When Facts Replace Theory: The Neanderthal Next Door

On the day of redemption, one time-travels back to the Cross at Calvary where the only begotten Son of God, Jesus of Nazareth, shed His precious blood for the lost souls of the sons of Adam.  Here, one repents of sin, believes upon the Lord Jesus Christ, and confesses Him before men.  From that place 2,000 years ago, one shoulders the Cross with the Word of God in heart and hand and proceeds forward. 

Along the way, the unsuspecting pilgrim is often stripped of his Book, which is replaced with denominationalism’s doctrines of men and of devils—polluted translations, carnal scholarship, and the overall spirit of the deceivableness of unrighteousness.  God has authored only one Book to which we will be accountable; it is the inerrant truth found in what is known as the Majority Text—also the Textus Receptus, which means the received text. In today's modern translations, you will find this in the Authorized King James Version of the Bible.

Many visitors to GodSaidManSaid are exposed for the first time to the principle of “born again”—the only way to see the Kingdom of God and to partake of the divine nature.  In your owner’s manual, the Holy Bible, you’ll find John 3:3:

Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.

There is no other way and no other name under heaven by which men must be saved. 

Have you been born again—literally born a second time, this time of the Spirit of God?  Will today be your day to participate in the greatest miracle of all time?  Will today be the day your sin and shame is erased?  Will today be your day of salvation?  Click onto “Further with Jesus” for childlike instructions and immediate entry into the Kingdom of God.  NOW FOR TODAY’S SUBJECT.  

GOD SAID, Genesis 1:26-27:

26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

GOD SAID, Exodus 20:11:

For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.

MAN SAID: We don’t need a God who created all things.  We exploded out of nothing, and over billions of years of time and chance, here we are! 

Now THE RECORD:

The accumulated weight of unbelief—overt and subliminal—must be answered in the heart of the saved.  There must be a push back, an utter rejection, a refutation, and a dismantling of the deceivableness of unrighteousness.  For the mountain to move, the absolutes of God’s promises must be absolutely absolute. 

This is an individual place.  I must establish in my heart that the Word of God is true and righteous altogether. 

I must push back against Satan’s overt and subliminal gradualism.  I must push back on the jaded line, “It’s really not important.”  If it were not important, God would not have paid attention to it.  I must push back against the spirit of unbelief that teaches the baptism of the Holy Ghost as received on the day of Pentecost—as well as miracles and healing by faith in Christ’s stripes—was only for the days of the apostles.  I must push back against the idea that casting mountains into the sea is only an allegory and assert that mountains are included if need be.  I must push back through the smoke all the way back to the Solid Rock. 

Many Christians find themselves vacillating when it comes to the age of the earth.  The plain childlike reading of the Scriptures testifies of an earth created by God just over 6,000 years ago.  According to the highly esteemed work of Bishop Ussher, God began His work Saturday night, September 21, 4004 BC. 

After 6,000 years of skepticism, have the world’s wise men proven the Bible in error?  Have they proven the Bible in error in its account of the creation of the earth and its universe?  Have they debunked Adam and his ribbed wife Eve?  Have they refuted Noah’s Ark, Abraham and Isaac, Sodom and Gomorrah, Moses and the Red Sea, Joshua and the battle of Jericho, Samson and Delilah, David and Goliath, and so much more?  Have carnal skeptics disproven the virgin-born Jesus Christ and His miracle ministry or His crucifixion between two thieves and His resurrection?  Have they disproven the Christian ministry given unto the childlike, the ministry of preaching the Gospel and healing the sick or the powerful ability to cast out devils and speak with new tongues?  Have they discredited the marvelous prophecies of the Word of God?  The answers are many resounding NOs! 

Foundational to the theory of evolution and its billions-of-years assertion are two central doctrines: uniformitarianism and time and chance.  The foremost is the doctrine of uniformitarianism, which basically says the present is the key to the past and the earth proceeds at a steady rate.  So then, looking at the present rate of change around us allows them to extrapolate backwards into their billions-of-years scenario.  However, two colossal events took place in the earth’s history that utterly destroy uniformitarianism.  The first is creation.  If you had visited Earth on the seventh day, when God rested after six days of creating Earth and its universe, it would appear that the earth and its inhabitants had many years of history, when in fact Adam and Eve and all land creatures were just one day old—yet all were fully grown, developed, and able to reproduce.  If you had looked up into space and had seen the sun, the moon, and the stars, you would have assumed great age, when in fact they were only three days old.  Evolution’s founding theory is built on the platform of unbelief.  [End of quotes]

When the assumptions of evolution are removed from the scientific models used to predict the past, evolution’s house of cards simply comes falling down.  When considering straight-up scientific facts versus theory, it becomes exceedingly obvious that we, our earth and its universe, are young—as in about 6,000 years.  Consider a few excerpts from previous GodSaidManSaid features:

▶ “Genetic Biology and 6,000 Years Again:”

Is the Bible true?  Is the earth truly only 6,000 years old?  Does extra-Biblical information confirm it?

