Richard Baker wrote:
Brother John said:
Where do you think our primitive cultures came from? They are all
descended from higher cultures, descended from the drop outs and
"hippies" of prior civilizations.
Where did those higher cultures come from in the first place if not
from earlier primitive cultures?
From earlier higher cultures? I don't know. Written human history only
goes back about 6,000 years. And the earliest records of literate
societies having a written history show those societies to be very
sophisticated with mathematics, literature, laws, a knowledge of
astronomy, etc. We can go back even further than that if we accept the
"evidence" of old campfires, stone spear points, bit of bone, etc. But
there is no way whatever to know who those people were, where they came
from, or what happened to them. As a result, it is impossible to know
whether or not they were the people who "evolved" into the ancient
literate cultures of Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus River Valley, and
similar cultures in the Western Hemisphere. There is just so much that
we do not know and can never know because the evidence is simply not there.
Consider the marvelous book by Jared Diamond called /Guns, Germs and
Steel. /It is almost all conjecture. It is very good conjecture perhaps,
but conjecture nevertheless. Consider the very important
paleoanthropological find in the Columbia River Valley called the
Kenniwick Man. We know from a study of his skull and other bones that he
was not racially related to the Native Americans that now occupy that
part of the world. He seems to have been of European ancestry or at
least his bones are more European-like than any of the Native Americans
today. But what chance is there that we will ever be able to figure out
where he came from, or what happened to his descendants if he had any?
There is no way to answer such questions scientifically. We don't even
know if Neanderthal was driven to extinction by modern man or was
intermarried with modern man to the point of extinction.
Bottom line. I don't know. But I don't think anyone else does either.
_______________________________________________
http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
