Ancient Humans were Advanced

Organized societies and economic exchanges were common in ancient times.

SUMMARY: Ancient civilizations in Europe and the Near East, when metalworking was first developed, were not simple societies who had to struggle with new technologies, famine and sickness, new findings reveal.

A study by archaeologist Magnus Artursson from Sweden found that inhabitants of "Bronze Age" Scandinavia in 2000 B.C. were already organized into hierarchical chiefdoms, 800 years earlier then such social structures were previously thought to have emerged. These ancient people had been thought to have lived in scattered farms with little cooperation between the settlements.

A temple in Turkey, built around 800 B.C. and being excavated by U. of Toronto archaeologist Timothy Harrison and colleagues, is showing "Iron Age" societies were also more advanced than formerly thought. Discoveries of ivory carvings, metal foils, and pottery indicate there were cultural and economic exchanges between cultures such as Hittites, Aegeans, and Semites. It wasn't a period of very little trade as had been assumed.

To read the entire short article, click on this link to DISCOVER.

COMMENT: The discoveries that ancient men were more advanced than they had been pictured are coming as a surprise to secular scientists. But Bible believers know from the Word of God that humans have been intelligent beings right from the beginning, and ancient peoples were anything but brutish cavemen.

Genesis, chapter 4, tells us about several of our early ancestors. Jabal "was the father of those who live in tents and raise livestock;" Jubal "was the father of all who play the harp and flute;" Tubal-Cain "forged all kinds of tools out of bronze and iron." Noah, of course, built a magnificent ark. Not long after the Flood, people were making bricks and building cities. Genesis 11 tells us of the great but infamous Tower of Babel.

This is by no means the first article recently published that has shown there really is no evidence of any "evolution" in mankind's intellect or sophistication from early times to the present. Today in fact we do have plenty of backward-thinking people, for instance those who can look at our marvelously fine-tuned universe and our amazingly well-designed world of living things and think it is all just a happy accident.

Romans 1:18-20 provides a warning to those who continue in their ungodly and wicked ways despite the evidence of God's existence which we find in nature. We can't discover God's plan of salvation in nature, however. To discover all we need to know about how salvation can be ours, we need turn to the Holy Bible. "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life." John 3:16 (NIV)

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QUESTION OF THE DAY

What is a sea star?

It is what most people call a starfish but which is not really a fish. There are over 1,800 species of sea stars which belong to a group of invertebrate animals called echinoderms, a word meaning "spiny skinned."

Source: The Complete Aquarium Adventure, by Merilee and Bill Clifton