In the September 2012 issue of Acts and Facts, science writer Brian Thomas wrote concerning the age of man and the earth under the title, “A Recent Explosion of Human Diversity.”  Several paragraphs follow:

Everyone should know that the cosmos was created.  It also stands to reason that those who “listen to Moses and the prophets,” as Jesus said, should be able to see more specific evidence of Biblical creation, including scientific discoveries.  One such evidence is human genetic diversity, which leaves evolutionary history in a quagmire, while confirming a straightforward interpretation of Genesis. 

The research team investigated the amount of diversity among today’s human genes and how long it took to reach the current amount of diversity.  They concluded that human genes diversified recently.  The authors wrote, “The maximum likelihood time for accelerated growth was 5,115 years ago.”  This is a tiny fraction (0.2%) of the 2.4 million years of humanity that evolutionists suppose.  The explosion of human genetic diversity has occurred in parallel with, and because of, human population growth.  With each new person comes another opportunity for DNA differences to arise, either by designed genetic shuffling processes or mutations. 

For example, if the evolutionary timeline is true, then human population growth and genetic diversity were miraculously unchanged for a few million years before suddenly exploding in just the last few thousand years.  What are the odds that every married couple would have had almost exactly two offspring—just enough to replace the parents—survive into the next generation for over two million years or 100,000 straight generations?  In addition, where are all the human remains that should litter the planet after having been peopled for so long?  

In short, why does the human genetic diversity data fit so well with Biblical creation?  Evolutionary theory provides no real answer to what caused the radical bottleneck in the worldwide human population at that time, whereas the Bible teaches that it was Noah’s Flood.  This genetics study confirms Moses and the Prophets.  Both science and Scripture show that humans have multiplied and diversified within the past 5,100 years.  [End of quote]

The headline in the December 29, 2012 issue of Science News reads, “Human diversity’s recent explosion.”  The subhead reads, “Most genetic variation came about in last 5,000 years.”  [End of quote] The more science looks into the invisible, the more the facts shout YES to God’s Holy Bible. 

When speculations of pseudo-science are removed, facts confirm God’s inerrant Word. 

The GodSaidManSaid feature continues:

Now consider this headline from the May 2013 issue of Acts and Facts: “Is Mankind Getting Dumber?”  Several paragraphs written by science writer Brian Thomas follow:

Do today’s children have lower IQ’s than yesterday’s?  Yes, according to measurements of intellectual and emotional strength gathered from different countries and contexts.  The results show the same basic decline and resist the notion that public or other forms of education are to blame.  Could the cause instead lie within? 

Stanford University professor Gerald Crabtree thinks so.  He published a pair of essays in the journal Trends in Genetics, citing new discoveries that show why the human intellect is “surprisingly fragile.”  This Biblical creation-friendly notion didn’t sit well with the authors of a rebuttal paper, who countered that the human intellect is “robust.”  What lies at the heart of this disagreement—bad science or bad assumptions? 

Crabtree identified two fundamental processes as the main culprits.  First, human intelligence uses neurons, and these cells can only function properly if their genes stay in top shape.  Second, these genes are susceptible to degradation.  This loss of organization occurs continually as mutations slowly, irreversibly garble genes, and the resulting errors pile up and are not corrected. 

Each new generation accrues about 60 new mutations to the gene-coding DNA regions of the human genome.  Crabtree applied this rate to calculate that “every 20-50 generations we should sustain a mutation in one copy of one of our many ID genes.”  As a result, “in the past 3,000 years the n(~120 generations), each of us should have accumulated at the very least 2.5-6 mutations in ID genes.”  Accordingly, the human intellect “perhaps reached a peak 2,000 to 6,000 years ago.”

This appears to confirm three lessons that can be drawn from the Bible.  First, Adam's and Eve’s brains were originally “very good.”  Second, we had our best brains about 6,000 years ago.  Third, humanity has suffered genetic degradation since then under the Curse. [End of quote]

The headline of the article published by www.NIA.NIH.gov and recently brought to the attention of GodSaidManSaid by a servant of the Lord reads, “Life Expectancy of the Human Race.”  Most of the feature follows:

Today, we know the average person, if un-impacted by serious physical trauma and/or diseases, will live for about 90 years.  The “cause of death” for such a person is usually listed as “old age” (i.e. senescence).  In biological terms, such a death is the result of the gradual loss of genetic information (DNA) over time; once the loss and corruption of a person’s DNA reaches a critical mass, the person dies. 

