WHAT EVOLUTIONIST EARTH-DIGGERS REALLY DON'T
WANT YOU TO KNOW!!
We are in Australia digging in the ground for ancient creatures;
we pick it up in a National Geographic magazine of October 2010.
read it carefully; note certain phrases that I will CAPITALIZE -
Keith Hunt
.....As it happens, there is one place in the Australian outback
where there may be such evidence. But which extinction hypothesis
the evidence supports is still in question.
Cuddie Springs is an ephemeral lake in north-central New
South Wales. Way back in 1878 a farmer sinking a well turned up
megafauna bones at Cuddie. Today the person most vocal about the
site, a woman who has spent her career excavating and
interpreting its fossils, is Judith Field, an archaeologist at
the University of Sydney.
In 1991, working as a graduate student at the site, Field
discovered megafauna bones directly adjacent to stone tools - a
headline-making find. She says there are two layers showing the
association, one about 30,000 years old, the other 35,000 years
old. If that dating is accurate, it would mean humans and
megafauna coexisted in Australia for something like 20,000 years.
"What Cuddie Springs demonstrates is that you have an extended
overlap of humans and megafauna;" Field SAYS.
NONSENSE, say her critics. They say the fossils have been
moved from their original resting places and redeposited in
younger sediments. Bert Roberts, a co-author with Flannery of a
2001 paper that argues for some kind of human causation in
megafauna extinctions, has examined grains of sand at Cuddie and
says he has found very YOUNG grains mixed among the SUPPOSEDLY
older fossils. That tells him that the stratigraphy is NOT
CLEAR-cut.
"If you don't even know the order of events, it's worthless,
a waste of time," Roberts says. Rainer Grun, another Australian
scientist who has dated fossils from the site, backs Roberts,
saying Cuddie Springs is a bit DISORDERLY: "This site shows clear
signs of disturbance. And if it's disturbed, ANYTHING is
possible. It's possible that the archaeological artifacts and the
megafauna really do go together. I'm not denying that. You just
CAN'T make the case for it."
Field vigorously disputes that interpretation and argues
that her critics are too wed to a human impact hypothesis for the
megafauna extinctions.
Unfortunately, Cuddie Springs was completely flooded and
unreachable when I visited Australia to report this story (not
that I could have, in any case, refereed the stratigraphic
DISPUTE). Field and I decided to drive instead to another famous
boneyard in the same general region, a place called Wellington
Caves. We drove for five hours from Sydney, across the Blue
Mountains through a pastoral country that looks much like the
rolling coastal lands of central California. When we pulled into
the Wellington Caves parking lot, we found it guarded by a
fiberglass Diprotodon.
Diprotodon was most mega of the megafauna, the largest known
marsupial ever to tread the Earth. Bulky and stubby-legged,
Diprotodon seems forever fated to be described in museums as
"lumbering:"
We met Mike Augee, a scientist on-site who showed us the
place where Diprotodon was first discovered. It's a wide hole in
the ground, a curving vertical shaft through a limestone hill,
covered with a metal grate.
"This is a sacred site in Australian paleontology," Augee
said.
Here's why; In 1830 a local official named George Rankin
lowered himself into the cave on a rope tied to a protrusion in
the cave wall. The protrusion turned out to be a bone.
A surveyor named Thomas Mitchell arrived later that year,
explored the caves in the area, and shipped fossils off to
Richard Owen, the British paleontologist who later gained fame
for revealing the existence of dinosaurs. Owen recognized that
the Wellington bones belonged to extinct marsupials. I asked
Augee what he thinks happened to the megafauna.
"I believe 100 percent in Tim Flannery's model;" he said.
Field raised an eyebrow.
"But it's a cave," Augee added. "You cant trust charcoal to
give you good dates in caves." True. Things wash into caves.
Water reworks sediments. Young, heavy things sink into the older
layers. The EARTH IS TRICKIER THAN YOU THINK!
JUDITH FIELD MAKES a key point about her scientific data -
there's not enough of it, not enough searching for the encoded
narratives of the past.
