Re: Biblical Ages


Chris Devol wrote:

> Those are not the only two possibilities. One alternative is that the
> proposition that Homo Sapiens cannot under any circumstances live longer
> than about 100 years is simply wrong. Another is that we have devolved from
> advanced human beings who were much more robust than us.

There is no meaning of the term 'devolved' in biology. Evolution has no
direction.

Of course it is *possible* that at some time in the past human beings
lived to great ages.

However:

1) Modern humans in developed nations have a greater average life-span
than any other population for which life-span is known.

2) The greatest age reliable recorded for a modern human is around 120
years.

3) Other great apes have life-spans of the order of 30-40 years.

4) The greatest life-span recorded for *any* mammal is around 250 years
for greenland whales, and there are sound biological reasons which
explain their great age. In particular, there is a correlation between
body size and longevity. There is no archaeological or palaeontological
evidence for human beings of enormous stature.

5) There is no evidence that humans living about 4,000 years ago were
biologically different from modern humans, and very sound reasons so
suppose that they were metabolically identical to modern humans.

6) There is no evidence for many of the other events described in the
Bible which are associated with reports of people living to a great
age, and most scholars of the Bible do not treat such accounts as
literal.

7) The teeth and bones of modern humans show signs of wear and disease
associated with ageing, and such characteristics are also found in
skeletal remains from 4,000 years ago. Based on the evidence from those
skeletons, archaeologist have concluded that life for the people living
at the time was 'nasty, brutish and short'. Teeth show signs of severe
wear caused by eating food made from flour ground on stone querns, and
the knee-joints of the women in particular as shot to hell because they
spent hours every day on their knees grinding corn.


I'd say that if you wish to support the assertion that people used to
live to far greater ages than modern humans, you need to bring some
rather sound evidence to the table.

There are, of course, other possibilities.

To give your a couple.

1) The accounts of very long-lived humans refer to a race of space
aliens who colonised the planet and interbred with the native hominids.

2) The speed of the orbit of the earth around the sun has decreased
drastically since those days, so that a year was a much shorter period
than it is today.

Incidentally, these propositions have been put forward by people who
are apparently serious. However, they are also incapable of bringing
any evidence to the table to support their proposition.

RF

.

Relevant Pages

  • New Research Confirms Out Of Africa Theory Of Human Evolution
    ... Researchers have produced new DNA evidence that almost certainly confirms the ... theory that all modern humans have a common ancestry. ... existence of inconsistent evidence in Australia. ...
    (sci.anthropology.paleo)
  • Re: More on the Neanderthal debate
    ... of modern humans. ... evidence on the other side... ... I stated that taking the position that Neandertals have contributed to ... the genetic makeup of the modern human gene pool rests on very little ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: News: Neanderthals and Humans: Perhaps They Never Met
    ... The number of years that modern humans are thought to have overlapped ... Neanderthals lived in Europe and western Asia from 230,000 to 29,000 ... I'll go whereever the evidence takes us. ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: Apiths Represent a Dramatic Shift in Lifestyle
    ... > who are more ecologically dominant presently than ... >> What other species have ever possessed it? ... e) You say it's the same as that of modern humans. ... >> evidence for weapon use. ...
    (sci.anthropology.paleo)
  • Re: Quelle couleur de Cro-Magnonais?
    ... "The ancestors of Cro-Magnon people left Africa ... twice as long ago as that 35,000-year-old age." ... Early Modern Humans ...
    (sci.anthropology.paleo)