Scientists are now asking a more strategic question:  What is the life-expectancy of the human race given the negative, cumulative impact of mutations/replication-errors?  This is a reasonable question because mutations/replications-errors are accumulating in the human population as a whole, and are then being passed from one generation to the next.  How many generations of humans can be produced before the collective human genome “wears out?”

To answer this vital, strategic question, a team of geneticists has compared DNA sequences in succeeding generations of Icelanders.  These geneticists found that children in Iceland have an average of 63.2 mutations/replication-errors that are “de novo” (“de novo means neither possessed nor transmitted by the biological parents).  Mutation expert Alexey Kondrashov reviewed this Icelandic study and agreed with the findings of the authors.  He also suggests that the accumulation of mutations/replication-errors in the human population is causing an increase in genetic disorders such as color-blindness and schizophrenia and autism.  Kondrashov writes, “Plainly, human DNA sequence quality is relentlessly worsening.”

Based on the Icelandic study, if we assume the first generation of humanity had NO or ZERO errors in their DNA, then, on average, the members of the second generation would have about 60 mutations/replication-errors in their DNA.  And, members of the 200^th human generation (about 4,000 years later) would have an average of 12,000 mutations/replication-errors in their DNA. 

Members of the human race now average about 18,000 mutations/replication-errors in their DNA.  It is estimated that when members of the human race reach an average of 21,000 mutations/replication-errors in their DNA, the human race will be at CRITICAL MASS and will NO LONGER be able to procreate/reproduce at survival levels and will quickly go extinct. [End of quotes]

Harmful mutations and replication-errors are occurring at a rate of 3,000 per 1,000 years.  When the number reaches 21,000—which the writer calls critical mass—life as we know it is over.  Stem-to-stern, mankind will have existed for 7,000 years. 

If so many evangelical Christians are reading the Scriptures correctly, the return of Jesus Christ in the clouds to receive His church unto Himself is very close, and shortly after follows the battle of Armageddon.  After Armageddon, Jesus Christ sets up His 1,000-year reign upon the earth.  6,000 + 1,000 = 7,000.  Is science once again knocking at the door? [End of quotes]

▶ “Satan’s Champions Have Gone to the Dogs” reports:

The headline in the June 15, 2013 issue of Science News reads, “Europeans are one big family,” and the subhead reads, “DNA finds common ancestry about 30 generations back.”  A few paragraphs follow:

Virtually every person living in Europe today shares a common set of ancestors that lived about 1,000 years ago, Peter Ralph and Graham Coop of the University of California, Davis report May 7 in PLOS Biology.

“What’s really surprising is just how closely related Europeans—and likely all people in the world—are,” Coop says.

In the past, mathematical analyses have concluded that everyone on the globe shares not a single ancestor, but a complete set of ancestors who lived about 3,000 years ago.  In other words, all of the people living then who have any modern descendants are ancestors of everyone living today. [End of quote]

Remember, eight people descended from the ark just over 4,300 years ago and they are the beginning of today’s global population. 

Discover magazine, in their July-August 2013 issue, under the heading, “Evolution in Overdrive,” published the following excerpt:

Joshua Akey of the University of Washington recently explored the average age of our species’ s gene variants, finding that most are very young.  About three-quarters of single nucleotide variants—a mutation that substitutes just one nucleotide (an A, C, T, or G) in the long string of DNA—occurred within the past 5,000 years, surprising considering that our species may be 200,000 years old. [End of quotes]

Today’s  subject is Neanderthal Man.  Several excerpts from the GodSaidManSaid feature “Neanderthal Man Back in the News—Was He Sighted in Outer Mongolia?” follow: 

The Neanderthal Man—a purported “missing link,” a hunch-backed, dumb-looking brute, a caveman, etc.—is back in the news.  Features were published in the March 2014 issue of Scientific American and in the March issue of Acts and Facts, and the two conclusions from the investigation of the facts, as you should expect, are notably different.  First, excerpts from Scientific American, from the feature, “Ancient Burial,” with the subhead, “In their treatment of the dead, Neanderthals were a lot like us,” follow:

Around 60,000 years ago, in a small limestone cave in what is now central France, Neanderthals dug a grave and laid an elderly member of their clan to rest.  That is the picture emerging from the archaeological site that yielded the famous La Chapelle-aux-Saints Neanderthal skeleton in 1908, and it has important implications for understanding the behavior and cognitive capacity of our closest evolutionary relatives. 

