic Ocean voyages in the beginnings of humans taking flight and within short order we come to our modern era where we can go pretty much anywhere we want to in the globe whenever we want to and weaving sending people into space some of you may have watched the recent SpaceX launch so where did Neanderthals fit into this larger picture they're viewed as and depicted as primitive and the dates that are given to their Origins and demise fit the ancient evolutionary time scale there typically depicted as a rising hundreds of thousands of years ago coexisting with anatomically modern humans and then going extinct oh maybe 30 000 years ago so in this inevitable March of progress they get stuck way back in the Primitive era so who were these people who do they come from how do they arise and what happened to them first of all and perhaps most importantly is the question of the time scale what do you do with that hundreds of thousands years of years ago they arose tens of thousands years ago they disappeared what is the timing of their existence these dates are obviously in conflict with the scriptures and they're in conflict with the Y chromosome data we've been exploring so just to stop for a moment and review what we've been discussing the main tool by which we've been interrogating human history is the male inherited DNA the Y chromosome in episodes five and six we look at the reasons why it's this instead of other types of DNA why it's this and not the hundred dollar tests you can take through family tree DNA 23andMe ancestry.com one of these other commercial testing companies this is the tool the basis for exploring European Chinese African Pacific all these other places that history That's the basis form that data seems to conflict them with the state and we've looked at the the main tool it has a basis in the existence of a clock this Y chromosome is copied erroneously every generation about two to three mistakes happen and so that these these differences add up over time and the number of differences between you and me between me and Ken are a reflection of the time since we last had a common ancestor so if Ken and I have a lot of differences at the Y chromosome level between us our common male ancestor must be in the distant paths if we have just a few differences between us our common answer so must be more much more recent than we thought I don't actually know how closer distantly related we are but the Y chromosome can tell us where does Neanderthal DNA fit though you may have read in the news and seen announcements that we've gotten Neanderthal DNA maybe you've taken a DNA test and they say oh you're four percent two percent Neanderthal how does this fit let me tee it up this way if you follow the creation Evolution debate closely you might have seen the question of Neanderthal DNA brought up as an argument against the young Earth time scale why if you look at the number of Neanderthal DNA differences between them and us and us being modern humans there are far more differences between us and them than between any two people alive today and so if we use this concept of a genetic clock we say okay how many differences exist between us how many mistakes happen per generation how can we dial the clock back to zero how long does it take critics of young Earth creation science would say you can't do that in six thousand years 4 500 years there's too many differences to explain so therefore your model is wrong well what do you do with that this is tied to this question of time skill it's an argument for their ancient time skills now young authors have been saying rightly so for many years that neanderthals are the descendants of Noah and his family they're post-flood peoples who died out so you need to explain them within 4 500 years how do you explain these long branches how do you explain all these DNA differences well there's a similar principle at play here that we saw in our discussion of African DNA so we saw in our discussion of these long branches among Africans no one's actually directly measured the rate at which Africans mutate their DNA it's all based on an assumption right now they assume that the Africans mutate their DNA faster than others we've already seen probably the strongest Smoking Gun yet that they must mutate theirs faster we're still waiting on someone to actually measure it well neanderthals are gone we can't measure the father-son rate at which their DNA mutates so that's one assumption they have to make that their DNA clock ticks at the same rate that ours does and it doesn't perhaps tick really fast and mutate really fast my point is this is very good indirect evidence that either the DNA is degraded and or their clock ticks at a different rate than ours does either way it is not a legitimate argument against the Unearthed time scale and what it also sadly means is that the DNA is not useful for further investigation so we can reject this date as scientifically inaccurate but what is the story of their time of origin and then the time of their demise this time skill is wrong what can we do and if we can't get out their DNA what can we say about their history let's go back to this graph because there's a clue to neanderthals in the DNA of modern people it works like this so if we draw the line right here to represent a thousand BC I've been arguing that the overlap between the tan lines and the blue lines is really tight basically this is an argument that when you're looking at human population history based on the Y chromosome you're looking at something highly accurate the match to the right of the purple line between the blue and the tan gives me confidence that whenever I'm looking to the left of it I'm looking at real history in other words the match to the right of the line argues that I can simply look to the left of the line and get information so if I say how many people were alive in 1200 or 1700 BC I just draw a line