What happened to the Neanderthals? (Part 21)

well hi everyone Ken Ham CEO Vance in Genesis krrish museum the Ark Encounter along with dr. nathaniel jensen PhD in biology from harvard university continuing this series the new history of the human race well new history it's the Bible's history well it's history that genetics is revealing a lot of very interesting things and dr. Jensen's gone through Wow what have we done now twenty episodes already this is number 21 and you can see all the previous ones on Answers TV you covered a whole range of topics and very interesting things about the history of the human race we're more closely related than we realized and one of these cultures have come about in recent times but more quickly than we realize all sorts of fascinating information and so he's been using the Y chromosome only dr. genes can explain it to you but this one is going to be on the Neanderthals and the Neanderthals well when I grew up I went to museums and they were sort of these creatures sort of looking half like apes and humans and bent over and living in caves as sort of you know primitive creatures somehow evolving into humans that's how it was when I when I was young stoner that what I was taught about Neanderthals but who were the natural people and what became of them and when did they live and well actually dr. genes is going to share some interesting insights from the research that he's done now let me also you know I'll say this again at the end that once we do 21 today and then 22 for tomorrow then next week 23 will sort of be the final one and then we'll have a 24 which will be a question time you can actually put the questions you want to ask in this particular program so as it's being broadcast you just in the comments they put the questions that you want to ask and dr. Jensen will collect those also we're going to use a different program and that we hope to have for number 24x we live comment so that you can have you know live questions and ask those questions live of dr. Jenson try ask him some hard ones too some really difficult ones so dr. Jenson for today for episode 21 the new history of the human race Neanderthals I'll turn it over to you I have a feeling that after today's episode in tomorrow's episode when I step on a lot of toes this will generate all sorts of questions and I look forward to them but please yes submit your questions and we're gonna have some viewers in different time zones some may not be able to make it it'll be Sunday night in 7 p.m. Eastern Time that's so it'll be June 14th in the US again if you're not able to make it please submit your questions ahead of time we'll probably get to those first and especially those good that get asked the most so this episode and begin to look at some of the earliest stages of human history we've been working generally speaking from the presents backwards in time beginning by looking at the question of who do we living people's come from given all all of our diversity and differences ethnically linguistically culturally what's the connections among us and and then we've been moving backwards in time and saying how do we connect back to these ancient peoples could the relationships between these ancient cultures and you and me that we didn't appreciate before early in the series I promise that we deliver on a number of these items we've seen in previous episodes the answers to many of these things 19 covered the first point that that there's Caucasians walking around who have had dark-skinned people in their family trained don't know it the from episodes about 7 through 10 covered a lot of the European side of the equation 17 as well about the Vikings the episodes numbered about 11 through 16 covered the pre-columbian history the Americas and now we're finally getting back to this this very early stage so this episode will have the Neanderthals our next episode will hit some of the earliest stages of human history and then we'll wrap it all up do it doing it fast-forward put all the pieces together here's what human history looks like now and a lot of the genetics that we've discussed that'll be episode 23 and Gold 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 linked 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 with Marvel 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 thousand 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 four thousand 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 12,000 years ago the Agricultural Revolution hits this allows for the advancement of the human race we see evidence for advancement in ancient structures like Stonehenge the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids we see cities like Petra this is some be old world examples if you go to the new world you see that pre-columbian peoples 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 transatlantic ocean voyages and the beginnings of humans taking flights 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 we're even sending people into space and you may have watched the recent SpaceX launch of astronaut to the space station so this evolutionary model has a clever appeal and this is how I see it and and this is the larger question I want us to consider and and discover an answer to that I don't think has been made in public before the evolutionary model draws on our natural intuitive understanding of progress of the last few hundred years we all know that 2020 is dramatically different from 1750 there's been huge advances in the global technological progress and we see some of that reflects it's not been even theirs first world country second World countries third world countries and we