Todd's Blog

First of all, thanks for reading my blog (some of you for years).  I've enjoyed sharing my work here, and I'm glad to know that others have enjoyed my work as well.  Now, I'm hoping you can help me.  Core Academy, the ministry I lead, is trying to raise $30,000 to balance our 2021 budget, and we are only about 75% of the way there.  If you have ever enjoyed my work or the work of Core Academy, we could really use your help right now.  You can contribute by clicking that donate button at the bottom of this post, or visit coresci.org/donate for more information.  Any checks mailed before the end of the year will count, and all contributions are tax deductible. Thank you! Feedback? Email me at toddcharleswood [at] gmail [dot] com. If you enjoyed this article, please consider a contribution to Core Academy of Science. Thank you. Have you read my book?  You should check that out too!

Happy Christmas Eve, everyone!  I was listening to some Christmas music the other day, and I noticed a few references to creation in some familiar songs.  So I started to look for other examples, and that led me down the internet rabbit hole (you know the one) to Christmas Carols: Ancient and Modern .  This was a compilation of Christmas songs published in 1833 by an English solicitor and antiquarian named William Sandys (1792-1874).  Sandys had a special interest in Christmas and also published  Christmas-tide, Its History, Festivities and Carols, With Their Music  in 1852.  These books, along with Dickens's Christmas Carol , contributed to the revival of interest in Christmas in the United Kingdom.  The holiday had fallen out of favor after it become licentious in the 17th century and the Puritans banned it during the English Civil War.  Even here in the colonies, Puritans in Massachusetts Bay Colony enacted bans of Christmas, and the holiday did not become popular until the mid-

Core Academy has the announcement of the latest Sanders Scholar , who will be working with me this year on hominins.  This will be our third year of awarding the Sanders Scholarship and our fifth individual receiving the award.  This year is a little different since we are mentoring this student "in house."  Past winners have all been supervised by other faculty at other institutions. We've already been working most of last year expanding our understanding of "cave man" skeletons, and this year we'll be spending a lot more time with chimpanzee and gorilla skeletons, as well as skeletons of Neandertals, the Flores hobbit, and australopiths.  The funding will mostly pay for travel expenses for us to get together and to visit a couple museums.  I think the less we say publicly about that, the better. Thank you to all the donors to the Sanders Scholarship Fund, and please keep your eyes peeled for future candidates.  I'm already thinking about the 2023 award

The rest of the Bible refers to Genesis 1-11 a LOT, and that's a fact. Sometimes I hear people say that the events recorded in those early chapters are rarely discussed in the rest of the Bible.  Supposedly, just a handful of key chapters make reference to them. Except it's way more than that.  Henry Morris in his book The Genesis Record  lists several hundred references to Genesis in other books of the Bible.  To generate the graphic above, I used 249 cross-references that I downloaded from OpenBible.info .  Those references tend to link phrases together (like "heaven and the earth"), so I want to go through this verse by verse and make sure all the known cross-references are present and any dubious ones are not included. Even without that more careful editing, the diagram still shows a higher density in the Wisdom literature (which we would expect - think about Job and Psalms) and also a higher density in the Epistles and Revelation, which if you think about it, als

Just five years ago, I was writing about a new set of tracks discovered at the famed Laetoli site in Tanzania .  Now there's even more news from Laetoli, and this time, it's different.  Old tracks discovered back in the 1970s and then neglected when the much more famous trackways were uncovered at a nearby site have now been subjected to scientific scrutiny.  This re-discovery and new examination appeared in Nature yesterday (and yay, it's open access! ). The paper by McNutt and colleagues describes the original discovery and uncertainty about the prints.  It was definitely a track of five prints at a place designated Site A, and it was definitely from a mammal walking upright on two legs.  But the two best prints revealed a really wide foot that could have been from a bear.  When attention shifted to the more famous tracks nearby at Site G, Site A was ignored. McNutt and colleagues found the tracks following the original site descriptions from published reports, and they