occupation, like hearths, spatial arrangement, and intentional burials. Moreover, the fauna and flora associated with Neandertals is that of the upper Pleistocene, and not of deeper, Flood-deposited strata. We are therefore quite confident that Neandertals must be the remains of post-Flood people. A similar argument can be made regarding the provenance of stone tools. With modern analytical technology, the raw materials used to make stone tools can be traced very precisely to particular, usually local, rock formations. Olduvai Gorge presents an informative example, where extremely localized lake deposits and volcanic material sit atop Proterozoic bedrock (Hay and Kyser 2001). On top of the lake deposits, small volcanic cones have generated basalt that was later gathered to make stone tools, which are subsequently found in lake- and stream-deposited sediments. For example, at the archaeological site HWK-EE, 41 Oldowan stone tools dated to 1.7 Ma by conventional dating are reported by McHenry and de la Torre (2018). These tools are made from phonolite, an extrusive igneous rock of intermediate composition and produced by the Engelosin volcanic cone, which geologically sits atop earlier lake deposits. Again, without regard to the absolute dating of these features, we can see that a sequence of events occurred: First, the Proterozoic bedrock was exposed, after which a lake formed and began depositing sediments. As the lake sediments began to build up, small (and on a regional scale, much larger) volcanic eruptions pushed through the earlier lake sediments, generating basalt that was used to make stone tools that were subsequently deposited in (and eventually recovered from) still more recent lake sediments. Whether the lake was initially formed during the Flood or after makes no difference to the existence of the stone tools. Whoever knapped tools from local volcanic rocks must have done so after the Flood waters retreated and recolonization of the land began, since the rock from that volcanic source did not exist before the Flood. Consequently, the raw material of some of the earliest stone tools at Olduvai locates them in the post-Flood period. A fuller survey of Acheulean and Mousterian lithics from other sites might reveal further examples of using source materials formed during or after the Flood, therefore indicating that their makers must have been post-Flood recolonizers. B. The Tower of Babel and Human Dispersal What about the account of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11? The church has long understood this event as global to humanity, that is, all people alive at the time gathered in one place to build the tower and city. Some modern evangelical scholars view Babel as a local event only applicable to the Hamite residents in Mesopotamia (cf. Gen 10:6-10; Collins 2018; Hamilton 1990; Longman and Walton 2018). If we follow the traditional view, then we may infer that global human dispersal began only after Babel, and hence globally distributed fossils such as H. erectus must be post-Babel as well as postFlood. In fact, the conventionally oldest putative human remains are already globally distributed. For example, H. erectus fossils dated to approximately 1.8 Ma by conventional dating are found in South Africa, East Africa, and Indonesia (Antón 2003). Stone tools dated to 2.1 Ma in Shangchen, China may indicate the presence of an even earlier human population (Zhu 2018). If we accept the Ledi-Geraru mandible as representative of a human being (which we admit is quite uncertain), that would push the earliest human remains to 2.8 Ma in Ethiopia (Villamoare et al. 2015). We acknowledge here that these observations raise significant questions about the nature of the Babel description in Genesis, which appears to be firmly rooted in the architectural practices known from Mesopotamian city states (see Walton 1995, Seely 2001), and the relationship of these distant people (who are unquestionably not H. sapiens) to the Tower builders. Rather than endorse a single solution to these questions, we instead list here two possible explanations with their advantages and deficiencies. One possibility is that the Tower of Babel may be a later innovation that took place only in Mesopotamia and involved only H. sapiens. The putatively earlier and globally distributed remains of non-sapiens people could be traces of pre-Babel dispersals of specific family groups or clans. This has the advantage of explaining the distinctly Mesopotamian description of Babel’s construction while also plausibly accounting for the much more sporadic and scarce remains of other people distributed globally. In this case, if the Babel event only involved H. sapiens, then it might also offer an observation for the relatively recent replacement of people around the world, leaving H. sapiens as the sole remaining human variant (Tattersall 2009). The disadvantage of this model is its poor accounting of the seemingly universal description in the Babel account. The world is said to be of one language and all the people are said to have traveled to construct Babel (Gen 11:1-4). After the confusion, God scatters them across the face of the earth, indicating that their gathering in one place was part of the problem God rectified through the confusion. The biblical text certainly appears to present the circumstances as involving all the people in the world at that time. A second possible explanation is that all globally-distributed hominin remains are indeed post-Babel and that the setting of the Babel story is much more remote than archaeologists have considered. This would readily account for the universal features of Genesis 11, though significantly removed in time from what appears to be its Mesopotamian context. It is possible that the early Babel migrants did endeavor to produce a tower made of materials as described in Genesis, but subsequent repeated and rounds of regional flooding (Morozova 2005) may have erased many of the earliest archaeological remains of the region. This explanation has the additional advantage of providing a possible account for the seemingly “primitive” lives led by these non-sapiens humans: as the culture of Babel was shattered and its people dispersed, previously known technologies and skills would largely be neglected in favor of the more immediate needs of food and shelter, reducing the early Babel migrants to low-technology (“stone age”) hunter/gatherers. Thus, the peculiarly Mesopotamian building techniques of fired mud brick and asphalt mortar must have been rediscovered at a later period, and it is these subsequent civilizations that are the focus of currently archaeological investigation. The disadvantage of this model is that it gives no account for either the late appearance of H. sapiens in the fossil record or the voluminous genetic and cultural evidence of H. sapiens coming to dominate and replace all other contemporaneous human forms. Why did this particular segment of humanity become so successful at the expense of all other varieties? Given the importance of the biblical evidence of universality, both in Genesis 11 specifically and as a theme throughout chapters 1-11, we ROSS, BRUMMEL, AND WOOD Human History: From Adam to Abraham 2023 ICC 76
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