Can We Reconcile God’s Word with Prehistoric Man? (Part 1 of 3)

Can We Reconcile God’s Word with Prehistoric Man? (Part 1 of 3)

Science’s ever-contentious battle with God is a losing proposition

Khen Lim

Image source: The Conversation

For years, I’ve always wondered how God’s Word reconciled with all the evidences we have of prehistoric man. National Geographic is full of articles on all sorts of prehistoric skulls and bones found virtually everywhere around the world but they’re not the only ones reporting them. 

It seems everyone is convinced of two things – firstly we came from primate material and secondly, the human race is far older than the Bible tells us. And in both cases, man seems to challenge God in what we think is the truth. It seems that God might be withholding the reality of our history from us. Or is He?

Introduction

Image source: Ancient Origins

Writing this article is a tough proposition because I’m not a scientist and it’s highly doubtful what I’m writing here will pass any science test. I don’t intend for this article to make me famous (or infamous) but for me, it’s just an exercise in trying to think intelligently and staying within the veracity of God’s Word. 

I don’t wish this article for anyone to call me a heretic or to challenge me in whatsoever manner because nothing I write here is provable as it is only meant as a thought exercise and nothing else. So, drop the stones, sit back and just humour me.

Firstly, let’s remind ourselves of what Scripture does and doesn’t talk about when it comes to evidences of prehistoric man. To begin with, nowhere in Scripture is there any specific mention of terms of cavemen or Neanderthals. There was clearly no humans before God created Adam and then Eve. 

Furthermore, the Bible holds neither information nor indication that either Adam or Eve had come from an evolved state. In other words, there is no Scriptural evidence that there were any lower life forms from which humans beginning with Adam and Eve hailed from.

However, in Genesis chapters 6 to 9, the Bible does offer a clear description of a period in which there was tremendous upheaval upon the earth. This was the Great Flood where God destroyed all of civilisation bar a family of eight people whom He gave plans to build an Ark that would help them stay afloat and alive. And with that, humanity had to begin all over again.

In the historical context, some people take this to mean that when man had to begin again, he had to do so by dwelling in caves and using primitive stone tools. But the Bible proved that they were hardly primitive; instead, they were just destitute but God gave them sufficient resources to make something out of their lives once more. 

Furthermore, just as fossil evidence proved, they were humans and not apes or half-apes. They just happened to live in caves and even that does not suggest they were primitive by any means.

Today, man continues to find that ‘missing link’ that would forever ‘prove’ that humans had descended from primates. That ‘missing link’ has been a seriously contentious issue over more than a century and every time someone declares he found evidence of one, disproving it proved embarrassing, demoralising and confounding because it shows up the shallowness of science – or scientists, perhaps – despite all these centuries of advancement.

Just a wild idea

Image source: Fox News

When I began to think of the certainty that there is no ‘missing link,’ I wanted to think how one can bridge the gap between the prehistoric man that the scientific communities are showing the world and God’s insistence that the human race began purely from Adam and Eve. 

To do that, I needed to assume that at least some of the prehistoric fossils are genuine. Like I said, this is not a scientific discourse but just a silly little exercise in thinking aloud.

The prehistoric fossils through carbon dating suggest that the Bible’s young-earth theory is contentious and debatable. It’s nothing but an age thing – prehistoric materials date back beyond 4,000 years, which is the limit placed by the chronological derivations of the biblical events in the Old Testament. 

From the genealogies provided, it is not difficult to work regressively and come to a reasonably point in time. By and large, the point of origin is somewhere around 4,000 years ago.

In my assumption, evidence surrounding the prehistoric man is, for the purpose of this exercise, incontestable. So, let’s say there are enough discoveries over time that unearth prehistoric fossils that suggest their existence earlier than 4,000 years ago. 

However, even as we do this as an exercise, let’s be mindful of what the Bible says. We need to remind ourselves that the inerrant Word of God tells us that before Adam, there were no humans. In other words, there are no one like us prior to Adam and in accordance to Creationism, this is true.

Therefore, these prehistoric fossils will point not to any evidence of pre-Adamaic humans but clearly to apes. The whole point of modern anti-theistic science is to basically prove that there is a clear connection from the evolution of apes to the modern man. This connection is what all the brouhaha has been over a century. In this little exercise, the ‘missing link’ would theoretically occur around the 4,000-year mark just before Adam was created.