talk about that because of this gigantic leap forward in our abilities as humans and so the evolutionary model draws on that natural yeah there's been a lot of progress the past is less advanced than today and it just extends it back in time why wouldn't you think that if you go even further back in time beyond 1750 to the ancient times that people were much more primitive than they are today it takes this this curve of history where we were really advanced now or less so just a few hundred years ago well why wouldn't we have been very unadmitted in the past it's this inevitable march of progress that summarizes the essential idea of human evolution and it summarises the intuitive emotional appeal that it has because we understand the part that the the advance the progress of the last few hundred years why wouldn't we simply extend it into the past it just seems to make sense so we're Denis Anatole 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 timescale they're typically depicted as arising hundreds of thousands of years ago coexisting with anatomically modern humans and then going extinct oh maybe thirty ten thirty thousand years ago so in this inevitable arch of progress that gets stuck way back in the primitive era - what were these people where do they come from how do they arise and what happened to them because we're now in episode 21 I'm not gonna review all the previous episodes where we covered everything from ancient China of pre-columbian Americas modern in ancient Europe you can find all those again on the YouTube channel or more importantly find it on the answers TV where you can see all these episodes watching whatever you want to so again I'll point you there instead of reviewing all that and taking up time from this episode instead I'm gonna think more deeply about this question of who are the Neanderthals and if you've watched the previous episodes especially those on the origin and fate of the Native Americans you'll immediately recognize that this question of the Neanderthals is a place that we've already been before and this is the parallel we saw especially in episode 11 that the stereotypes of Native Americans as primitive people's leftovers from the Stone Age the Paleolithic era these sorts of things and you look at some of the practices especially Amazon jungle and why wouldn't people think that those stereotypes are wrong and we know they're wrong because of all things mainstream archaeology is overturning them this book 1491 written in 2005 document some of these advances we looked at other advances since then this field is changing so fast it's hard to keep up with this is a paper from 2018 where we looked at these authors examination of a cloud forest in Ecuador so you think okay save the Amazon the jungle one of the stereotypes is the Native Americans are these peace-loving people living in a harmony with nature never touching it for thousands of years and you and the Europeans came in and destroyed it well if you look at the archaeological record of this particular cloud forest in Ecuador and you can date the layers I think they were looking at lake sediments you can date them with carbon-14 works for the most recent times in a few minutes we'll talk about what happens for ancient times so you can look at these layers you can look at the plant materials are there is there pollen grains are there plant remains consistent the cloud forests and the topmost layers yes it fits but you dig down into layers that are just a few centuries ago and you begin to see plant material consistent with then opened grassland not jungle and you dig down even further to the pre European times and what you find are maize grains in other words farmland cloud forest was not always a cloud forest and it's been so only for a few centuries so these people were transforming their environment they were building massive structures intricate pyramids these massive buildings and they they look the way they do today and our erroneous label of primitive comes from and misunderstanding of their history and sends largely from the massive population collapse they underwent and we looked at some of the discussions than the debate over how many people were here on the eve of Columbus's arrival and saw that there's evidence to suggest there were as many people in the Americas in 1491 as there were in all of Europe and this of course dramatically changed over the next three centuries were these these people dropped in numbers to under 10 million whereas the number of European immigrants and European people migrated multiplying in the Americas just exploded so this idea that they were primitive the author of 4091 says is similar an analogous to someone being dropped into Nazi Germany at the end of World War two going to a concentration camp seeing these emaciated people and thinking well they must have always been part of a culture that had been barefoot and starving they must have always been primitive and of course we know that's completely wrong these people is man succinctly puts and accurately puts our survivors of a recently shattered culture and if you understand what happened prior you can make months much more sense of who they are and why they are the way they are today you have that background in mind and you think of yet another primitive people's you begin to wonder if this is not the result of the inevitable march of progress from simple to complex but perhaps the results of an ancient catastrophe or population collapse but before we can dig deeper into that explanation and explore it and evaluate it we have to tie up some loose ends that are leftovers for mainstream science 