Do you think cavemen (neanderthals) ever mistook volcanoes for caves?

Question

Like if the volcano had a hollow at its side.

Answer 1

I studied Cultural Anthropology, and the studies of the first man. Up til now I have seen no evidence that any caveman fried under a volcano or in one. But, if there were any active ones maybe finding fire wasn't an accident after all. This is a fascinating subject, I recommend you continue, it shows early man and man today on a continuum-some made it some did not.

Answer 2

Definetly not.People say cavemen and woman are stupid(kinda true)but they could tell a volcanoe from a cave!

Answer 3

Wow! There was one guy who just wrote you a novel...not even about your question.  Anyway to acutally give you a relevant answer...probably not.  There are no real active volcanos close to where Neanderthals originated or have ever been found.  They may not have had as big a brains as we have but they were not stupid, especially not environmentally stupid.  They actually probably had a better sense of their surroundings than we do today.  They would have tried to stay where there was food, and the other animals around them would have alerted them to 'something' rumbling by their migration alone.  They would have sensed that the food had travelled on and if they wanted to eat they best move on as well.  This would have happened way before an eruption happened.  Hope this helped!

Answer 4

Neanderthals were not stupid and they were very attuned to their surroundings.  They would certainly know what a cave looked like.

Answer 5

Well since a lot of caves I have been in were created by volcanoes, I would have to say yes. There are great caves all around volcanoes that once had molten rock flowing through them. They make a nice place to get out of the elements.

Answer 6

probably not.  they had a larger brain capacity than you so wouldn't have been so dense

Answer 7

No, they probably would mistake an active volcano as a god.

Answer 8

it depends whitch period of time your talking about near the of the neanderthals there were smart,but in the beginning not very smart at all from what I know

Answer 9

Um they aren't exclusive.

Plenty of people take advantage of hot springs, which are a result of vulcanism.  Who wouldn't?   Winter makes a nice hot bath pretty appealing, and hot springs draw tourists around the world.  

It isn't as if the Volcano is erupting all the time.

Answer 10

hopefully they didn't try the top out....

Answer 11

Is this a joke question? You've got to be kidding! You actually believe in neanderthals?! That's as bad, no, worse, rather, than believing in the Easter Bunny!

So, now, that big question: What about ourselves? What can we infer from the evidence regarding the origin of human beings? Evolutionists now give us two choices. Either human beings are the result of time, chance, and a ceaseless struggle for survival, or else we began as “a hopeful monster whose star was a bit more benevolent than most.” According to creationists, the evidence suggests, instead, that we are here by the plan, purpose, and special creative acts of God.

I’ve mentioned being part of a television program on creation-evolution produced by the secular Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC).The program opened with a medieval princess wandering in a castle garden, apparently looking for something. Then the camera panned over to a rock ledge around a pond. There it was, big bulging eyes and all: a frog. Right before our incredulous eyes, the princess leaned over and kissed the frog. Stars sparkled across the TV screen, then a handsome prince appeared. As the prince and princess embraced, the narrator stepped into the scene with this introduction: If you believe a frog turns into a prince instantly, that’s a fairy tale; if you believe a frog turns into a prince in 300 million years, that’s evolution.

When I believed and taught evolution, I would not have put it that way, or course. But as I look back, I realize that story reflects what I really was teaching. According to evolution, if you simply wait long enough, time, chance, and struggle (mutation and selection) will gradually turn some amphibians, like that frog, into reptiles, mammals, apes, and finally man, like that prince.

Scientists can understand how a “machine” with as many complex and interdependent parts as a human being could be put together by intelligent creative design. Could chance and struggle over vast amounts of time do the same thing without any outside help and no planning ahead? Nothing in our scientific experience suggests time and chance have that kind of creative ability, although much of our common experience demonstrates that time and chance can destroy design! To convince scientists and skeptics, then, clearly the burden of proof lies with the evolutionist to find a series of fossils suggesting the change from frog to prince, or at least ape to man.

The first fossils proposed as links between apes and mankind were the “cave men” called Neanderthals. Neanderthal was originally portrayed as a “beetle-browed, barrel-chested, bow-legged brute” (a suitable ancestor for a mugger, if nothing else!) The creationists in those days responded, “Hey, wait a minute. Neanderthals are just plain people, some of whom suffered bone diseases.” The first Neanderthals discovered came from harsh inland environments in Europe, where they could easily have (like many of our own American-plains Indians) suffered skeletal abnormalities, especially from lack of iodine in the diet and shortage of sun-induced vitamin D necessary for calcium absorption during the long winters.

