<div dir="ltr"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Sep 2, 2008 at 8:04 AM, <a href="mailto:kennethgmiller@juno.com">kennethgmiller@juno.com</a> <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:kennethgmiller@juno.com">kennethgmiller@juno.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">I have no problem with this, especially since you were careful to use the word "seems", which suggests that you're willing to reconsider your position if new evidence appears.<br>
<div class="Ih2E3d"><br>
> those parts of the world with the oldest human remains -<br>
> in Africa, not the Levant.<br>
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</div>This is a separate point, and I suggest everyone keep their mind open to the possibility that not all the evidence is yet in. Wikipedia's article "List of human evolution fossils", for example, does not show any discoveries prior to 1848. Who knows what will be found in the next hundred or two hundred years?<br>
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Akiva Miller</blockquote><div><br>R Akiva ( i love typing that! ),<br><br>It's interesting that you mention lack of fossil discoveries <i>before </i>a certain date in history... I'm not sure how that's relevant, except to show that with time and tech, more fossils can be found. I for one like to think in terms of patterns, and if the pattern of discovery continues, we will simply find more evidence that modern human populations dispersed (no pun intended) from sub-Saharan Africa. Perhaps the descendants of Shem, if he walked the earth much as you or I do, had a common language very similar to Hebrew, and they dispersed more recently throughout the Levant from the Black Sea, where we know a catastrophic flood destroyed thousands of square miles of coastal civilization around 5000 years ago. I've never studied what language group was supposedly spoken by those peoples around the Black Sea at that time, but maybe someone else has...<br>
<br>Maybe the people of ancient, really ancient Bavel contained a large group of emigres from further North? Certainly historians claim that Semites originated not from the Arabian Desert, but from somewhere near Syria. Maybe they came there from the further north. One problem with this is that eastern Black Sea peoples are Caucasians, not Mediterraneans and many of them are, uh, white or only slightly dark skinned... I would guess that Moses looked more like a Yemenite or an Arab, so what did Noah or Avraham look like? Hopefully, no one uses my hypotheses as an affirmation of the "Jesus Christ Superstar" Nordic Goldylocks look for any biblical figure...<br>
<br>Maybe, Noah and Avraham were from orginially (antedeluvian) from Ufra in Turkey, whose ancient people Victorian scholars identified with Arpachshad... (Truthfully, this is when it becomes easier to simply separate Avraham from Noah historically, leaving Noah as a mythic figure, replacing Adam as the "Father of Mankind" in the Torah's description of the 70 original nations of humanity and how people like Shem, Ever, Nimrod, etc distinguished themselves from all people of all nations for their good or evil works. From then on, it becomes easier to let Nimrod, Shem, and Avraham play their respective roles together in the same time period, freed from attachement to the Flood or the Dispersion. Listen to R Jeremy Wieder's shiur on literal and non-literal interpretation of Torah from YUTorah.org)<br>
<br>As for Adam until Noah, I don't know and wouldn't guess, but for me, a literal discussion of Adam and Eve is much less pertinent for a Torah view of history than a literal discussion of the Dispersion, which as discussed above, happened in the time of Avraham Avinu, who I very much like to think of as a historical figure, if you catch my drift. (Don't think people haven't had to defend the historicity of Avraham until modern times. R Berel Wein's book "Herald of Destiny" cites some ShU"T of the Rashba wherein he castigates Jewish students of philosophy and history for, among other things, trying to deny the existence of the Avos and claiming that only a belief in Moshe Rabbeinu was required dogma.)<br>
<br>For a good introduction to modern science's theory on early human migration, read the first chapters of Jared Diamond's excellent book "Guns, Germs, and Steel." You can watch the National Geographic DVD if you want instead, but then you miss Diamond's debunking of the so-called "pathetic inaccuracy" of Carbon-dating. In the book, Diamond goes through all of the science and deduction involved in dating of fossils, etc, including the different methods of Carbon-14 dating and their discrepancies and limitations. He convinced me that there is no vast conspiracy on the part of scientists regarding fossil dating, and that they have a pretty good, if rough, idea of when humanity got to everywhere and with what basic patterns of travel out of africa. The major problems are Polynesia and the Americas, because some really old fossils were found in South America, older than the Bering Strait Ice Brigde. (Please tell me somebody knows what I'm talking about.) Not to say that the Out-of-Africa hypothesis is proven, but its a start.<br>
<br>BTW, I just saw on Wikipedia that apparently the Muslims built a Mosque in Ufra over the supposed site of the birthplace of Abraham! Cool huh. It's also a neat coincidence that carbon-14 has a half life of 5700 years, for those who want to think that's some kind of hint to its 20th century discoverers... Of course, stray amounts of carbon-14 in a fossil imply that there was a lot more carbon-14 in it hundreds of thousands of years ago. (If you already don't like my view of natural history or my sense of humor, it gets worse...I love the fact that my dog's name is Lucy, just like the first major fossil discovery of <i>Australopithecus afarensis</i>, perhaps the earliest "human ancestor" according to modern science, though the dog is named after Lucy from <i>Peanuts</i>. I also love the fact that the most complete skeleton of Tyrannosaurus Rex, at the Field Museum in my very own Chicago, is named Sue, sort of like the Johnny Cash song...then again, Johnny Cash wrote a song about a man named "Ira" too)<br>
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