"There are about 200 late Pleistocene sites in Australia,"
Field says. "Dates from fewer than 20 of these are accepted. What
you're looking at is an incredibly thin data set from which these
elaborate explanatory models are constructed:"
Fortunately, there are bone hunters all over the continent.
Amateur paleontologists play a crucial role in finding the
megafauna bones. Lindsay Hatcher is one of them.
Hatcher is an easygoing fellow I met near the town of
Margaret River, about a four-hour drive south of Perth. Hatcher
made one of the most significant fossil finds in recent years at
Margaret River. In 1992 he decided to explore the aptly named
Tight Entrance Cave. Hatcher took the path often used by
spelunkers and found himself working his way right through a
bunch of fossils. "This is an extinct kangaroo everyone is
walking on;" he told his friends. A hole in the floor of the cave
turned out to be the eye socket of a huge kangaroo. More than
10,000 megafauna bones have since been hauled from Tight Entrance
Cave.
Sometimes the bone hunters fly ultralights over the vast
wasteland known as the Nullarbor Plain, the treeless underbelly
of Australia along the Southern Ocean, and use GPS to map the
locations of cave entrances they see from the air. Hundreds of
caves have been found recently in the Nullarbor, and four in
particular have produced abundant megafauna bones. Hatcher has
also found caves with primitive boomerangs that he believes were
used for hunting bats. But again, megafauna and humans aren't
found in the same places - except in a tantalizing few.
Mammoth Cave has become a popular tourist destination near
Margaret River. Between 1909 and 1915 the cave sediments that
contained fossils were hauled out and examined in a haphazard
manner that no scientist today would approve. ("They took the
jewels, basically," Hatcher said.)
Still, one bone in particular has drawn extensive attention:
a femur with a notch in it. There's a replica of the bone on
display at Mammoth Cave. Hatcher thinks the bone was notched by a
sharp tool. When he looks at Mammoth Cave, he sees an obvious
human habitat, a great shelter during the Ice Age.
"Beautiful place for people to live. Sheltered. Permanent
source of water in those days. There's plenty of bush tucker,"
Hatcher said as we wandered the illuminated chambers of the
cavern. Or was the femur notched by the razor-sharp tooth of a
marsupial lion? EVERYTHING'S INTERPRETATION. What's certain is
that Hatcher will keep searching, doing his part to solve the
continent's greatest mystery.
THE EARTH PRESERVES its history HAPHAZARDLY. BONES
DISINTEGRATE, artifacts CRUMBLE, the land ERODES, the CLIMATE
CHANGES, FORESTS COME AND GO, RIVERS CHANGE THEIR COURSE - and
the PAST, if not obliterated, is STEADILY OBSCURED. By necessity,
narratives are constructed from LIMITED data....
I caught up with Peter Murray, a paleontologist based in
Alice Springs. We drove to a site south of town where the red
sandstone is adorned with circular and serpentine symbols. "Quite
attractive. And enigmatic," Murray said. "But no megafauna''
Murray has, however, studied a rock painting in Arnhem Land, in
far northern Australia, that shows what looks very much like a
megafauna marsupial known as Palorchestes. Often compared to a
tapir, Palorchestes had a small, mobile trunk and a long tongue
like that of a giraffe. In Western Australia another ambiguous
rock - art site shows what appears to be a human hunter with
either a marsupial lion or a Tasmanian tiger - a major
distinction, since the marsupial lion went extinct and the much
smaller Tasmanian tiger survived into the historical era.
Murray, over an Alice Springs dinner of camel with beet
sauce and some smoked emu, said of his profession, "EVERY STEP OF
THE WAY INVOLVES INTERPRETATION. The DATA DOESN'T JUST SPEAK FOR
ITSELF"
THE BLITZKRIEG HYPOTHESIS paints the alarming picture of
human beings rapidly wiping out a great number of animals. But
there's an even more ominous scenario: The extinctions don't
happen quickly because of anything that resembles overkill but
rather through a very incremental sequence of events, including
climate change, during which the people involved could not fully
discern what was happening to their environment.