Neanderthals from the Palestine area do not show the more stooped and massive features. The brain volume of Neanderthals is slightly larger than the average brain volume of people today, and Neanderthal peoples had a well-developed culture, art, and religion. Nowadays, evolutionists agree completely with creationists: Neanderthals were just plain people, no more different from people living today than one living nation is different from another. What were the “cave men”? Just people who lived in caves. (And at today’s housing prices, that may once again be a good idea!)

There’s a secular museum in Germany where the curator dressed the wax model of a Neanderthal Man in a business suit and tie. His reason? He said it was time to quit deceiving the public. Neanderthals were just plain people. Indeed, scientists now classify Neanderthals as Homo sapiens, the same scientific name given to you and me.

Tragically, Neanderthals have not been the only people once considered subhuman “missing links.” In an article reprinted in Natural History as part of an issue on the history of evolutionary thought, there’s a short but very sad article by Henry Fairfield Osborn. Osborn says that a hypothetical unbiased zoologist from Mars would classify people into several distinct genera and many species. Thus, said Osborn, Negroes would be classified as a separate species, not yet evolved to full human stature. “The standard of intelligence of the average adult *****,” wrote Osborn as a so-called fact of evolution, “is similar to that of the eleven-year-old youth of the species Homo sapiens [which, for Osborn, meant Caucasians only].” Osborn was a leading evolutionist of the 1920’s, and it is easy to see how his kind of evolutionary thinking (rejected by modern evolutionists) helped to pave the way for Hitler’s n**i racism in the ’30’s and ’40’s. (See also Gould, on the false science of “craniometry” and its terrible applications.)

The Australian Aborigines were also once treated as subhuman evolutionary links. The natives of Tasmania were deliberately slaughtered by settlers who justified themselves by saying it was okay to kill wild dogs as farm pests, so why not other non-humans? As her dying wish, the last surviving Tasmanian, Truganini, asked that she be buried with her “people,” not embalmed as a museum specimen. She died, was embalmed, and preserved as an evolutionary link. (Warning: few Christians stood against this horror, perhaps because many churches had already accepted evolution into their thinking.)

In 1912, speculation about man’s ancestry shifted to Piltdown Man, dignified by the scientific name Eoanthropus dawsoni. Almost everyone knows that Piltdown Man turned out to be a deliberate hoax. But Piltdown Man wasn’t shown to be a hoax until the 1950’s. For over 40 years, the subtle message of the textbooks was clear: you can believe in creation if you want to, but the facts are all on the side of evolution. The facts, in this case, turned out to be a bit of ape jaw and human skull stained to make them look older.

One mystery is who perpetrated the Piltdown hoax, but the real mystery is why did anyone believe it? It was not a particularly clever hoax. As Gould points out, when people looked at the teeth with the right hypothesis in mind, “the evidences of artificial abrasion [filing] immediately sprang to the eye. Indeed so obvious did they seem it may well be asked—how was it that they had escaped notice before?” The age-stain was better done, but the imported mammalian fossils and hand-crafted tools were again obvious frauds. People wanted to believe in evolution, so they were able to see what they wanted to believe (a “people problem” that can only be solved by honestly looking at alternate sides of an issue).

Sometimes people ask me how virtually all the evolutionists in the world could be so wrong about such an important issue as human origins. Answer: it wouldn’t be the first time. Science is a human endeavor, and human beings make mistakes. Evolution goes far beyond the limits of science, and is even more easily influenced by human bias. I know that both intellectually and personally since I once accepted the evolutionary bias and its view of the evidence.

The “human factor” in the study of human origins is apparent in the multiple and varied interpretations of Java and Peking Man (“Homo erectus”) recounted in a very readable, yet thoroughly documented, book by Marvin Lubenow, Bones of Contention.

Joining Neanderthals, Blacks, Aborigines, and Piltdown Man as proposed witnesses for human evolution at the famous Scopes trial in 1925 was Nebraska Man. Nebraska Man was dignified by the scientific name Hesperopithecus haroldcookii, but he was never known by anything but a tooth. By imagination, the tooth was put in a skull, the skull was put on a skeleton, and the skeleton was given flesh, hair, and a family! Fig. 28 includes a picture of Nebraska Man redrawn from a London newspaper published during the year of the Scopes trial.

