From the January 28, 2014 eNews issue
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"Before we started this work, I had some ideas of what we were going to find. Most of those ideas turned out to be completely wrong."
— Carles Lalueza-Fox, the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona.
Ancient Europeans may have been dark skinned and blue-eyed, according to recent DNA evidence from skeletons found in a cave in Spain.
The genetic code showed traits that surprised archeologists, including genes coding for strong immune system characteristics that would have helped the ancient hunter gatherers to fight off pathogens.
Such highly prepared immune capabilities were not expected to have evolved until humans began farming and handling animals and facing exposure to their microorganisms on a regular basis. A variety of unexpected bits of information have popped up in the science of ancient history lately, reminding the researchers of the world to be careful about creating stories before they have all the facts in.
300,000 Year-Old Hearth
The Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel has just released information on evidence of a cave holding a hearth and different cooking and gathering areas. The existence of a cave home is not surprising, given the long history of the land of Israel. The findings in Qesem cave are particularly noteworthy, though, because they have been dated to 300,000 years ago, and yet the culture that lived in the cave demonstrated strong intelligence and an advanced social structure.
Infrared spectroscopy was used to analyze the ash from the cave, and it was determined that a hearth was used to make fires and cook food. Flint tools of different shapes were used to dress meat, and the archeologists noted that different parts of the cave were used for different activities.
“These findings help us to fix an important turning point in the development of human culture – that in which humans first began to regularly use fire both for cooking meat and as a focal point – a sort of campfire – for social gatherings,” said one researcher. “They also tell us something about the impressive levels of social and cognitive development of humans living some 300,000 years ago.”
Which Story Do We Believe?
According to the common archeological, paleoanthropological story told in popular science today, human beings evolved from relatives of the australopithecines, an ancient ape. The early humans lived as hunters and gatherers for millennia as they developed language and the use of tools, long before they began working the ground and raising animals. The picture of the hairy, ape-like cave man remains firmly embedded in our collective mind’s eye. Musical instruments were first invented 37,000–67,000 years ago. (The Neanderthals had a flute.) Writing was invented about 5200 years ago in ancient Sumer in Mesopotamia. The Bronze Age started about that time, and iron wasn’t used widely until about 1200–1800 B.C.
The Bible paints an utterly different picture of early humans. According to the biblical model, human beings were created genetically perfect and have been deteriorating ever since. Agriculture (not prostitution) is the oldest profession; Adam and Eve were placed in the Garden to tend it, and Cain and Abel raised crops and sheep. The use of iron and brass and the creation of musical instruments began early in human history (Gen 4:21–22,). Caves were used for burial sites (Gen 23:11, 25:9). Men only lived in caves only when they were in trouble (Gen 19:30, Josh 10:16, 1 Kgs 18:13).
Which is correct? The clue might come from genetics.
It is foolish for cousins or other close relatives to marry these days, because genetic mutations run in families. All humans are related to each other—nobody argues otherwise—but the ones that are the most closely related are also the most likely to pair up the family’s specific bad alleles and produce children with genetic defects. If distantly related humans get together, though, the genetic strengths of one mate have a chance to make up the weaknesses of the other, giving their children at least one healthy set of most gene sequences. We don’t marry close relatives because we have the same problems.
According to Genesis, early humans didn’t face the same situation. God had created man and woman “very good,” and the sons of Adam and Eve would have had to marry their sisters, which would have been just fine because all parties concerned had a perfect genetic code without any mutation or errors to compound. The early humans lived long long lives until the Flood, after which the life expectancy dropped asymptotically. Even two thousand years after Creation, Abraham married his half-sister (Gen 20:12). Moses’ father married his own aunt (Ex 6:20). It wasn’t until the desert wanderings that the LORD ordered the Israelites not to marry their close relatives anymore (Lev 18:6ff). This tells a story of a once-perfect genome collecting bits of damage over centuries of generations.
The question is, does what we see in genetics today indicate that we evolved in a long line of messy trials and errors from a common ancestor with today’s apes, or could we reconstruct the genetic code of those perfect early humans by replacing all mutations with the good stuff?
It used to be said that human and chimpanzee DNA were 98.5 percent alike. That ship has sailed. Various recent analyses show that number to be much lower, and University of Florida research geneticist Dr. Richard Buggs places the actual similarities between chimp and human DNA at below 70%. A 2010 paper in Nature showed that there were large differences between the Y chromosomes of humans and chimps, and a variety of other papers have tried to explain various differences through evolutionary mechanisms.
While the protein coding regions of DNA are very similar (humans and chimps use the same proteins to accomplish the same functions) the non-coding, regulatory sections of DNA show massive differences.
Dr. Jeffrey P. Tomkins, former director of the Clemson University Genomics Institute, wrote just a year ago, “Genome-wide, only 70% of the chimpanzee DNA was similar to human under the most optimal sequence-slice conditions. While chimpanzees and humans share many localized protein-coding regions of high similarity, the overall extreme discontinuity between the two genomes defies evolutionary timescales and dogmatic presuppositions about a common ancestor.”
On the other hand, the National Institutes of Health COSMIC (Catalogue of Somatic Mutations in Cancer) program has spent the past several years cataloguing every human genetic mutation that causes cancer. By comparing disease-causing alleles in one family to healthy genes in the rest of the population, we might be able to retrace our genetic steps to the non-mutated genomes of our ancient ancestors, whether or not they had blue eyes or were cooking supper in caves 300,000 years ago.
Further Reading
Comprehensive Analysis of Chimpanzee and Human Chromosomes Reveals Average DNA Similarity of 70%
— Answers in Genesis Journal
Chimpanzee and human Y chromosomes are remarkably divergent in structure and gene content
— Nature
Chimpanzee?
— Reformatorisch Dagblad
Human and Chimp DNA Only 70% Similar, At Least According to This Study
— Dr. Wile Blog
Archaeologists Find Evidence Of 300,000 Year-Old Hearth
— Science Recorder
Swarthy, Blue-Eyed Caveman Revealed Using DNA From Ancient Tooth
— The Guardian
An Introduction to COSMIC, the Catalogue of Somatic Mutations in Cancer
— National Institutes of Health
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