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 5 & 6 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 are the commercial testing companies this is the tool the basis for exploring European Chinese African Pacifica all these are the places that history that's the basis for 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 past if we have just a few differences between us our common ancestor 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 and the reason we got so excited one of the main smoking of the recent origin the human race in the y-chromosome was a match between two types of data the first type of data was the history of human population growth derived from archeology and written records so for example the Roman Empire kept a census of how many citizens they had the Chinese Empire - the same you can use that to say ok how many people are living here you can also use archaeological remains how big is this city how many people would have required to sustain it how much manpower do you need to build this pyramid those sorts of things you can use to derive estimates and that's why there's two lines here it's gonna be a little bit of guesswork but this gives you a decent range of what the global population size look like we also looked at the ways in which you can use genetic differences - of all things reconstruct the human population history the simple explanation is the number of branches in each of our family trees reflects the number of people and you just extrapolate that and apply that globally the global human family tree the number of branches on it is going to reflect the number of people alive at any point in time in history and so when you reconstruct the human population history from the y-chromosome it matches very tightly but no from archaeology and from written records and the archaeology written records from this time a thousand BC going forward those data the blue line is evidence the evolutionists agree with and yet it's only the young earth reconstruction the reconstruction of human population history from the y-chromosome within a young earth framework that accurately recapitulates this this is remarkable word is Neanderthal DNA fit though you may have read in the news and seen announcements that we've gotten the under-told 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 evolution debate closely you might have seen the question of Neanderthal DNA brought up as an argument against the young earth timescale 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 then between any two people alive today and so if we use this concept of a genetic clock we say ok 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 forty five hundred years there's too many differences to explain so therefore your model is wrong what do you do with that this is tied to this question of time scale it's an argument for their ancient time scale well you if you've watched episode 19 you might recall us discussing these long branches among sub-saharan Africans some sub-saharan Africans others do not have these long branches and I've been orienting the tree back here Singh saying no as some we're back here and time moves from left to right and we discussed how we explain these branches no this does not represent mutations that happen in the future what I argued for and showed evidence for was that this seems to suggest some of these Africans that their clock ticks slightly faster than people outs were even other people in sub-saharan Africa and there's probably something just genetic factor that is the reason for this the evolutionists say no all clocks tick at the same rate you need to completely reorient the tree like this paper does and put those long branches back here again time moves from left to right we're not going to zoom in here but the red Africa these red African branches come off first there for richer ate originated in Africa we did so a long time ago now I bring this up because if you had a Neanderthal DNA they show up then even older than these African lineages now young Arthur's have been saying rightly so for many years that Neanderthals are the descendants of Noah and his family their 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 mutates 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 that doesn't perhaps tick really fast and mutate really fast the other assumption that they make is that this DNA is reliable and the reason I bring this up is because of my own personal experience working with DNA in the lab we were when I was an undergraduate working as an example with plant material we're using single-celled algae to understand photosynthesis this chemical process by which plants harvests light energy from the Sun and so forth we're studying the biology the chemistry of plants and we'd isolate DNA from these algae stick at the freezer put it in special solution and yet still in controlled conditions in the ideal scientific environment to keep this DNA preserved it would degrade naturally that's just second law of thermodynamics at work and so after a year to give weird results and because it wasn't worth our time to try to figure out why I was giving weird results we just throw it away and isolate some new stuff well here you have DNA that's been sitting on the ground even by young earth standards for thousands of years why wouldn't that be degraded well here's the interesting thing even evolutionists admit yes the DNA is degraded but they say we've eliminated the degraded parts and what we're presenting to you is bona fide sequence real sequence well how do you know that's true it's an assumption they assume it's real not degraded it's not an artifact of some sort of chemical degradation