Conservative Creationists know and understand that there is no ‘missing link’ because Adam did not descend from apes or half-apes. He was created by God from a separate and unique blueprint (Gen 2:7). He was not extracted from an existing life form (ibid). Whereas Eve was, Adam had no dependency life form from which he was conceived. To put it in another way, there was no donor animal.

At the same time, God not only did say He was pleased with His Creation, which is why He blessed them (Gen 1:10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 28, 31) but He specifically told us that Adam – and all of us subsequently – was created in His image (1:26, 27). 

For Creationists, this is an important point. If we believe that the ‘missing link’ exists (but not found yet), then we admit that humans were once derived from a primate lineage and if this is true, then we might as well conceded that God must be an ape. If we were created in His image and we hail from apes, surely then God’s origins are no more than a divine but very powerful primate.

If we do not believe this to be true, then we could not have come from any line of primates, which means the ‘missing link’ is non-existent. This in turn means that as the human race began some 4,000 years ago, the prehistoric fossils (assuming they are genuine) lay proof that a different and separate primate line had existed even earlier. What we now know (for this exercise) is that these two development lines are not connected and as one ended (the prehistoric), the other one began (the modern Adamaic man).

What and why this happened is completely open to conjecture and often someone gets into trouble speaking his mind or postulating something bizarre. As for my little exercise, I imagine perhaps that right at an earlier point of beginning not recorded biblically, God could have allowed a very early form of primates to exist and gave them natural latitude to develop on their own. 

Over many millennia, God would have witnessed the gradual biological transformation of this lineage but after some time, He grew frustrated and displeased over it. After all, if He could feel good and pleased with what He say in the Creation of the Earth and all that was abundant in it, 

He might have felt the opposite before and this could have led Him to wipe everything out and began the way He preferred it, the way in which He would feel good about and in the precise manner that He could find pleasure in.

God has every reason to be displeased with the prehistoric ape. Not only was its natural development too slow but it did not reflect His true image. Just these two points alone meant that the primate-based line had to end. And from thereon, He laid down His real marker and began the human race for the first time. Rather than say modern man, this is man as he was and as he is today. 

Nothing modern or not modern about him, he just is.

Dealing with bent progressivism

Image source: Monkey Blog (WordPress)

There is no doubt that something as wild as what I’ve written will be discredited. I don’t expect anyone to pay much attention at it. I only put it in writing just as a record of what my thoughts were a week earlier. I thought it was personally interesting because invariably, it led me to do a bit more study into how the world could veer so hard to the left and leave the truth behind.

How can science be so naïve to imagine that there is a transition from ape to man? How is it that so many scientists believe that the fossilised ape remains lay prove to such a transition? How shallow can they be that whenever one imagined cavemen, they would automatically think they were some ape-man hybrids complete with primitive non-intelligence who couldn’t communicate or speak and had no language to do so in? How can science be so devoid of a proper understanding of what the Bible says so clearly about the beginning of the Adamaic line?

In contrast to how science is grappling and clutching at straws, the Bible makes it evidently so clear that when Adam and Eve were created, they had none of that learning curve to deal with. In fact, when God created them, they were at least, young adults. They were not teens. They certainly were not toddlers. Instead, Adam and Eve were full-grown and equipped with communicability, society and development (Gen 2:19-25, 3:1-20, 4:1-12).

While progressive and evolutionary scientists go to great lengths to image the existence of prehistoric caveman, the Bible was already offering the fullest and clearest picture for more than 2,000 years. And even as we speak, they continue to ‘prove’ what is inevitably unprovable unless they construe and conjure. 

From one distorted looking tooth ‘discovered’ in a cave, an evolutionary scientist can instantly invent a complete narrative and publish it to the world, saying that he has discovered a distorted human caveman whose bent posture compels him to believe that he could be partially an ape. When in fact, it is scientifically impossible to work all this out from just one little tooth, distorted or otherwise.

The problem with the modern scientific community is that their worldview is anti-theistic. It is progressive and it tries its best to be evolutionary in every way possible. If they have to, they will force a square peg to fit a round hole just to make sure that the progressive agenda moves along nicely. In other words, if evolutionary scientists have hold a theory, they will construe evidence and then force fit it into the theory.