Which takes us to today.
"The way we have lived and are living is destroying our future;"
Flannery says. Yet we are only gradually figuring out how we're
changing our world and the extent to which our efflorescence is
harming or even driving to extinction countless species.
After tramping around Australia for a couple of weeks,
poking into caves in three different states and hiking the
outback, I returned to Sydney for a review session with Judith
Field. She spoke again of the CONTROVERSIAL stratigraphy of
Cuddie Springs, of the layers where megafauna and human tools may
be associated, of the history of the enmity among the scientists.
As I listened, she suddenly said, "Are you very tired?" My
chin was cradled in my hand - I guess I looked as though
I was about to put my head down on the table. "I'm sorry I wasn't
able to crystallize the story for you;" she said weeks later on
the phone. "Oh, it's crystal clear;" I said. "It's a PERFECT
MUDDLE!"
But we'll muddle on. Science is a laborious process, and
sometimes progress comes only with many stumbles and blind
alleys. Think of Rod Wells in Victoria Fossil Cave, slithering on
his belly through passages so narrow that he had to turn his head
sideways to squeeze forward. Scrambling. Digging.
Sometimes we will strike an impassable obstacle and have to
back up the way we came.
......
NOTE:
Ah did you catch the important admit parts? Did you catch that
ground digging scientists DO NOT AGREE with each other? Did you
see where they admit much INTERPRETATION goes on all the time.
Did you note where they admit the earth changes, floods come,
rivers change their course etc.? Did you catch where it MUDDLES
them up at times? Did you catch: "Water reworks sediments. Young,
heavy things sink into the older layers. The earth is TRICKIER
than you think"?
Indeed it is. We have places like here in Alberta, Canada (where
I'm writing this) a place not too far away from me called
Drumheller - the "bad lands" - well really the Dinosaur lands,
relatively on top of the land, not very deep down at all. Then in
other places of the world the Dinosaur remains are quite deep
down.
Yes, the earth is trickier than science would like it to be. Gets
them all arguing and interpreting in different ways as to the
"why" and "what" and "if" of this and that they find.
God has them in confusion!! And He deliberately did it so. As
shown in other studies on this Website, there was an age, an
earth before Genesis 1:2. It was the earth and age of the
Dinosaurs on land, sea and air. Science has come to admit that
some great horrific event took place that wiped out the dinosaurs
in one mighty act, so huge, the human mind can hardly envision
it.
And it was indeed so! Then we come to Genesis 1:2. The earth was
without form and void - and the earth was covered with water, and
the Spirit of God moved over the water.....
We are not told HOW LONG a time this earth was covered with water
before God brought the land from the water and created all that
is mentioned in those 7 days of creation week. The earth could
have been under the water for a few years or for millenniums. We
do not know, we are not told.
But the forces that destroyed the world of the Dinosaurs was
MIGHTY IN POWER! So mighty our human brain can not fully
comprehend the forces that shook, rattled, and rolled this earth.
It was the time when the oil and gas beds and other huge
substances like pot-ash, were made and deposited at different
depths under the land.
When God brought up the land from the sea, when the mighty
mountain ranges came forth; God deliberately had some of the
dinosaur fossils put near the top in some parts of the land, and
lower down in other areas of the land. Some were put in "younger"
beds of the earth as the modern evolutionist earth-digger would
say, and some in "older" strata as the moderns would call it.
God just MIXED IT UP, so modern science would have to say, the
earth muddles things up; the earth is trickier than you think.
Oh, you bet-cha, enough to make the space-age evolution scientist
pull their hair out, and get so mixed up they do not know if they
are up or down, in or out, high or low. As they discover more and
more about this earth and the universe, and cannot find any life
like ours out there .... well it's so darn upsetting to them they
could just go and jump into the nearest black-hole. Hummmm maybe
they should and maybe they would come out on the other side with
some LIGHT!
So next time you hear the evolution scientist speak so
DOGMATICALLY about evolution, remember what you just read about
some of those scientists digging away down-under in Australia.
Keith Hunt
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