process and they assume that then the internal clock takes the same at hours well there's a way to test those assumptions some are the same way we tested the question of the African branches what happens if you put Noah back here you basically say no either it's degraded or their clock ticks too fast if either of those is true then it's basically irrelevant to our discussion well if you take that position you put Noah right there we've already seen you get a 95 percent match between the y-chromosome based data and the data from archaeology and historical records well what if you say no the DNA of Neanderthals is reliable and it ticks is at the same rate as humans and we need to completely reorient the tree the start is way back here it's not up here where I've been saying you've got a they don't branch off Africans there's some of the first post-flood peoples and they must have written the last 45 years what happens if you try to reconstruct human population history that way just like we saw for the question of reordering the tree based on the African sequences you get a very poor match the match between the tan lines and the blue lines is 14% 95% and you can see this more in the papers I published in December you just go to our website and type in my name look for these papers and the answers research journal my point is this is very good indirect evidence that either the DNA is degraded and/or their clock ticks at a different rates than ours does either way it is not a legitimate argument against the on earth timescale 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 well what is the story of their time of origin and then the time of their demise if this time scale 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 tune the adage holds in the DNA of modern people it works like this so if we draw a 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 you in 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 the right align argues that I can simply look to the left of the line and get information so if I say how many people were alive and 1200 or 1700 BC I just draw a line over from the tan to this axis now 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 gonna bring us closer to the story of the Angelus so let's let's take this in steps you didn't follow what I just did well stick with me we're gonna explain this in more detail in a moment recall from episodes 19 and 20 we discussed the question of where exactly Noah is and there still is some uncertainty I've been going in this series with where I think the best guess for now is it may be revised as more research comes in this is research in progress and I'm presenting one possibility and the one that I think is best supported by the evidence at the moment so the position where I think Noah 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 some in this episode and then even more so in the next episode 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 ethno-linguistic 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 stay where he was made second-in-command of Egypt to preserve people it says from all countries all lands and this that the timing of this event is right in line with the timing of event I just showed you okay what does this have to do with Neandertals 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 the antidotes so 500 and 750 years post flood during this time of Joseph salmon 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 doubled 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 they 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 point in history which gets us bang again close to this question the entrance five to ten million males 10 to 20 million people total on the globe in the time of Joseph's famine we'll get into some of these details more in the next episode but if you were watching episode 20 and thought I just have trouble thinking that all the earth came to Egypt because how do you get people from the Americas well how does that question change for you if you know that there's only 10 to 20 million people total alive on the entire globe at the time of Joseph's family that's just a few large cities by today's standards how far did they spread did they even make it to the Americas by the time of Joseph Stram there aren't that many people there I'm gonna 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 earliest 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 there was one model that I think makes a lot of sense more research will lead to the evaluation of it the bigger point I wanna make here is something that the question of plausibility so the the question I'm now trying to answer is what happened between Noah and really battle and Joseph the several centuries in between them how many people were alive at each stage well we know from Scripture there were four males and again I'm talking males because we're thinking y-chromosome four males immediately post flood Noah and his three boys we've learned from the y-chromosome at the time of Joseph stay they 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 low millions well if 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 as my kids grow up and they each have two kids each or four kids each they're in their families doubling double government that's less than population doubling that's entirely reasonable is my point it doesn't take much to go from Noah to Joseph and that tanker now you might say well I my family doesn't doesn't have population doubling maybe only have one sibling to sillens maybe you're the only child you look at other places around the globe maybe it's not published don't like that 