The scientific worldview is therefore peculiar and it does not adhere to evidence because it doesn’t need to. None of their results are because of irrefutable evidence because there is none. In fact, the whole scientific progressive platform is so vacuous in the intelligent sense that we see more major opposition within academia to what they say and believe in and how they interpret things.

The problem we have to deal with is not just the scientific community. It is also the governments at large who are in cohorts, sharing the same objectives. As the world creaks towards a pan-progressive dominance, the view of the scientific community has become the de facto popular mainstream and therefore, the idea has gelled, that man and ape, though separate today, were once part of the one and same lineage, leading all the way back to a common ancestor. 

The hugely disturbing part of this ideology is that there is no evidence any progressive scientist can point to as fact. There are no plausible interpretations that can stand the scrutiny except what the Bible has been telling us; that Adam and Eve were the very first in the human race, that God created them and they were from the outset, fully formed, fully intelligent, capable of communicating, already had a shared language and are upright and biped in nature.

Dealing with confused Creationism

Image source: Before It's News

Recent scientific studies have come out to suggest that the makeup of the modern man has elements of the Neanderthal DNA. The Neanderthals – scientifically, Homo neanderthalensis – were an extinct alleged species of human that were widely found in ice-age Europe between around 120,000 to 35,000 years ago. They were distinctively recognisable by their receding forehead and very pronounced brow ridges. 

For whatever reason, even creationist scientists have lent their credit to the acknowledgement that the Neanderthals were human and as such, hence, the possibility that our human DNA could contain their prior existence.

It was in 1856 in the Neander Valley near Dusseldorf, Germany that an ancient fossil was discovered that the tag ‘Neanderthal Man’ was attached to it. Even so, subsequent study revealed that similar fossils were found twenty-six years earlier, in 1830, in Engis, Belgium and then also, in 1848, in Forbes’ Quarry in Gibraltar.

As early as then, discoverers already considered the fossils to be primitive humans (‘ape-man’ to some) or somewhat diseased humans. At any rate, they were regarded widely as humans in one form or another even though subsequent reconstruction efforts proved that the Neanderthal looked more like apes. Go here for an example.

The question then is, if this were true, would it impact God’s Word? And how?

Firstly, claims that part of the modern man’s DNA came from Neanderthals are often used as a way to discredit God’s Creationism but no matter whether or not this is substantiated, the fact remains that this is not a credible evidence against Creation or Scripture or God Himself.

In fact, this very piece of so-called evidence, if it’s true anyway, can actually be used as a foil against the myriad attacks levelled at the Bible and its Creation story. This is because the sharing of the DNA is not something unusual in Nature. 

In fact, many living matter do share such a basic structure because this is, in essence, the proof of a common but intelligent design. It, however, does not lend any credence to any proof of evolution or atheism.


Comparing skulls of modern man and Neanderthal (Image source: Ancient Origins)

For example, today’s digital cameras come in different formats and configurations, use a variety of lenses that offer a range of performance and lowlight capabilities and of course, all of them are designed to cater to various purposes and user types. Yet all of them come from a common genus – digital cameras, no matter who makes them and how they may differ in detail, share similar fundamentals and the manner in which all of them operate. 

Invariably, they all have their lenses mounted at the front and the shutter release button is always on the same side of the camera body. Behind the lens – which may or may not be removable – lies always the imager (sensor) and regardless of the number of pixels, they work roughly the same way.

All of this actually makes perfect sense. The fact that the digital camera design has remained the same is proof that it is the most effective means of achieving the purpose for which they are made. Just because all the digital cameras share the same fundamentals does not mean they’re all the same. The differences are, in fact, as tangible as their basic similarities, making each make and model distinct and often unique.

The same can be said of the DNA sharing issue. Mere similarity of the DNA, in and of itself, cannot be the reason to prove there that are no differences that are designed into and between two living beings. Make no bones about it, the subject matter of Neanderthal DNA is never a simple one. Even within the scientific community, it is complicated enough to make it a very complex topic to talk about vis-à-vis Christianity.

What this then means is that any connectivity between the various different species can be quite indistinct. But I think the really big issue here has more to do with progressive evolution scientists pushing the controversial claim that the modern man and Neanderthals have had consummation among themselves, which is how the DNA became compromised. 