Two years later, Nebraska Man was back to being just a tooth. The tooth was found in the real skull, attached to the real skeleton. It turned out not to be the tooth of man’s ape-like ancestor, but the tooth of an extinct pig!

Figure 28. Discarded candidates for man’s ancestor.

TO SEE FIGURE, GO TO



A. Neanderthals turned out to be just plain people, some of whom suffered from bone diseases. In proper attire, they would attract no particular attention today.





B. Piltdown Man (Eoanthropus dawsoni) was a deliberate (but not very clever) hoax palmed off as “proof of evolution” to students for more than two generations. It turned out to be a bit of ape jaw and human skull artificially aged.





C. Nebraska Man (Hesperopithecus) was reconstructed, family and all, from a tooth—a tooth that later was found to belong to an extinct pig!





Most evolutionists have long since learned not to make so much of a tooth. Yet it was not until 1979 that Ramapithecus—“reconstructed as a biped on the basis of teeth and jaws alone”—was dropped as a “false start of the human parade” (Zihlman and Lowenstein). That didn’t stop Elwyn Simons from suggesting that Aegyptopithecus is a “nasty little thing” whose social behavior and family life—conjured up largely from eye sockets and the canine teeth of the males—are supposed to make it a kind of psychological ancestor of man!

The Australian National Museum in Sydney has apparently found a solution to the problem of evolutionary links still missing between apes and man. In June of 1993, we were greeted by a display describing five kinds of apes: lemurs, orangs, gorillas, chimps, and man. No need to look for links between apes and mankind if human beings are still apes! One display, described nursing behavior in various apes, including people. Another showed that man and chimps are the only apes that murder their own kind. A third pictured love-making among people and other apes. The text mentioned that some apes were monogamous, others polygamous or promiscuous, and that some men were like gorillas, others like chimps, etc. It was a truly inspiring and edifying display! Most evolutionists, of course, would be just as disgusted by the displays as would anyone else with a respect for science (or for common sense).

Modern speculation on mankind’s ancestry centers on a group of fossils called Australopithecus. In the public mind, these fossils are associated especially with the work in Africa of the Leakey family and of Donald Johanson and his famous specimen, “Lucy” (Fig. 29).

The name Australopithecus means “southern ape,” and it seems that apes are just what they are. Johanson likes to point out that where he finds his australopithecine bones, he finds many of the regular African animals (rhinos, boas, hippos, monkeys, etc.), but never apes. Could it be that apes are exactly what he has been finding all along? Its features are clearly ape-like—except that some claim Lucy and other australopithecines walked upright.

But how crucial to the definition of man is relatively upright posture? Vincent Sarich at the University of California in Berkeley and Adrienne Zihlman say that if you want something that walks upright, consider the living pygmy chimpanzee, Pan paniscus. This rare, rain-forest chimpanzee is only slightly shorter than the average chimpanzee, but it spends a fair amount of time walking upright. (I’ve watched them in the San Diego Zoo.) Since all the other features of the australopithecines are so apelike, perhaps Johanson and the Leakeys have discovered the ancestor of the living pygmy chimpanzee!

But did the australopithecines indeed walk upright? In the American Biology Teacher, Charles Oxnard says:

In one sense you may think there is no problem. For most anthropologists are agreed that the gracile australopithecines … are on the main human lineage …. This is the view that is presented in almost all textbooks; I expect that it has been your teaching in the classroom; and it is widely broadcast in such publications as the “Time-Life Series” and the beautiful [television] story of “The Ascent of Man.” However, anatomical features in some of these fossils provide a warning against a too-ready acceptance of this story ….

As part of his warning, Oxnard reminds his readers of gross errors once made in the cases of Piltdown Man and Nebraska Man.

Oxnard then proceeds to examine the evidence. And he’s well qualified to do so as Professor of Anatomy at the University of Southern California. He points out first that anatomical relationships cannot be simply established by subjective opinion. Viewed one way, for example, the pelvic bones of australopithecines seem to be intermediate between man and ape. But merely viewing the bones from a different angle makes the specimen seem as far distant from man as the other apes are. “Yet another view,” says Oxnard, “might suggest that the fossil arose from the African apes via modern humans!”—in other words, that humans were the missing link between the apes and the australopithecines!

