Pale Horse said:
or appx. 13000 years of 'recorded' history. Genesis account of creation = 7 thousand. Written History = another 6.
No one talks about that number. It's either 6 thousand or 600 million+.
Cave paintings date back to over 30,000 year - these were the first human recordings of the life around them.
Just taking the case of one species, modern humans (Homo Sapien), there is overwhelming evidence from all over the world that we evolved. The very last part of that evolution was when we diverged from the Homo Heidelbergensis species around 200,000 years ago. (Homo Neanderthalensis diverged from Heidelbergensis around 300,000 years ago).
The following is from notes I made whilst researching the history of the occupants of Britain:
Lower Palaeolithic
Sites such as Boxgrove in Sussex illustrate the later arrival in the archaeological record of an archaic Homo species called Homo heidelbergensis around 500,000 years ago.
The extreme cold of the following Anglian glaciation is likely to have driven humans out of Britain altogether and the region does not appear to have been occupied again until the ice receded during the Hoxnian interglacial. This warmer time period lasted from around 300,000 until 200,000 years ago and saw the Clactonian flint tool industry develop at sites such as Barnfield Pit in Kent. The period had produced a rich and widespread distribution of sites by Palaeolithic standards.
This period saw also Levallois flint tools introduced, possibly by humans arriving from Africa. Finds from Swanscombe and Botany Pit in Purfleet support Levallois technology being a European rather than African introduction, however. The more advanced flint technology permitted more efficient hunting and therefore made Britain a more worthwhile place to remain until the following period of cooling (Wolstonian glacial, 200,000-130,000 years ago).
Middle Palaeolithic
c.180,000 - 40,000 years ago
From 180,000 to 60,000 years ago there is no evidence of human occupation in Britain. During the Ipswichian interglacial period, between around 130,000 and 110,000 years ago, meltwaters from the previous glaciation cut Britain off from the continent for the first time. Overall, there appears to have been a gradual decline in population between the Hoxnian interglacial and this time suggesting that the absence of humans in the archaeological record here was the result of gradual depopulation.
From 60,000 to 40,000 years ago Britain was grass land with giant deer and horse, with woolly mammoths, rhino and carnivores. Neanderthal man had arrived in Britain by around 40,000 years ago.
Upper Palaeolithic
c.40,000 - 10,000 years ago
Evidence of Neanderthal occupation of Britain is limited and by 30,000 BC the first signs of modern human (Homo sapiens) activity, the Aurignacian industry, are known. The most famous example from this period is the burial of the "Red Lady of Paviland" (actually now known to be a man) in modern day coastal south Wales.
A final ice age covered Britain between around 70,000 and 10,000 years ago with an extreme cold snap between 22,000 and 13,000 years ago called the Dimlington stadial (with the Last Glacial Maximum at around 20,000 years ago). This may well have driven humans south and out of Britain altogether, pushing them back across the land bridge that had resurfaced at the beginning of the glaciation, possibly to a refuge in Southern France and Iberia.
Sites such as Gough's Cave in Somerset dated at 12,000 BC provide evidence suggesting that humans returned to Britain towards the end of this ice age, in a warm period known as the Dimlington interstadial although further extremes of cold right before the final thaw may have caused them to leave again and then return repeatedly. The environment during this ice age period would have been a largely treeless tundra, eventually replaced by a gradually warmer climate, perhaps reaching 17 degrees Celsius (62.6 Fahrenheit) in summer which encouraged the expansion of birch trees as well as shrub and grasses.
The modern British people are essentially new arrivals, products only of the last influx 12,000 years ago.
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This is just the tip of the iceberg of human evolution and development.
Fossil evidence displays the evolution of sea creatures into land creatures, dinosaurs into birds, primitive primates into primitive humans.
By comparison the Bible is such a simple record of human history centred around the Middle East. It is limited by the scope of human knowledge of the time. To cover the areas beyond the scope of human knowledge it creates fantastic elements.
If God existed and imparted the facts to man the elements need not have been fantasy. A human several thousand years ago would know the difference between a day and a year, a year and a hundred years, a hundred years and a thousand years. So why would a God have to simplify creation down to days? The dinosaurs alone occupied millions of years, and before them was a long history of evolution.
But then, the Bible itself is a product of evolution. Its ideas undoubtedly evolved from earlier religions - most specifically from ancient Egypt, a culture which has left us so many written and pictoral records.
In more recent history, Christianity evolved into Islam (after Mohammed visited Egypt in the 7th Century and learnt from the Coptic Christians).
Evolution of species and of ideas is a fascinating subject for discussion.