Part of this push is because the evolutionists themselves were the ones who ‘reluctantly’ conceded that the Neanderthals were more human than anything else.

However, the same evolutions obfuscated the matter by deliberately remaining ambivalent. For them, surrendering the Neanderthals to the Creationists without a struggle was unthinkable. So this issue of whether the Neanderthals and the modern man did or did not share DNA continued to exist till today. 

If the evolutionists were having such a difficult time reconciling the two, the young-earth Creationists were only too happy to consider the Neanderthals to be human* because for them, this recognition was essential in negating the option of the ape-man. 

Even the renowned Marvin Lubenow had offered evidence of Neanderthals being buried alongside modern man, which is another way of saying that they are hardly apes or ape-man in nature. He wrote, “In all of life, few desires are stronger than the desire to be buried with one’s own people.”

When all is said and done, the whole subject of the Neanderthals remain not just controversial but confusing and convoluted. And by all means, whenever the evolutionists and progressivists are determined to advance their atheistic agenda, it will also be heavily politicised. 

All the same, some have also questioned that if the Neanderthals were similar enough to us to have had mated together, why should they be considered a separate specie? Why make this distinction? Why don’t we just consider them to be another ethnic aspect of the broad human family?

As it turns out, no one can say for sure who these Neanderthals really are and where they fit (if at all) into the issue of the modern man. Even the Creationists themselves cannot agreed on who they were. Furthermore these arguments had been going on for more than a century without any sign of resolution let alone one that fits into the Bible.

As far back as the days of the notorious Charles Darwin, humans were not viewed equally. From a physical standpoint, some were looked down as being ‘subhuman’ or ‘anything less than a real human.’ In other words, living beings of a lower order than man. Back then, it was fairly common for the scientific community to view native Africans as such. Derogatory labels were used to relate to them as being genetically closer to gorillas than humans. 

As for humans, the ideal example had always been the white Caucasian or Anglo-Saxon. With this in mind, maybe all of us are applying the same treatment to the Neanderthals, making presumptions that they’re physically and intellectually inferior to us, the modern man. And if we are, then what we’re implying is that they are more of a subhuman specie. 

Yet for all of that, we’re no closer to understanding who the Neanderthals really are. While we’re on the subject of prehistoric evidences, let’s examine a few of the notable ones.

What exegesis says to misguided evolutionists

Genesis 2:7 (Image source: Pinterest)

When it comes to anti-Creationism, it isn’t just Neanderthals that we have to deal with. Yet we know the Bible’s stand on the origin of man because it tells us so:

“Then the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground. He breathed the breath of life into the man’s nostrils and the man became a living person.” (Gen 2:7, NLT)

The origin of man, therefore, does not come from any prehistoric or pre-Adamaic line. Scripture offers absolutely no evidence that apes or any lower form of life played any role in its creation, which is contrary to everything that evolutionists claim. 

There is no evolution as we speak of. The above passage is clear proof that it was God – and not evolution – that formed man right from the beginning. In fact the point of origin began when He used “the dust of the ground” in creating Adam.

In fact, God mentioned this again when He voiced his disapproval first at the serpent and then at Eve followed by Adam for their disobedience. To Adam, He said the following:

“By the sweat of your brow will you have food to eat until you return to the ground from which you were made. For you were made from dust, and to dust you will return.” (Gen 3:19, NLT)

You cannot get any clearer than this. Here is God first saying that He formed Adam from the dust of the ground and then two chapters later, He told him that is exactly where he will return and become when he dies. In Hebrew, the original word is עָפָר (‘aphar, Strong’s #6080), which translates into inanimate dust, dry earth or dirt. It can also refer to ashes or mud. 

As for the word ‘formed’ (Gen 2:7), the original Hebrew is יָצַר (yâtsar, Strong’s #3335), taken to mean ‘to mould into a form like what a potter does.’ The same exegetical basis is also used in Gen 2:8, 19, 2 Samuel 17:28, 2 Kings 19:25, 1 Chronicles 4:23, Psalm 2:9, 33:15, 74:17 and 94:9 and countless other areas principally in the Old Testament.

