Disclaimer: This seems like a pretty basic question, but after several searches, I haven’t found any similar threads. Sorry if it’s a repeat.
I was thinking about the Jewish calendar, and it occurred to me that 5768 years isn’t very many, in the Grand Scheme of Things. Or even in the Moderate Scheme of Things.
Are there any human events we can pinpoint to within a few decades that occurred before c. 3762 BCE? As far as I can tell, Egyptology goes back to about 3100 BCE. Is that the best we can do?
If we haven’t got any events, anyone have any insight into what humankind was doing around that time? (Besides, of course, eating the forbidden fruit.)
2nd Disclaimer: This being GQ, no religion/politics please. My bad parenthetical joke notwithstanding.
Probably. The earliest forms of writing date to the 34th century BC, if I recall correctly (ha) and that’s pretty much the limit of how far back you can go with the level of precision you’re asking.
Of course, we know of many human activities that took place long, long before that, but the precise time can’t be ascertained, even within a few years.
We have cave paintings & other types of artwork created by humans which are up to 25,000 years old. We have evidence of hand tools, firepits, and dwellings going even further back. Heck, we have skeletons that can trace how humans came to be in the first place.
Ok, so carbon dating’s not exact enough to determine whether Lucy was 3,200,000 million years old or 3,210,000 million years old. But we know she existed at SOME point.
Why do we require exact dates & written record to prove humans existed before the Bible says we did???
ETA: Sorry, don’t mean to sound confrontational, and I’m sure you don’t either. It just occurs to me that, compared to the timeline of human existance, 6000 years is nothing. Surely, I figure, we’ve got to know something fairly specific about what is practically yesterday.
Well, you need to define what you mean by “know”. Scientists will tell you that they “know” the earth is about 4B years old, that life first appeared about 3.5B years ago, that vertebrates came onto land about 350M years ago, and that the human and chimp lines split from their common ancestor about 5-6M years ago. These are all “fairly specific”.
But even if we have a piece of rock inscribed with a date of 5,000 BCE (by whatever calendar method used by that civilization), how do we “know” that the date is accurate? Everything in the past has to be determined by some sort of scientific analysis that will have some margin of error. So, without defining what you mean by “know”, it is not possible to answer your question.
If you go out at night (in the northern hemisphere), you can see can something happening 2.5 million years ago: the Andromeda galaxy. Do those who think the world is only a few thousand years old think that God created it with all those photons streaming towards the Earth from where Andromeda would have been if the world existed 2.5 million years ago?
Not that I don’t accept the whole kit and caboodle of carbon dating (hey, some of my best friends are carbon!), but it would be nice if there was, say, a nice chain of historical records that predated the magic six thousand date. It’s one thing to claim the Noah Flood carved the Grand Canyon and the Big Guy in the Sky planted dinosaur bones, but to dismiss a civilization’s history is quite anoth… quite anoth… hmmm… no, I wouldn’t put it past someone, but it would be neat if such a timeline existed.
Think of this as an analogy: We biblical literalists believe that Adam and Eve were created as adults, not as babies. By the same token, we believe the universe was created in a state of readiness which would be useful to human beings. If the Andromeda galaxy has some use to us (and I’m sure we’ve learned some scientific principles from observing it, at least), its existence needed to be perceptible to us.
Wikipedia has a nice long list of what was going on in the fourth millenium BC. However, as you can see, very little of this stuff is actually “historical” (in the sense of being written down), even less is known from contemporaneous sources, and it doesn’t look like any of it can be ascribed a date to within a few decades.
But how would you authenticate that the time line was real, and not some fabrication? Any “historical record” that conflicted with the Creation Myth could be hand waved away as some sort of forgery or a misunderstanding of dates-- they said “years” but it was really “weeks”, or some such nonsense.
If you want one-year precision, then dendrochronology (tree-ring dating) is your best bet. Any individual tree will only give you a record of a few thousand years, tops, but if you then find another, long-dead tree whose ring patterns overlap with that one, and another which overlaps with that, and so on, you can extend the record back considerably (up to about 10,000 years). If you find human works which contain large amounts of wood (a frame for a house, for instance), in an area with a good dendrochronology record, you can see where that wood fits into that record, and pinpoint the year in which that tree was cut down. I don’t know if this has ever been successfully done at sites more than 6000 years old, but it certainly could be.
We’ve learned plenty of scientific principles from it, if it was actually there hundreds of millions of years ago. If it wasn’t, then everything we’ve “learned” from it is wrong. I wouldn’t classify that as “useful”.
This is more the spirit of the OP, but without the religious reference. I guess it was naive to ask this question not to get into religion considering the subject line I put on it.
Looking at the Wiki link from MikeS, we’ve got c. 4000 BC: Invention of the potter’s wheel in Egypt, and also c. 4000, horses are domesticated in Ukrane.
Also Otzi is only 500 years after the epoch of the Hebrew calendar. (The wiki you get for 3761 BC is kinda funny. “Important People: Adam.”)
Not so, no more wrong than if an anatomist were to describe adult anatomy based on an examination of Adam and Eve on creation day. The world was created with consistent physical laws, according to a design that reflects consistent application of those laws. The fact that it was created in a “developed state” does not render what we’ve learned wrong or useless. What scientific principles we learn from them will be applicable for anything we attempt to apply them to.
There are hundreds of books on Archaeology that cover the extremely important period from the end of the last ice age (c. 12,000 BCE) and the beginning of writing. The eastern shore of the Mediterranean in particular was the site of the development of cultivated agricultural crops, domestication of animals, and the establishment of cities. Similar developments were taking place all over the world by 6000 BCE.
I have the 8th edition, but in that part IV is on Farmers, (c. 10,000 BC to modern times). It covers the entire world.
The literature on this period is enormous so if you want to get into it you’ll need to find a focus for your interest.
However, if your question is merely when scientists have evidence of human behaviors before writing and before the mythical date of genesis, then the answer is yes. Huge heaping scads of evidence.
Is there any conceivable observation of any kind at all which would distinguish between the universe being infinitely old, it being billions of years old, it being 6000 years old but created in a “ready” state, it being five minutes old but created in a “ready” state complete with implanted memories, etc.?
If there aren’t any observational differences at all, do we “dissolve” the question of the universe’s age as unanswerable or meaningless, or do we come up with some more sophisticated criteria for determining an answer? If so, what criteria?