Some archaeologists have long argued that a number of Neanderthal sites preserve evidence of burials, a practice considered to be a key feature of modern human behavior. 

In recent years, researchers have found compelling evidence that Neanderthals had other modern practices, such as decorating their bodies and making sophisticated tools.  They did such things before anatomically modern humans invaded their turf, suggesting that Neanderthals developed cultural traditions independently, rather than learning them from savvy newcomers. 

Ironically, the original La Chapelle-aux-Saints discovery in the early 20^th Century gave rise to the Neanderthals’ unfortunate reputation as dumb brutes.  Shortly after the find, French paleontologist Marcellin Boule reconstructed the skeleton to show a stooped, slouching individual with bent knees, a short neck, and a low, sloping skull.  Thus the image of the oafish caveman was born.  Scientists later determined that the skeleton was in fact that of an aged male who suffered from severe arthritis.  [End of quotes]

Concerning Neanderthals, the following information is from the GodSaidManSaid feature, “Neanderthal Man:”

Dr. Duane Gish, who just recently passed away, was a well-known biochemist, author and famous debater. He had the following comment concerning Neanderthal Man:

It was claimed that he lived as long as about 100,000 years ago to as recently as 25,000 years ago, but all anthropologists now believe that he was just as human as you and I. 

Dr. H. Morris and Dr. H. Morris III, in their book Many Infallible Proofs, have this enlightening section on the Neanderthal Man:

The most famous of all the supposed ape-men was Neanderthal Man, who was believed by the contemporaries of Charles Darwin to be a brutish, half-stooped, apelike evolutionary ancestor of Homo sapiens.  It is now quite evident, however, even to the evolutionists, that Neanderthal (as well as the still more advanced Cro-Magnon Man) was human in every sense of the word, completely Homo sapiens.  Even such a thorough-going evolutionist as Dobzhansky has commented on this.

The cranial capacity of the Neanderthal race of Homo sapiens was, on average, equal to or even greater than that in modern man.  [End of quote]

The reason why Neanderthal Man was somewhat stooped and brutish in structure was not because he was newly evolved from the ape, but because he had health problems: 

Now, at long last, thanks to the investigations of Dr. Francis Ivanhoe of London, who published his findings in the August 8, 1970, issue of Nature, the Neanderthal puzzle may have been solved.  His review of the currently available anthropological and medical evidence shows that Neanderthal Man was evidently the victim of his decision to move too far north  at the wrong time, the onset of the glacial age.  In doing so, contends Dr. Ivanhoe, he lost significant contact with the ultra-violet rays of the sun and because his diet did not provide the missing nutrient, he contracted rickets, the vitamin D deficiency disease, which was to deform him for thousands of years to follow.  [End of quote]

The headline of S. Bunney’s article in New Scientist was, “Neanderthals Weren’t So Dumb After All.”  She said:

Paleontologists in Israel have discovered a fossil bone which shows Neanderthals may have been just as capable of speech as modern humans.  [End of quote]

Another article in New Scientist was titled, “Living Human Fossils In Outer Mongolia?”  One of the  paragraphs from the article reads:

Is Neanderthal Man alive and living in Outer Mongolia?  Myra Shackley tentatively posed this question in 1980 in her semi-popular book Neanderthal Man (Duckworth).  Probably to the surprise of many (but not all) archaeologists, she repeats it in the latest issue of the much-respected archaeology journal Antiquity.

The sightings of “wild men” with the physical appearance of Neanderthals together with the tool finds represent to Myra Shackley “an impressive body of material which it is difficult to disregard.”  [End of quote]

Cro-Magnon Man, according to evolutionists, is the last evolutionary step to man, but the fact of the matter is that he simply is man.  Dr. Gish said if he was walking down the street in a business suit, nobody would recognize anything out of place. [End of quotes]

In the January 2017 issue of Acts and Facts, Dr. R.J. Guliuzza addresses the sub-humanization of Neanderthals under the heading of “Neanderthals were Subhuman in Imagination Only.”  Several paragraphs follow:

Evolutionary beliefs—not known facts about Neanderthals—forced this misleading sub-humanized caricature of them.  Evolutionary imagination conjured up the ape-like, hairy, club-wielding, mentally underdeveloped savage because it fit their expectations of a missing link between an ape-like ancestor and humans.  Rather than liberating scientific research, for decades this major evolutionary blunder has sidetracked an accurate understanding of Neanderthals. 