What exegesis tells us is that Adam was literally fashioned by the very hand of God out of an existing material, which was dust in the ground and that prior to God who “breathed the breath of life” (Gen 2:7) into Adam, he was lifeless just as a pottery vessel was, too, lifeless. 

But when God breathed into his nostrils, Adam “became a living person” (ibid). That breath came directly from God’s spirit and when that entered into the lifeless body, Adam became a ‘living soul.’

The word ‘breathe’ in this case comes from the Hebrew word ר֫וּחַ (tr. ruach, Strong’s #7307), which means wind or breath or spirit. The equivalent in Koine Greek is πνεῦμα (tr. pneuma, Strong’s 4151) to mean the same thing. Both commonly refer to passages that talk about the Holy Spirit. 

Therefore, the Spirit of God (as in Gen 1:2) is the same as the breath of God (in Gen 2:7) or the breath of life (in Gen 6:17) or the wind that God despatched over the Earth to recede the Great Floor (as in Gen 8:1). In fact, ‘ruach’ is prevalent in 400 passages within the Old Testament.

What God can teach evolutionists

Image source: Darwin's God

All too commonly, the picture of ‘early man’ painted by almost every contemporary evolutionary anthropologist is maligned by impressions of brutishness and low intelligence. The suggestion is that it took tens or hundreds of thousands of years for man to gradually acquire the necessary intelligence to dwell in caves, light a fire, clothe himself, create tools and weapons and hunt as well as cultivate lands. 

And in all of this, the anthropological view is that man basically ‘stumbled’ into such discoveries. Apparently, he accidentally got a fire started and somehow learned how to make good use of it. What they’re saying is that the uncivilised man took almost forever to be civilised.

Yet God says no to the evolutionist’s view and for very good clear reason. Adam did not come from any lower class of animals. It was from the dust in the ground that God formed him and when He breathed into his nostrils, Adam acquired the life that came from the Holy Spirit so that he became a living soul, very much in His image. 

In other words, Adam was clearly intelligent right from the get-go. As we see in Genesis 4:1-4, Cain was, with God’s help, born a man and then soon after, he and his brother Abel became a cultivator of the land and a shepherd respectively. Their skills made it possible for the sons to reap the harvest and make offerings to God.

Being a cultivator – or tiller – of the land meant that Cain grew crops. He did not bring in wild crops from virgin forests. His was the product of having farmed the land. His was the produce that came from the ground. His produce was therefore domesticated. Although we do not know for sure what these crops were, we can be sure that domesticated grains and vegetables were available a lot earlier than evolutionists say.

As for Abel, this verse proves the evolutionists wrong:

“Abel also brought a gift – the best portions of the firstborn lambs from his flock.” (Gen 4:4, NLT)

The part that says “from his flock” tells us without a doubt that Abel was a ‘keeper of sheep.’ Like his brother, he did not bring in wild sheep but instead, the words ‘his flock’ suggest that these were not only his sheep but they were domesticated and kept. And the likelihood is that he had been keeping his flock for as long as Cain has been tilling the ground and reaping its harvest.


Image source: The Institute of Creation Research 

To suggest that these were domesticated, the common understanding is that the process of going from a state of wilderness into one of domestication must have been arduous and time-consuming. Under ordinary circumstances, that might be the case but God did say in the beginning of Creation that He created some things ‘wild’ and some that were ready for man’s consumption (domesticated, in other words):

“Then God said, ‘Let the land sprout with vegetation – every sort of seed-bearing plant and trees that grow seed-bearing fruit. These seeds will then produce the kinds of plants and trees from which they came.’ And that is what happened. The land produced vegetation – all sorts of seed-bearing plants and trees with seed-bearing fruit. Their seeds produced plants and trees of the same kind.” (Gen 1:11-12, NLT)

The part that says, “The land produced vegetation” offers up irrefutable evidence that by the time Cain was born – and born a man in the most supernatural way, mind you – the land was fully ready for him to cultivate. Furthermore, God had equipped Adam’s eldest son with the necessary skills that work the land without much delay. 

Like everyone in the first family, they were all instantaneously intelligent; something evolutionists cannot wrap their heads around. Instead they simply reject this because they lack the understanding that in God, things can be created supernaturally. They cannot even comprehend that in the event that Adam and his family had to domesticate the crops and the flock of sheep, it didn’t take that long; certainly not tens or hundreds of thousands of years.