over from the tan to this axis and I can get the number of people alive now this is a New Concept that we'll dig into more in a moment and I want to show you how this is going to bring us closer to the story of Neanderthals so let's let's take this in steps you didn't follow what I just did well stick with me we're going to explain this in more detail in a moment so the position where I think NOAA is best supported it's back here where there's two branches coming off of him not three and we'll discuss why there's not three after about five to seven hundred years of people living after Noah there's a whole bunch of branches that then start diversifying as if there's a second Babel like event where the major ethnolinguistic groups of the World start splitting and separating going their separate ways we saw in episode 20 that this has a very intriguing overlap with an event in Genesis 41 that sounds very Global the Famine of Joseph's state where he was made second in command of Egypt to preserve people it says from all countries all lands and this the the timing of this event is right in line with the timing of the event I just showed you what does this have to do with neanderthals remember that I said the match over here between tan and blue means I can just use the tan by itself to figure out population sizes which means I can go back from the Y chromosome and tell you read off from this graph how many people were alive in the entire planet during the Famine of Joseph this brings us closer to the question of Neanderthals so 5750 years post flood during this time of Joseph's famine how many people were alive well we're looking at the Y chromosome male inheritance so we can read off the number of males I just double it to get the number of females to get the the total population based on the Y chromosome data even if you didn't follow exactly how that did it my point is we can use genetics to learn how many people were alive on the planet at various points in history even the most ancient points in history which gets us then again close to this question in the entrance five to ten million males 10 to 20 million people total on the globe in the time of Joseph's famine I'm going to put pause on that for the moment and go even deeper in history we've got still this outstanding question of what about the 500 600 years before Joseph's famine all we have is this branch and this Branch we don't have other branches coming off what can we say about that rhodius point in history now we're really pushing the limits of what these data can say this is research in progress what I want to show you though is one model that I think makes a lot of sense so the the question I'm now trying to answer is what happened between Noah and really Babel and Joseph the several centuries in between them how many people were alive at each stage what we know from scripture there were four males and again I'm talking males because we're thinking why chromosome four males immediately post blood Noah and his three boys we've learned from the Y chromosome at the time of Joseph's Day there were five to ten million males we don't really have Y chromosome data at the present to fill in the Gap but we can start running some models one question we can ask is what would it take to go from four males to the number of males alive and Joseph stay in the in the low million well if you run the math all you need is a growth rate of three to four kids per couple that number is less than population doubling so as an example my wife and I have four kids our population is doubling it's gone from two to four if my kids grew up and they each have two kids each or four kids each they're in their families doubling Dublin doubling that's less than population doubling that's entirely reasonable is my point it doesn't take much to go from Noah to Joseph in that time period now you might say well my family doesn't doesn't have published in doubling maybe you only have one sibling two siblings maybe you're the only child you look at other places around the globe maybe it's not population Dublin I don't know what I think of it my point is that it's plausible whether or not it's probable is something we can evaluate with relevant data and the most relevant data are the data that come from the historical record of the immediate aftermath of Babel a list of peoples in Genesis 10. Genesis 10 gives us genealogies of Noah's son's generation then how many sons they had and how many some of their offspring had and if you take the average of shemham and japheth's lineages immediately following the flood they were not undergoing population doubling they were undergoing something much faster the average number of kids per couple in Genesis 10 is seven to eight not three to four so when I say what you need is as a minimum to go from Noah to Joseph is something even less what the scripture says is going on now remember that when we're at Joseph's time we're talking about a famine famines have this nasty habit of killing people because they die of starvation so what may have happened is that there was rapid reproductive growth following the flood and the Famine of Joseph today put a big damper on that and may have killed off some the theological point of course we see in Genesis 41 is God preserving the lineage of Jacob because of his promise to Abraham but everyone else is benefiting some may not have benefited who knows the point is this is extremely plausible it works very well and it's even less than what Genesis 10 is saying is going on okay neanderthals these people appear to have migrated away out from Babel and died out before the famine okay well what does that tell us back to the Native Americans we said these so-called primitive looking peoples are that way not because they've been living in Stone Age Technology for thousands of years and always been primitive they were highly Advanced but their civilization collapsed and