Because he is so sensitive to the serious problems of subjective interpretations, Oxnard then goes on to describe in fascinating detail a computer technique called “multivariate analysis.” He goes into both its practical and its theoretic applications and reaches two conclusions.

First, his scientific conclusion: if the australopithecines walked upright, it was not in the human manner. If their posture resembled that of any living creature, it was most likely the orangutan. Oxnard also reaches a second conclusion for educators: “Be critical.” That is, examine all the relevant evidence. Look at it from different viewpoints. That’s really the only way we can protect ourselves against bias in science or any other human endeavor: a willingness to constantly check assumptions and to listen respectfully to the views of others. I trust that’s what we’re doing in this book, and I wish students around the world had the same freedom to explore both sides of the creation-evolution issue.

Figure 29. Australopithecines, including Johanson’s “Lucy” and the Leakey finds in Africa, are the current candidates for man’s ancestors. But USC’s Charles Oxnard says the fossils “provide a warning against too ready acceptance of this view.” He reaches two conclusions. One is scientific: “If the australopithecines walked upright, it was not in the human manner.” The second is educational: “Be critical.” We must encourage our science students to examine evidence more critically, he says—and, I might add, that’s what the two-model creation-evolution concept is all about.





Louis Leakey started the modern interest in australopithecines (and captured the attention of National Geographic) way back in 1959 with his “ape man,” Zinjanthropus. Zinjanthropus has since been reclassified as Australopithecus bosei, and it is now considered grossly apelike, an extinct ape really not related to man at all.

In fact, it was not the skeletal features that attracted attention to the Leakey finds in the first place. It was tools. As I said at the beginning of this book, every scientist can recognize evidence of creation. Tools imply a tool maker. Since the tools were found with Australopithecus, Louis Leakey assumed that that creature had made the tools. Thirteen years later, Richard Leakey found beneath the bones his father had unearthed “bones virtually indistinguishable from those of modern man.” Perhaps that solved the tool-maker mystery. At the time, Richard Leakey said his discovery shattered standard beliefs in evolution.

Actually, fossil discoveries have been shattering standard beliefs in evolution with monotonous regularity. Each in its day was hailed as “scientific proof that human beings evolved from apelike animals, yet all the candidates once proposed as our evolutionary ancestors have been knocked off the list. The cover story in Time magazine for March 14, 1994, assumes that evolution is an absolute fact,24 but it summarizes what is really the evaporating case for human evolution with these dramatic words:

Yet despite more than a century of digging, the fossil record remains maddeningly sparse. With so few clues, even a single bone that doesn’t fit into the picture can upset everything. Virtually every major discovery has put deep cracks in the conventional wisdom and forced scientists to concoct new theories, amid furious debate. [Empahsis added.]

It’s sad that human evolution is still taught as “fact” to school children, college students, and the general public, when “virtually every major discovery” has discredited the so-called evidence and disproved the theory. Even sadder, scientists who know the evidence and are “forced to concoct new theories” are only concocting new theories of how human evolution occurred, unwilling to ask whether evolution occurred and to work on the truly new, non-evolutionary theories that the evidence demands.

The australopithecines could not have been our ancestors, of course, if people were walking around before Lucy and her kin were fossilized—and there is evidence to suggest just that. Fossils of ordinary people in mid-Tertiary rock were found in Castenidolo, Italy, back in the late 1800’s, and the evolutionist Sir Arthur Keith recognized that accepting these “pre-ape” finds would shatter his belief in evolution (or at least its scientific support). Oxnard25 and Lubenow26 call attention to the Kanapoi hominid, a human upper arm bone found in rock strata in Africa laid down before those that entomb the australopithecine remains.



Figure 30. Footprints are more distinctive of man than most bone fragments are. If the footprints above are accepted as human, evolutionists would have to say that man existed “before” man’s supposed ancestors. Creationists say that these footprints (and the Castenedolo and Kanapoi bones) simply suggest that people have always been people, beginning with the first created human beings.