In the last decade, an astounding flood of documentation has poured in showing how Neanderthals are far more human than evolutionary stories have depicted.  Views about diminished mental capacity were especially overturned.  Infant brain development for Neanderthals was believed to follow “an ancestral mode of brain development, similar to that of our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees.  Modern humans, by contrast, were suggested to follow a uniquely derived mode of brain development just after birth,” but “the new data indicate that Neanderthals followed largely similar modes of endocranial development to modern humans.  These findings challenge the notion that human brain and cognitive development after birth is uniquely derived.” 

The full sequencing of Neanderthal DNA showed it was at least 99.7% like that of living humans.  Neanderthals and other humans mated and exchanged DNA that “in some places, such as the DNA related to the skin, the genetic instructions are as much as 70% Neanderthal and in other places there’s virtually nothing from the species that’s often portrayed as brutish cavemen.”  Therefore, the “next time you call someone a Neanderthal, better look in a mirror.” 

Usually creatures, especially humans, mate only with others that they recognize as the same species.  The fact of Neanderthals mating with people like us reveals, as a science reporter states, that:

“For a long time, the field of human evolution has imagined a fictional world where distinct human groups separated from one another and then remained distinct for long periods of time,” Siepel [a Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory geneticist] said. “And we’re just finding out on multiple time scales that’s just not true.” 

The evidence of Neanderthals as evolutionary transitions is being shown to be merely a mental construct that took on a life of its own following its wholesale adoption. 

Possibly, the most remarkable findings are Neanderthal artifacts that reveal behaviors like those of all people throughout history.  A simple search for published reports returns headlines like “Surprise: Neanderthals Were Fine Housekeepers,” “Ancient Engraving Strengthens Case for Sophisticated Neanderthals,” “Ice Age Fashion Showdown: Neanderthal capes versus Human Hoodies,” “The Real Question: Who Didn’t Have Sex with Neanderthals?,” “Neanderthals May Have Used Chemistry to Start Fires,” “Hand Axe Design Reveals Distinct Neanderthal Cultures,” “Neanderthals Made Their Own Jewelry, New Method Confirms,” “Maybe Neanderthals Weren’t Such…Neanderthals,” “Neanderthals Built Mysterious Stone Circles,” and “Modern Humans No Brainier than Neanderthals, Study Finds.”  [End of quote]

When the speculations of unbelief are removed, the facts declare the glory of God.  These final excerpts are again from “Neanderthal Man Back in the News:”

If men lived an average pre-flood life of 911 years, or basically 13 times longer than we do today (and they certainly did), then much of the world’s knowledge that rejects this Biblical record would have a very distorted view of reality (and it certainly does). 

[T]remendously long pre-flood life-spans answer many questions.  Consider Neanderthal man, one of the evolutionists’ supposed links between ape and man.  Because pseudo-science has rejected the Bible and the creation model, the following truth has escaped the followers of pseudo-science.  A.L. Gillen writes in his book, Body By Design, the following:

Dr. Jack Cuozzo, a research orthodontist for over 30 years, in his book Buried Alive, explains Neanderthal man skeletons.  His studies show that the human head does not stop growing as we age.  Contrasting the measurements of people’s heads when they were 19, in their late forties, and some at age 80, he discovered that the head changed in the following manner: (1) the brow ridge came forward; (2) the jaw came forward; (3) the nose got bigger; (4) the chin came forward; (5) the cheeks came forward and flattened out; (6) the teeth came forward; and (7) the back of the head started to point out. 

Think of a baby’s soft head.  It is fashioned with cartilage as well as bone.  Our skull gradually changes over time from fetus to infant to adolescent to adult.  This has been known for some time.  But more recently, Dr. Jack Cuozzo has found that our skull continues to change in our old age, and assuming man could live to 150, 200, 300, or even 500 years of age, this pattern of change would produce an individual that looked remarkably like Neanderthal man.  [End of quotes]

God’s Word is true and righteous altogether—miracles and all.  It’s a place to build a life that will last forever. 

GOD SAID, Genesis 1:26-27:

26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

GOD SAID, Exodus 20:11:

For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.

MAN SAID: We don’t need a God who created all things.  We exploded out of nothing, and over billions of years of time and chance, here we are! 

Now you have THE RECORD.

 

 

References:

Authorized King James Version

GodSaidManSaid, “The Deceivableness of Unrighteousness and 6,000 Years”

GodSaidManSaid, “Genetic Biology and 6,000 Years Again”

GodSaidManSaid, “Satan’s Champions Have Gone to the Dogs”

GodSaidManSaid, “Neanderthal Man Back in the News—Was He Sighted in Outer Mongolia?”

Guliuzza, R., “Neanderthals Were Sub-Human in Imagination Only,” Acts and Facts, January 2017 

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