Another supernatural aspect of Creationism is that man was born with a language to boot. Atheistic evolutionists cannot possibly understand this. Having already rejected God (or disbelieving in Him), the ability, right from the beginning, to communicate is anathema. 

In fact, God said that the first family was able to share a common language and talk among themselves. They were able to get a fire going, to cook meals and do all the very things that evolutionists insist till today that it would have taken hundreds of thousands of painful years to make possible.


The Sons of Cain comprising shepherd Jabal, poet Jubal and metal worker Tubal-cain with the inscription 'Is this not all mankind? The man of the fields, the poet, the city worker' by Paul Landowski currently installed in Terrasse along the water in Paris (Image source: Paul Landowski)

In fact Cain’s offspring exhibited strong notions of civilisation. In Genesis 4:1-16, his descendants learned to live in tents. They tended to livestock and cultivated fibrous plants, eventually acquired the art of weaving. Like his granduncle, whom his own paternal grandfather, Cain, murdered, Jabal, Lamech’s son, had inherited the necessary skills in domesticating animals. 

Jabal’s brother, Jubal, pioneered the first musical instruments utilising strings and wind. And by doing so, it goes without saying that he too would have begun to compose music that he played with them.

A stepbrother by the name of Tubal-cain somehow knew how to forge tools and weapons from bronze and ferrous. Bronze is particularly impressive because this was an amalgam of copper and tin, meaning that he must have had the necessary skill in smelting for without it, he couldn’t have made any instruments using either of the two metals.

Contrary to the evolutionist’s beliefs, the Bible’s view is that much of these skills were already inherent in the days of the first family and its extended members, and furthermore, Adam had lived for hundreds more years, enough for him to hand down the knowledge to the others via a language they all had in common. 

In the days before books were available, people like Adam and all of them down his line relied on teaching by word of mouth. That wouldn’t have been possible if we accept the evolutionist’s claim that the early man did not possess any linguistic skills.

Duped by phoney discoveries

Today, over 30 million people still live in caves, caverns and dugouts as if they are modern Neanderthals (Image source: That's The Way It Is)

Another problem with the evolutionist view is their often shallow understanding of the Stone Age. Simply put, they believe it was a period very long time ago. They call it such because that was a period in which early man used stone implements. 

The Wikipedia refers to it as “a broad prehistoric period during which stone was widely used to make implements with an edge, a point or a percussion surface.” It goes on to say that the Stone Age lasted about 3.4 million years, ending between 8700BC and 2000BC. That’s their version.

No matter what they say, using their very definition of the Stone Age, we can certainly say that there are still people around today who live in such an Age. Like the early man, they also know how to develop tools and weapons out of stone when such are required. Stoneware in fact remains fairly popular. 

But just because there are people who use implements made from stone bears no meaning to an Age that evolutionists tell us was many millennia ago. Using the same logic, if we’re using equipment or apparatus made from bronze or iron, does that mean we live in the same period as Jubal?


A Tasaday child named Lobo on a vine featured on the cover of National Geographic (Image source: Philstar)

Interestingly, the August 1972 edition of the renowned National Geographic published a groundbreaking article on the Tasaday people in Mindanao, Philippines, entitled, ‘First Glimpse of a Stone Age Tribe.’ The article soon paved the way for its televised version called ‘The Last Tribes of Mindanao’ shown as a National Geographic Special on North American television audience numbering in the millions four months later in early December.

According to the article, these are cave-dwellers of the Stone Age era. The article considered the Tasadays to be intelligent people who made fire by twisting a stick and in fact, appeared to know a lot of other things that we had no idea of. The impression was that the Tasadays had lived a hermetically sealed life away from modern civilisation so that what they represent was diametrically different to what we are accustomed to.

At that time, Philippines was governed by the notoriously corrupt Marcos government. The ‘discovery’ of the Tasadays was linked directly to people who were cronies of the President himself who exploited it for all it was worth. This included not only an exclusive granted to National Geographic but also, NBC Television was also roped in. The program was so successful that celebrities like Charles A. Lindbergh and Gina Lollobrigida had gone on to visit the site.