Then there’s the footprint evidence. Actually, we have many features in common with the apes (as a trip to the zoo will verify), and it should not be surprising that some bones would be difficult to classify. But apes and human beings have quite different footprints. The apes have essentially “four hands,” with an opposable big toe that makes their footprint quite different from ours. They also have a gait that’s quite different and a tendency to drop to all fours and “knuckle walk.”

In National Geographic 27 and Science News,28 Mary Leakey describes a trail of man-like prints in volcanic ash near Laetoli in east Africa. Fig. 30, redrawn from the former, shows Mary Leakey’s concept of how the prints were formed and preserved and the kind of foot that made them. If you examine the article, you’ll find that the foot looks pretty much like yours or mine.

In the center of the National Geographic article is a two-page fold out. Elephants, giraffes, guinea hens, and acacia trees dot the scene. Except for the volcano, it looks as if it could have been taken from a Tarzan movie. Then across the center is a line of very human-like tracks. You might be surprised, however, at what the artist put in the tracks. An artist had to do it, by the way, since we have no foot bones connected to leg bones, etc., to tell us what really made the tracks. Perhaps the most logical inference from these observations is that people made them. The stride is quite short, but perhaps the person was small or just very cautious about walking across the damp volcanic ash.

Most evolutionists, however, forbid themselves to believe that these tracks could be made by people, because they don’t believe people evolved until later. The Kanapoi hominid, however, suggests that people might very well have been around to make these prints. And living not far from that site in Africa today are people (the Pygmies) not much taller as adults than the Laetoli print-makers.

Understanding the serious implications of the Laetoli finds, one scientist looked almost desperately for evidence that some animal, and not man, may have made those prints. He even had a dancing bear jump up and down in mud, hoping those tracks would resemble the Laetoli prints! His conclusion? It was impossible to tell the Laetoli tracks from ordinary human footprints. As an evolutionist, he used such adjectives as “shocking,” “disturbing,” and “upsetting” to describe his results, since none of the popular evolutionary “links,” including Lucy, could be man’s ancestor, if people were already walking around before these so-called ancestors were fossilized. To the creationist, the evidence simply confirms that people have always been people, and apes always apes, as far back as the evidence goes.

Did visitors from space help build the great pyramids of Egypt and Central America?

Is advanced technology from an alien civilization needed to explain how ancient man could move huge stones, build monumental structures, create intricate artwork and organize complex cultures? Some think so, because of their evolutionary belief that ancient man was ‘primitive’.

If evolution were true, the further back into history we look, evidence should show a gradual decline in man’s intelligence, moving closer to the ape’s. Biblical creation would indicate otherwise. Man, created in God’s image, has always been intelligent. People make discoveries and invent things, and this knowledge is passed on and built upon. In this way, technology can increase within a society, but this is not because people become more intelligent.

True history

A short time after creation, people were already inventing things such as musical instruments, and metal-working (Genesis 4:21–22). By the time of the Flood, mankind would have reached a high level of technical ‘know-how’. We don’t know exactly how high,1 but there are some clues.

First, it was sufficient for Noah and his helpers to be able to build a huge ocean-going vessel. The Ark measured approximately 135 metres (450 feet) long, 23 metres (75 feet) wide and 13 metres (45 feet) tall (Genesis 6:15). We know that these proportions were ideal for stability.2 This colossal task would have required advanced knowledge in engineering, not to mention timber-working techniques (see also Q&A: Noah’s Ark).

Second, we can get some indication from the level of technology in those civilizations which sprang up rapidly after the Flood. Noah and his family would have tried to carry with them as much know-how as they could, to survive, and restart civilization in the ‘new world’ for which they were headed.

The Bible records that soon after the Flood, mankind built a huge city. This was in the fertile river valley of Mesopotamia, around present-day Iraq. Even evolutionists can’t ignore the evidence here, and generally refer to this area as the ‘cradle of civilization’. Which it was—but only for the post-Flood world.

The tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1–9) was probably a ziggurat, or the first type of pyramid, like others still standing in the area (around present-day Babylon). Similar styles of pyramids are found in ancient civilizations all around the world. Evolutionary historians believe that each culture devised the same style of building independently. But it seems more sensible to suggest that they are similar because they all came from the same origin—Babel.

As with any group of people in society today, those that existed at the time of the Tower of Babel would have had a diverse range of skills. Some were builders, some artists, and others farmers. However, when God divided the groups by language, the broad pool of knowledge was divided also. The original groups that became, for example, the civilizations of the Egyptians and Mayans obviously included people skilled in civil engineering, building, and so on, as evidenced by the rapid establishment of their cultures. Other groups would have lacked such knowledge.

