Origins 2022: My contributions
Today was the last day of Origins 2022 (sad), and I presented some of the work we've been doing at Core Academy. First, we talked a bit about our work with human fossils and origins. For this presentation, we indulged a bit in speculating about the ancestral form of humanity. It's a really difficult problem. I would guess that most modern creationists consider our appearance as Homo sapiens to be the original form of humanity. In other words, Noah and family looked like us (Noah is as far back as we can extrapolate with the presently known fossils and DNA). I've long thought that was just prejudice. We naturally assume that people are like us, so of course Noah looked like us. The problem is that the fossil record preserves humans that don't look much like us at all. So how should we understand their appearance? I wish I could tell you that we had a good answer, but figuring out the ancestral human form is just a really difficult problem. What we ended up showing is that the average human form (averaging the different named human taxa) isn't very like Homo sapiens. We're kind of an outlier, and there isn't much reason to assume that our ancestors looked exactly like us.
Next, I tried to develop a way of placing the Neandertals into a post-Flood context. I reasoned that cave formation might give us a kind of anchor in creationist chronology. I noticed in one publication that a cave containing Neandertal remains was cut into Mesozoic limestone, and I knew that all the creationist geologists I know would call that a Flood-formed rock. So I figured the cave could not have existed before the Flood. That led to survey 104 Neandertal sites, where I found that 89 of them were caves or rockshelters. Of those, not a single cave was cut into Precambrian rock. They were all caves cut into Flood rock or maybe post-Flood rock. And that means that the contents of those caves could not have been deposited before the Flood. Neandertals are post-Flood.
Finally I presented a paper from one of our students on testing patterns in the fossil record. That was part of a much larger project that we're collaborating with Paul Garner on. We're basically looking for correlations between evolutionary models of origins and the order of the fossil record. We hope to have something ready to publish in the very near future.
I'll post another summary of other talks in the very near future. Meanwhile you can check out the abstracts right here: Creation Biology Society and Creation Geology Society.
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!
