The hubris of human knowledge is that we think know everything. Right now. Geophysicists now believe that Tunguska-sized events are possibly as frequent as every 300 years on average. That wasn't true a few years ago. No one had any explanation (that was reasonable) for Tuguska.
sciam.com
There is a bog in Ireland where every tree was sheered off and died in the Dark Ages (I think around 700 CE). So, yes, there are cataclysms. Terrible Hiroshima-sized explosions (and larger) come out of the skies and periodically wipe out local subgroups of people (100-300 years).
I don't know the figurines you refer to. Perhaps an URL would be helpful.
I do know about Kennewick man. The current "Native Americans" are trying to "hide" this little tidbit under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act by forcing reburial of this "ancestor" rather than allowing study of the remains. Sounds justified until you know the whole story.
Basically, a pre-Columbian man was found with a spear point lodged in his hip. This remarkable skeleton was found by boaters watching hydroplanes along the Columbia gorge. It was so well preserved, that investigators weren't sure it wasn't a murder investigation, until the autopsy and other analysis revealed the 8400 B.P age. A pre-Columbian flint spear head was found in X-ray, healed over in this pathetic 40 year old man's hip. He lived for several years after the point broke off in his hip.
What's interesting (and this is why the Native Americans are trying to literally bury this archeological find) is that over 200 bone position markers indicate that this man was not American Indian, racially. The features are all wrong. More like Mongolian (the term Caucasian is used, but that doesn't mean White people - it means like people of the Caucasus' Mountains of Western Asia.) Which puts into question that the current Indians aren't "the original inhabitants" but merely the latest invaders of the North American continent. So, since there aren't Mongolians here now, were they the first, possibly wiped out or driven out by later invaders, our (certainly) victimized current generation of "Native Americans"? Now that would quash the sympathy card that Native Americans have been playing.
I'm not suggesting what happened to the Native Americans in North America was right, just was not atypical of Hominid migration. I've always have said, humans can be brutal. ANY truthful analysis of Western Europe shows that rather than being monolithic invaders of other races, different tribes have been invading, reinvading and retreating all across Europe and Asia for at least 5000 years. Recent discoveries of the Mummies of Mongolia has fair haired people, probably nomadic traders from as far away as Scotland traveling into the Asian highland.
No the (geologic, historic, archeologic ) story is not complete. We just shouldn't grasp at the first theory that makes our convictions work for us. That's not science, that's religion or arrogance. Again, ANY honest investigation into geology will show that about 1-10% of the data doesn't fit the model. Exactly. So, does that mean the theory is wrong? Not really. Just incomplete.
BTW, if you look at all the data, the general notion of evolution is very well supported. Now, modern DNA study shows even more evidence supporting the interconnection of species and forcing a redrafting of the Tree of Life. That's how science works.
washington.edu |