Upon the fall of the Marcos government in early 1986, the truth behind the Tasadays began to emerge when Oswald Iten, a Swiss journalist, made the exposé in the Swiss newspaper Neue Zurcher Zeitung (April 12-13 1986, 84:77). 


Photo taken by late John Nance in 1971 showing the so-called Tasaday Stone-Age tribe making fire (Image source: Newslab-Philstar.com)

In the three-page article called ‘Steinzeitschwindel’ (tr. Stone-Age Swindle), Iten uncovered a huge scam that made fools out of not only National Geographic and NBC Television but more importantly, the anthropologists who had said this of the Tasadays: “They were making stone axes and, catching my fascinated stare, a man rose and brought them to me. They were crude, as crude as the oldest tools of the European Palaeolithic.” 

Against all that, Iten’s newspaper article not just revealed the Tasadays as nothing more than slash-and-burn farmers. Photos that accompanied the article showed some of their wives wearing fashionable Levi’s shirts.

A perfect example of how so-called intelligent and insightful anthropologists were so easily duped was Professor Emeritus Lawrence A. Reid of the Department of Linguistics of the University of Hawaii. Reid allegedly spent as many as ten months with the tribe alongside some linguistic groups from 1993 to 1996. 

Despite serious allegations that the Tasadays were a fake Stone-Age tribe, Reid incredulously concluded, saying, they “probably were as isolated as they claim, that they were indeed unfamiliar with agriculture, that their language was a different dialect from that spoken by the closest neighbouring group, and that there was no hoax perpetrated by the original group that reported their existence.”


Manuel Elizalde with Balayem the Tasaday woman in 1971 (Image source: NewsLab-Philstar.com)

He also wrote in his paper called ‘Linguistic Archaeology: Tracking Down the Tasaday Language,’ reiterating pretty much the same thing. Although he initially admitted that a Tasaday native named Belayem had likely faked data, he maintained that following a ‘more detailed analysis’ of their language, he surmised that as many as three hundred of Belayem’s linguistic forms were actually used in the Manobo languages of Kulaman Valley that the individual couldn’t have even known about let alone visit. In other words, Reid had simply chosen to conveniently ignore all evidence pointing to the fake Stone Age claims in order to advance his claims.

As it all turned out, the Tasadays were not even a valid tribe. In fact, it was an invented name for a group of Manubo Blit people who lived in a village on the other side of the hill from where the cave was. The whole caper was the devious work of Manuel Elizalde, who headed a government agency dealing with cultural minorities. He was also a crony of the dictator Marcos and to him, orchestrating the scam was likely an opportunistic endeavour to not just enrich himself but to lift his credibility for a more prestigious government posting.

According to Iten’s findings, it was Elizalde who had the members of known local tribes take on a Stone Age appearance but that was not all. Many local tribes eventually confessed to pretend to be Tasadays for monetary gain. They knew that the more traction the news got, the more money they could earn from it.


The fake Tasaday tribe shown in modern clothes including denim jeans photographed in 2012 (Image source: Susanne Haerpfer)

Set against the fake Tasadays, there are some credible stone-age people around. In pockets around the world where civilisation has not shone its light, men still rely on tools and weapons made from stone to survive. 

Today they can be found in the deep interiors of Central America, New Guinea, Africa and Kalimantan (Borneo). History has often proven that in virtually every generation, there are people – whole families even – who eschew modern comforts and instead resort to living in caves and using basic stone implements. There may not be many of them but the evidence remains nonetheless.

In the days of the Wild West, pioneering settlers in the frontier lands differed from the native Indians who continued to resort to stone implements. The same was true during the Middle Ages and also at the start of the first millennium. When Egypt and Mesopotamia were enjoying sophisticated and advanced civilisations, some were still sticking to their stone implements and living in caves. Judges 6:2 also tells us that Israelites were no different.

The point is that people who live by such basic means and in caves do not necessarily imply that they were necessarily backward. It is also not true that such discoveries pertain to people in the past who had lived a very long time ago. Nothing is worse than anthropologists whose exaggerated claims has often caused people to have a completely wrong idea about the difference between the actual Stone Age and people who prefer a lifestyle that might be similar albeit in modern civilisation.

End of Part 1 of 3

Part Two will be available next Sunday, June 11 2017