Imagine if you and your extended family were suddenly forced to migrate rapidly into an unpopulated wilderness. Even though you come from a society with great technology, it is likely that your family group would not carry all of the necessary knowledge with you to, for example, be able to find ore-bodies, and smelt and work metals. So you might choose to use stone tools to survive.

Cave men

After the Flood, some groups chose to shelter in caves. In harsher climates, these would have provided more protection than artificial dwellings. However, this does not make their inhabitants ‘primitive’ or unintelligent. Some people today choose an alternate lifestyle away from cities, in surroundings that could be considered ‘primitive’, without being any less intelligent than others.

The typical ‘cave-man’ is portrayed as a hairy, dim-witted, brutish creature. However, many cave paintings reveal a skill equivalent to that of some of the greatest artists of modern times.

Recently, surprised scientists have even found ‘stone-age’ musical instruments, revealing a high level of understanding and musical ability.3

Stonehenge—its massively heavy, precisely positioned slabs defied explanation for those thinking of the builders as ‘less evolved’. It has recently been demonstrated that greased planks, ropes, and ingenuity applied by fully intelligent people would do the job.



It is easy to see how many skills would be lost if people were broken into isolated small groups today. For example, one such group may have farmers and architects, but no mechanics, geologists, or blacksmiths. That group would know of the mechanic’s skill but not how to apply it. Similarly after Babel, those groups fortunate enough to carry the broadest range of skills would be able to transplant their previous culture rapidly. It would look as if it had sprung up ‘overnight’.

There seems to be no evidence showing how the knowledge to build pyramids was developed. Note the following two quotes by evolutionist researchers:

‘There is no evidence whatever of any technological breakthrough in the methods of quarrying or cutting stone which might account for the onset of pyramid building. All the tools and techniques used by the pyramid builders were in existence well before their time.’4

‘The archaeological evidence suggested that rather than developing slowly and painfully, as is normal with human societies, the civilization of Ancient Egypt, like that of the Olmecs, emerged all at once and fully formed. Indeed, the period of transition from primitive to advanced society appears to have been so short that it makes no kind of historical sense.

‘Technological skills that should have taken hundreds or even thousands of years to evolve were brought into use almost overnight—and with no apparent antecedents whatever. (emphasis added)’5

Some of those groups which found themselves forced to use stone technology would have gained other knowledge in time, while we see cultures today which are still quite content to use stone tools. They are, however, fully human and intelligent. There is also evidence that cultures can lose technology. In ancient Egypt, the early pyramids were the best, with the quality declining until they were no longer built. As one secular researcher observed:

‘The pyramid age had come to an end, having lasted for a little more than a century. Pyramids were still being erected for about a thousand years, but they rapidly became smaller and shoddier, and it is quite clear that with the third Giza pyramid the zest had gone out of pyramid building forever.’6

Massive buildings and ingenious solutions

On a windswept plateau, 3,900 metres (13,000 feet) high near the Bolivian shore of Lake Titicaca in South America lies the ancient city of Tiahuanaco. It was a majestic ruin even when the ancient Incas arrived there. Sixteenth century Spanish treasure-hunters didn’t believe the local Indian tradition that Tiahuanaco sprang up very rapidly, after a great Flood, built by unknown giants. Today the remains of immense statues and stones lie strewn over the landscape. A Reader’s Digest author commented, ‘… the best engineers of today still ask themselves whether they could cut and move huge masses of rock such as those used to build the city. The giant blocks look almost as though a die were used to cut them—a task achieved with none of the resources of modern technology’7 and ‘… the architects who designed and built them were men of genius.’8

Ruins of an ancient Mayan astronomical observatory. Note the similarity to one of today's observatories.  



Many of the structures from the ancient world have stood for thousands of years in relatively good condition—would our 20th century buildings still be standing in thousands of years?

