How do we know that humans have been around for more than 6000 years?

by inkling 74 Replies latest watchtower bible

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  funkyderek

  TopHat:

  Just as I thought...no answer to my post...just a bunch of spelling bullies...shame on you!

  You're absolutely right. Your shoddy spelling was the least reprehensible part of your contributions to this thread and should not have overshadowed the nonsense you posted. So, in that spirit, let's review the rest of your posts based only on their content and not your grammar or spelling.

  If you think about it "Civilization" hasn't been around for to long. If we humans are millions of years old then why is civilization so young? and Real history so new in comparison.

  Humans have not been around for millions of years.

  I have read extensively on the subject of Civilization and still I can NOT bring myself to believe that humans roamed around for millions and millions of years and suddenly became Civilized only a few shorts years ago compared to millions and millions of years..

  Clearly that's not true. You haven't read extensively on the subject of Civilization. You may have looked it up in an enyclopaedia but you obviously haven't read any reputable textbooks or even, I suspect, the entire encyclopaedia entry.

  Those people on the islands you speak of, james, are part of a Civilization...they may even have come from a very advanced Civilization themselves but wondered off on their own. They used whatever was available on the islands to make life comfortable.

  This is unadulterated nonsense. The only way you can defend your belief that civilisation must begin shortly after the appearance of humans is to claim that small tribes of hunter-gatherers with no government, written language, metallurgy or even the wheel are in fact civilised. Doing so means that the word "civilisation" completely loses its meaning. When you say they are civilised, all you apparently mean is that they are human. This further compounds the absurdity of your original claim.

  according to the Enclyopedia Britanica, Civilization has been present for only 10 to 12 thousand years. NOT millions! That to me is a short period of time.

  It is quite a short period of time, only about twice the Creationists' purported age of the universe. In that time, humans have gone from a hunter-gatherer to an agrarian lifestyle and far far beyond. The development of agriculture and subsequent division of labour allowed further advances such as the invention of writing and metallurgy and so on, which each further accelerated the pace of advancement. (Had you really "read extensively on the subject of Civilization" you'd know all this, of course.) Asking why this happened so rapidly and why it didn't happen before or in other places is actually a worthwhile question, and a good deal of time and effort has been expended trying to answer it. Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel provides some likely answers, although some of his claims are disputed. (Again, you'd know this if you'd actually studied the subject). There are lots of possible answers being debated and investigated as we speak, but the fact that we don't know exactly what triggered the beginnings of civilisation and why it didn't happen before lends absolutely no credence to the absurd hypothesis that the first humans appeared some four thousand years after the invention of agriculture.
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  BurnTheShips

  Civilization has been around for millions of years.

  Civilization is less than 10k years old. The oldest known is in Mesopotamia, and the best archeological data places it at about 6000 BC.

  BTS
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  amicus

  Some Scientists are dishonest, some merchants are. Some politicians (no, I won't comment) try to help their constituants, some don't. Some Military leaders honestly try to limit troop losses, some newscasters try to tell the truth. Human nature,

  Honest historians/scientists try to sift through any evidence of the historical record to produce an accurate document.

  Currently evidence points to mankind as we know it developing in Africa 150k years ago? The cool thing is that science is exploding based on accumulated knowledge. We may be killing ourselves off as a species, but we are gonna go out knowing more than our ancestors ever dreamed possible. Kinda cool when you think about it. Modern religions need to adapt pretty rapidly to still stay viable. That Southern Baptist Deacon that I worked with in Jamaica 10 yrs ago has to work a whole hell of a lot harder to try to convince me (or anyone) that anyone of African descent is sub human. Yep, not uncommon 10 years ago in the Southern US.

  My guess is that his bigotry is begining to fade away. It is probably being replaced with a new bigotry, but at least the US bigots are slowly being cornered. We white boys are rapidly becoming a minority, and based on our history I'm not sure that isn't really a bad thing.
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  ballistic

  One of the problems with the JWs "belief system" is that it has evolved to fit the facts, and when something becomes impossible to explain or fit into the real world, it is changed or thrown out. Therefore, if incontrovertible evidence appeared that humans had existed for millions of years, this would be absorbed into the beliefs over time.
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  Satanus

  One could pose the question, why have so many tribes/groups remained UNcivilized until the present day, much of africa, parts of australia, north america until recently, parts of south america, and the northern arctic climes. Why did they basically stay socially static for tens of thousands of yrs?
  
  S