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 needed aftermath of Babel the list of peoples in Genesis 10 Genesis 10 gives us genealogies of Noah's sons generation then how many sons they had and how many sons some of their offspring had and if you take the average of Shem ham and Japheth sling ages 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 7 to 8 not 3 to 4 so when I say what you need is as a minimum to go from Noah to Joseph is something even less when what the scripture says is going on now remember that when we're at Joseph's time we're talking about 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 flemeth the famine of Joseph's day put a big damper on that and may have killed Asif II 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 it's even less than what Genesis 10 is saying is going on now let me add one more point in here because we're talking about Genesis chapter 10 because we discuss in a previous episode what words the line of Japheth or of hammers or Shem if I'm proposing Noah is where I think he is and you've only got two major branches coming off where's the third boy well if you look at Genesis 10 we might have a partial answer and we'll discuss this even more in the next episode the number of offspring from each of these lineages is not equal Shem and ham have roughly the same number offspring around 30 Japheth has half that number now if you go back to episode 4 where we talked about differential rates of reproduction there we were looking at about a 20 percent difference if one group of people let's say a small group of Africans perhaps slaves from Africa were brought to Europe in the 1400s but they reproduced maybe 20 percent fast very small difference they can be the dominant ancestors of everyone else in just a few centuries well if ham and Shem are reproducing twice as fast as Japheth it doesn't take long for their lineages to out-compete Japheth in short order now some of you have messaged me and pointed out there's a verse in Genesis 9 I'd forgotten about this where it talks about Japheth dwelling in the tents of Shem could that be what it's referring to I don't know it's a very intriguing verse to consider and I can't give you the exegesis if at the moment my point here is looking at the math that and the data that we have at Babel we already see one of these lineages behind the eight-ball so to speak one of these is reproducing slowly or much more slowly than the rest and this may have long-term consequences that we'll explore in more depth in the next episode here's something else I would consider we're taking these points to rapid fire because there's so much to be uncovered here at the earliest points in history and so much to be rewritten in contrast to mainstream science let's use this model and again it's a model but let's dig deeper at the implications if I use this math and say okay if you take this rate three point six six kids per couple and then you make some assumptions about after this many generations the previous generations die out and you run a population model that'll get you from for males to five to ten million males in a few centuries you can then use that model and say okay at this century and at this century and at this century in between Noah and Joseph how many people were alive for example Abraham is born 300 to 400 years post-flood can we run this model to ask the question how many people who are alive on the planet at the time of Abraham well we can do it whether or not it's true is another question but if you run the model the model says at the time of Abraham they were only fifty thousand to three hundred thousand people alive in total in the entire globe so when you read about the Kings the five kings of the nations the Gentile in Genesis chapter 14 with whom Abraham event tries to do battle or Denis wait you know that you know that story were these the only kings alive on the planet that there's only fifty thousand to three hundred thousand people alive in total this really gets the wheels turning well I'm gonna there's so much more to discuss there I'm gonna leave that aside for the moment because we're the question we're trying to get at is the question of Neandertals all this is prelude to getting at the question of the timescale of Neandertal origins and demise well all we have so far from the animals are the mainstream timescale for their origin and demise well it turns out the mainstream timescale is a tool that we can use to rewrite their history and this is how it works it's a four-step process this is again research in progress the numbers may change as we do more research but I think this gives us a general idea of the shape and and type of conversion that we can do with genetics of all things so I'm not gonna get into geology you can read much of the stuff on our website about the geologic considerations about radiometric dating and carbon-14 dating and all that sort of stuff and a biologist I leave those sorts of discussions to my geology and astronomy colleagues in physics colleagues here's what we can do with genetics so let's think about the evolutionary model again they agree that from a thousand BC onward history matches what young earth creationist would think prior to that there's of course divergence now here's what I want you to see there's two things in this graph there's a time scale on this axis so of course they have an ancient history hundreds of thousands of years ago but they have ideas about human population growth 2000 BC 10,000 they say around 12,000 BC is this agricultural revolution roughly well this is based on archaeology and using archaeology they infer population sizes so they will say in 10,000 BC