those we see today are the survivors of a recently shattered culture the shattering came about because of the arrival of Europeans diseases enslavement and so forth those are not applicable at the dates we're looking at for Neanderthals however in episode 20 we looked at other events biblical events such as Caravan the migration of people Egypt at the time of Joseph's famine and Conquest as well as confusion the Tower of Babel Conquest being the mixing and migration and pillaging of the peoples it's happened ever since battle look in Israel's history we saw that point all of those would be at play all three of those events confusion Caravan Conquest have by their nature the potential to upend and shatter a civilization and culture then Neanderthals appear to have survived Babel now the Judgment purpose of Babel was to shatter civilizations that's what God said he said they're building a tower to Heaven look at what they're doing what's going to stop them from doing anything further let's confuse their languages it's to inhibit what they were doing that's the judge it's been a very effective judgment part of the reason I think we haven't had technological progress like we've had except into the last few hundred years is because we can't speak to each other we've had to recover some of that lost knowledge it's taken a long time God's judgment in Genesis 11 has lasted thousands of years it's going to affect the Neanderthals and other culture the famine would affect them the dates seem to be like it looks like they died out before the famine so another possible explanation for their demise is Conquest we looked at the history of Israel to see the sad history of their conquest by the people it's because of their sin God's Divine judgment so there's a Divine hand but we also know that it's also constant sequence of human sin in Genesis 10 Nimrod is called a mighty Hunter before the Lord do you think Conquest set in centuries after Babel where did conquest start happening right away we're human hearts any different from Before the Flood where they were thinking of new ways to do evil and kill each other I don't think so I don't think history bears that out I don't think the scripture bears that up we all have the same depraved heart that only Christ can redeem so could neonatals have died out at the hands of fellow battle survivors I think it's entirely plausible the conquest as a rule of thumb kick in as soon as Babel ended I think so and if you're thinking about the population sizes so if if an Abraham's day there's only 50 000 people and one of the subgroups within this fifty thousand decides they're going to go conquer the others that Conquest might not be just the overtaking of one group by another it might lead to the extinction of one so those are all things to keep in mind when we think about the Neanderthals today's Native Americans so-called primitive peoples we saw in previous episodes apparently wiped out those who were here first and now today they've been nearly wiped out by those who came in after the Europeans what about the Neanderthals they survived Babel did they survive the conquest that likely ensued thereafter I want to return to this larger point though of the inevitable March of progress the animals are often stuck back here and there's this natural well they look dumb old primitive what do we do with that even if we convert their time scale and put them in a Biblical context yes there's this possibility that we're wiped out by someone around them maybe they succumb to the effects of the Ice Age we have a temporal context in which to place their origins in existence what about this idea though of an adult March of progress well here's I think a larger Point that's not been made before that I think is emotionally satisfying and biblically consistent what do we do with the fact that there's yes unambiguous gigantic leaps of progress in the last few centuries why wouldn't we extrapolate that into the past well we've already seen based on Native Americans and in Scripture that catastrophes can take and Advance people and make them look primitive same thing can apply to the Neanderthals and so history is filled with the rise and fall of peoples based on conquest and your ability to survive a conquest or not do it has a relationship to the size of your Peoples some of it of course there's a disease role but if you're a large population and this tiny minority comes and tries to wipe you out chances are the larger population is going to win and the smaller population is going to have to revert to A Primitive State because they've just been destroyed we've been looking at human population history heavily over and over in each episode and what's intriguing to me is the rule of thumb is fairly level growth even growth for thousands of years and a sharp uptick in the last few hundred one that seems to coincide with the Leaps and Bounds of progress that we've seen so this seeming move from primitive to complex to me is not the inevitable March of progress it's the inevitable March of populations it's not some evolutionary story of how we keep advancing people are Advanced and they go primitive advancing or primitive depending on who've conquered them and who else they can conquer and the recent uptick seems to be in byproduct of just how many people are on this globe we've had a sharp uptick in peoples knowledge is increased has been sharing and there's so many more hands to be put to the task of advancing technology this is not some evolutionary story human history is a reflection of changes in population growth and Neanderthals are at the earliest stages when population sizes were small and the chance of going permanently extinct because it got wiped out for much higher [Music]

Channel: Answers in Genesis

Views: 61,291

Keywords: answers in genesis

Id: X_bHuaTZq8g

Length: 20min 42sec (1242 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 07 2023