In the ancient city of Sacsahuamán, near the city of Cuzco, Peru, there is a magnificent wall built by the Incas, deliberately using irregularly shaped blocks of stone. Some of the blocks weigh as much as 100 tonnes and are so accurately fitted together that still today it is not possible to insert a piece of paper in the joints between the blocks. Even more incredible, however, is a larger stone block in the area. The size of a five-storey house and weighing an estimated 20,000 tonnes, the builders of Sacsahuamán could, and somehow did, move this block! The feat of moving such a staggering weight has never been attempted, let alone duplicated, with modern machinery. Even the largest crane in the world today is capable of lifting only about 3,000 tonnes.9

No wonder New Age authors who accept evolution believe that ancient man must have had help from some technologically advanced race!10

Consider two examples of ancient man’s ingenuity in building the pyramids.

The pyramids required an absolutely level base for their foundations. This was achieved by using an ingenious spirit level. The Egyptians first cut channels into the underlying rock and filled them with water. Then, they inserted rods into the channels and marked off the water line, thereby establishing a true level. And read what one author says regarding one burial chamber construction:

‘The ceiling consists of nine blocks with a total weight of 400 tonnes. To minimize the danger of the great weight of the masonry above bringing down the ceiling, five superimposed open spaces were provided above the chamber to spread the load; these constitute a masterpiece of engineering.’11

Levelling? Loads? Building for stresses? Accounting for these types of things reveals a high level of knowledge beforehand. Architects and civil engineers spend years at university learning these kinds of advanced skills. The ancient world displays numerous other examples of man’s ingenuity.

Archaeologists studying ancient civilizations often report being ‘amazed’ or ‘surprised’ at the level of man’s skill in the distant past. Actually they’re surprised only because their evolutionary beliefs lead them to expect to find evidence of ‘primitive’ men, not intelligent ones.

Amazing history

The truly astonishing feats of the ancient world, requiring a high degree of intelligence, knowledge and skill, were not only in architecture and civil engineering. The ancient Mayans were meticulous time keepers. Without computers or sophisticated measuring equipment they knew the length of the solar year to be 365.2420 days long. Only recently have astronomers calculated it to be 365.2422 days long.

The Mayans worked out that 405 full moons occurred in a period of 11,960 days; modern research shows it to be 11,959.888 days. They calculated the synodic period of Venus at 584 days; current science shows it to be 583.92 days [the synodic period is the phase cycle as observed on Earth—the time between successive appearances of a given phase, e.g., crescent. The Mayans of course were not familiar with Galileo’s explanation that the phases of Venus could be explained by its orbit around the Sun (224.7 Earth days)—called the siderial period, i.e. relative to the stellar background]. These minute margins of error, confirmed only with the use of modern technology, reveal an amazing degree of accuracy on the part of these ancient cultures.

Interestingly, considering the Mayans’ obsession with accurate timekeeping, the Mayan calendar apparently began from a creation date about 3114 BC. The Mayans also excelled at mathematics, using a positional system, similar to today’s, that was less clumsy than that used by the Romans in Europe.

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Ancient ingenuity

Facing an extremely difficult (even by today’s standards) task, the civilizations that erected the giant statues on Easter Island, and the colossal figures of the Pharaoh Ramesses in Egypt, used human ingenuity in construction. An Incan wall of irregular stone blocks, fitted together so precisely that even after centuries of earthquakes it is not possible to fit a piece of paper between the joints. The stone block weighs an estimated 100 tonnes! [More pictures available in Creation Magazine.]

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Did you know?

In 1900, off the island of Antikythera, Greek divers discovered the wreck of an ancient ship sunk about 65 BC. Recovered from the wreck was a device with an extremely complex system of precision mechanical metal gears and engraved scale calibrations. Thought to be some kind of navigation computational device, it reveals the inventors to be extremely intelligent.

The ancient city of Mohenjo-Daro in the Indus valley, believed to be one of the earliest civilizations known, had a system of sanitation exceeding that of many European cities thousands of years later.

The ruins of Roman temple columns at Baalbek in Lebanon stand on a single foundation stone (placed by an earlier civilization) weighing an estimated 2,000 tonnes.

Carved from a single block of volcanic rock, the ‘gateway of the sun’ at Tiahuanaco weighs an estimated 100 tonnes. How it was transported and erected is a mystery.





Conclusion

The known history of mankind does not suggest evolution from a primitive ‘ape-man’ creature through to today’s intelligent human. Rather, the evidence from the past shows that people have always been intelligent, using their ingenuity to make the best out of the various situations in which they found themselves.

Answer 12

If they did they would not be around now working for Geico