there were four million people alive in the planet my point is they have this model for the history of human population growth going into the ancient past this allows us to do a four step process by which to convert evolutionary dates to young earth calendar ones here's how it works step one as you find the evolutionary carbon-14 date so as an example let's take 10,000 BC okay we've got our date carbon 14 dates something like that then you find the evolutionary population size associated with it so in this case as I mentioned they would say in 10,000 BC there were four million people alive we're talking Y chromosomes I'll just / - two million males fine what does that matter well step three is take that evolutionary population size and find that same number the Y chromosome curve so I said we can we can trust the numbers back here because the match over here and we can find the numbers on this axis you say okay where's two million people on this axis so that's step three you find it there on the right side of this curve and using this horizontal line you find what intersects the yellow and you draw a line down and now you've got the young earth calendar date even if you didn't follow all of those steps we have a way by which we can convert evolutionary carbon 14 dates the dates assigned to Neanderthals we convert them to calendar dates and the link is the history of human population growth recorded in genetics so for all the math this is something I've already done and this is the result a very early preliminary result this is a result based on a young earth time scale using the Masoretic text and long sojourn in Egypt if you're a Septuagint person or a short sojourn you can read are all of these graphs the ministry doesn't get into that debate as an official position I'm just using the master I take you in the long sojourn and this is what folds out I want to point out a couple of key features in this graph number one you have these three tan lines over here that represents the range of flood dates the solid line is the average the dotted lines are the range what do you mean a range well there is some uncertainty in the text and I don't mean oh we can insert thousands or millions of years no what I mean is when you're doing a chronology and you say okay this man fathered this son when he was this old well when it says he was this old is that a week before his next birthday this is a week after his previous birthday there might be a play of about a year what difference does a year make well if you have 50 generations of one year being in question now you might have a 50 year uncertainty it's not a big uncertainty you notice this is a difference of about 50 years to a century my point is we don't want to be more precise than what the Bible says this is a young earth time scale it's very clear but let's recognize that there's there's also some uncertainty I think in one of the one of the lineages of the kings I think the date exactly one Solomon reigned relative to the Exodus there's a little there's again a very small uncertainty there so don't be intimidated or scared off by what you mean there's a range just recognize when you try to be very precise with the text there's still even some debate among conservative good young earth scholars so you can read a paper by Rob Carter and Chris Hardy which goes in these nitty-gritty nitty-gritty details in all its glory if you're interested these lines right here are the date for Joseph's famine again the average and the range and there's a little bit of uncertainty for the same reasons I just mentioned the blue lines represent the way by which we can convert dates so here are the evolutionary dates in BC here are the young earth calendar dates in BC and this is positive why that doesn't make any sense well cuz makes the graph easier to read so just recognize what I'm doing apologize for the confusion evolutionary BC dates creation BC dates and you find where these two intersect and you can convert it and I'll give you an example more in a moment because this will make it easier to understand there are two blue lines because again of some of the uncertainties in terms of establishing the very strict type chronology and because there's an inherent statistical variation and biological data but notice we're not talking about a variation of millions of years we're talking about a variation of maybe a century or two not a big deal okay Neandertals where do they fall out in this graph what can we learn about their story from this graph thirty thousand years ago is the mainstream date well the top date that we have here is ten thousand not thirty thousand but we can still make a conclusion ten thousand years ago you draw a line over I'd word intersects the first blue line or the second one then you draw a vertical line down ten thousand years ago would represent somewhere between 2100 and 2200 BC we can do the line over this way somewhere between 1900 and 2000 BC thirty thousand years ago to accept represent something even more early than that now based on the geography of the Neandertal fossils they seem to have been spreading out spreading out doesn't happen until after Babel and in my view this is not the official edgy view but I lean towards that will being within about a century after the flood I think that makes a lot of sense maybe a century or two so they're somewhere after that based on their geography and based on converting the mainstream time points to young at the time point so it's here or earlier or maybe here or earlier both of those seem to be before the famine so what we can based on the dates so we can still use genetics genetics based on living peoples but these genetics of living peoples give us a new tool by which to convert mainstream dates 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 and slave Minh and so forth those are not applicable at the dates were looking at for Nia metals however in episode 20 we looked at other events biblical events such as Caravan the migration of people to Egypt at the time of Joseph's famine and conquest is what was confusion the Tower of Babel conquest being the mixing and migration and pillaging of the people's that'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 conquests have by their nature the potential to up end and shatter a civilization and culture then the intervals 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 gonna stop them for doing anything further let's confuse their languages it's to inhibit what they were doing that's the judgment that'll inhibit what they're able to do technologically this guy has this set of knowledge this guy's this set of knowledge and all they can't talk to each other and share it it's been a very effective judgment part of the reason I think we haven't had technological progress like we've had acceptance 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 gods judgment and Genesis 11 has lasted thousands of years it's gonna affect the Neanderthals and other cultures a family will detect them the date seemed to be like that looks like they died out before the famine so another possible explanation for the 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 there it's also a consequence of human sin in Genesis 10 Nimrod is called a mighty hunter before the Lord do you think conquests set in centuries after Babel where did conquests start happening right away were 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 I don't think the scripture bears that I'll be all have the same depraved heart that only Christ can redeem so could the an adult's have died out at the hands of fellow belt and babbled survivors I think it's entirely plausible did 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 an Abraham's day there's only fifty thousand people and one of the subgroups within this fifty thousand decides they're gonna 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 is 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 timescale and put them in a biblical context yes there's this possibility that were wiped out by someone around them maybe they succumb to the effects the Ice Age we have it we have a temporal context in which to place their origins in existence what about this idea though in about 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 we've already seen based on Native Americans and in Scripture 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 people's 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 and in each episode and what's intriguing to me is the rule of thumb is fairly level growth even growth for thousands of years in the sharp uptick in the last few hundred won that seemed 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 being a little 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 then they go primitive and advanced ago primitive depending on who conquered them and who else they can conquer and the recent uptick seems to be in byproduct of just how many people there on this globe we've had a sharp uptick in people's knowledge is increased has been sharing 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 Neandertals are at the earliest stages when population sizes were small and the chance of going permanently extinct because got wiped out for much higher next episode we'll look at the fates of the survivors of these ancient conquests and try to put the pieces together there at the earliest stages of human history in this new history of the UN human race I hope you'll join us next time well dr. Jensen absolutely fascinating and you know I remember there were a couple of things I remember when I went to school as a teenager high school it seems like a long time ago I remember my teacher showing me a movie how you know humans evolved about two to three hundred thousand years ago in fact going back to their ape-like ancestor you know five to eight million years ago but two to three hundred years ago and they showed you this graph and said you know they started using stone tools and things and you know first of all though hunter-gatherers and learn to farm and then for all this time the population just stayed flat and then suddenly just a few thousand years ago it goes up and I haven't even thought back then if you cut off most of that black line you know because they would say oh well they must had children but they died out or whatever they're all primitives etc and it wasn't until they started develop some technology over here suddenly it takes out but what you're showing is you know that that first part of that all that flat graph is gone that's our evolutionary story and if you take what we actually are observing it just fits beautifully with what the Bible's teaching and I know we've talked about that in previous episodes ok I got a question for you now if people want to put their questions in the comments then not tomorrow for the program tomorrow for number 22 but for number 24 that'll be the following week 23 is the final one then 24 we can have the question time and questions that are submitted you'll try to answer those and also we should be able to have questions coming in live as well but my question for you right now is or maybe yeah you haven't done this and maybe you'll do it for next episode but how many people do you think we're alive at the Tower of Babel have you done that model I mean you said how many you thought might have been alive at the time of Abraham 50 to 300 there and what do you think about the terror baby people say a hundred but what do you say a hundred to two hundred hundred hundred and thirty years after the flood I've heard some people say around about that's that sort of time my view is is based on a couple different things in the scriptures less so the y-chromosome and I know there's debate and exactly when Babel happened I tend to take the division of the earth in the days of Peleg is referring to Babel not necessarily plate tectonics these sorts of things I think many of the geology folks would agree with that yes they step on a few toes but I think textually that that makes sense yeah in context that makes sense yeah 11:1 the whole earth was one language one speech so if that's the division and someone else had also pointed out to me back when I was at ICR that it's intriguing if you again think about the text in context you let the scripture interpret scripture they're all one language one speech Genesis seems to be it a collection of first-person accounts people saying I was there I saw it and I wrote it down and then there perhaps Moses collects it and then edits and these sorts of things debate on that but that's the view I like it's almost as if you have someone who's there at the time of the flood recording what's happening these are the people I knew in Genesis 10 then Babel hits I can't tell you anymore I can't talk to them I can't tell you what happened in this lineage that lineage but those who are there at the time that Babel hit here they are in Genesis 10 I'm writing them down for you and then language is confused and we lost we parted ways so based on the numbers there are 70 heads of families and then saying okay they have wives they probably have many kids have a hard time thinking that God's gonna give a child a new language and think they're gonna survive to me that you're likely heads of families perhaps extended families so using that number and saying okay let's add in women children perhaps extended family family units I'm thinking maybe about a thousand around the time of Babel these people separate so it's very small numbers of simple the people one of whom is Nimrod who's a mighty hunter and they've just had their plans frustrated how are they gonna vent that frustration I'm not sure they do so peacefully so I don't know how many of those lineages would be expected to survive until the present day yes he separates them but we've seen what happens in Israel's history with human hearts we've seen God's divine judgment of that we see his divine judgment of the nations as well as think it think of some of those people who are listed Canaanite God commands these lights to wipe them out so Babel is the first word not the last word my guess is wrote a thousand people and this is something to keep in mind then going forward as you think about what happened to their descendants and then what sort of signature would they leave in today's world which is what we're going to pick up in an episode 22 and you know I was also thinking if they're gonna build a tower they had some technology had ability they had Talent but then as they left that and you have those 70 families according to their language units moving away from each other now if I was a head of one of those the Lord never gave me an ability to build anything so you would come with me and we'd live in caves and we'd be the Neanderthals right but if it was my brother who who has this ability to think three dimensionally and just build houses you would go with him and he'd build a city so that's really the sort of thing we're looking at ugly yes exactly and I I wonder again the point is to make them spread out they've disobeyed already the command is spread out well they disobey again even if it confuses the languages given the shattering of their cultures how many of them are still somewhat interdependent on others so they're here God says spread do they want to spread all the way to the ends of the earth or they're gonna say well I can't talk to you but can we kind of wave our hands and try to undergo some sort of trade this is a question I have in my mind still as we think about how quickly did they reach the ends of the earth and we'll talk about the details of that from the y-chromosome next time as well okay episode 22 which will be tomorrow searching for the earliest clues to human history who are Abraham's biological descendants can we identify them and the DNA tell us what happened up to the events the Tower of Babel but before the family Joseph say that you're talking about so in these early stays of human history what did happen which civilizations rose and fell what did Abraham have to do with any of this that's what you're going to talk about in the next one episode 22 and if you missed all of the episodes subscribe to answers TV that's our streaming service it's a new streaming service from Answers in Genesis we now have over 1700 items up there when answers dot T be with more being added every day and all this series is on there and it works out at just over $3 a month it's very very inexpensive and high-quality and you can also go to youtube not the same quality as answers on TV but we do have playlists there for you if you want to go to youtube and use it so doctor Jensen thank you and we look forward to talking about Abraham in the next episode episode 22

Channel: Answers in Genesis

Views: 65,496

Rating: 4.7907128 out of 5

Keywords: neanderthals, history of the world, creation

Id: Swowi_CSjOM

Length: 58min 36sec (3516 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 06 2020