This is too much!
Check out this story.
What you will find is, in part, this:
The earliest homo sapiens remains found outside of Africa were discovered in Israel and are thought to be around 100,000 years old. They are remains of a group (of a few hundred people at most – my comment- Ed.) who left Africa through what is now the Sahara desert during a brief period when the climate grew wetter, turning the desert green with vegetation.
And how did they get to Israel?
They crossed the Red Sea! Truth.
Now, the article goes on to say that group died out, but later crossings further south at the Red Sea’s narrowest point into Arabia succeeded. However it is apparent from looking at the scanty evidence that their dying out is just a guess, based on the non-continuance of fossil remains.
And because the fossil record is picked up further south, in that Mesopotamian ‘cradle of civilisation’ we all know about.
It cannot exclude the possibility that, as conditions grew harsher in Israel, this group of proven resourcefulness simply upped stakes again and moved south.
So what?
The bare facts of crossing the Red Sea and establishing the first society outside the African ‘Garden of Eden’ in Israel are before us. Long before Egypt, and pyramids/pyraslavery, and Exodus.
The article does assert that the vast majority of surviving humanity is descended from that very small very special group.
Think deep tribal memory. Think Israel – chosen people – think….strewth!!!
I’ve only just read this information and am only starting to digest it.
I question my ability to interpret these facts or factoids or what, but I’m given a fillip by reading this piece in the same publication.
It starts:
Studies on a human skull recently unearthed in Spain offer the earliest evidence that ancestors of Homo sapiens did not reject newborns with severe deformities but cared for them alongside their other children.…
They pieced together a 530,000-year-old fossil cranium and discovered it belonged to a child who lived to between five and 12 years old despite being born with a rare birth defect known as craniosynostosis, in which the skull segments close too early, producing facial deformities and interfering with brain development.
Nice. Reassuring. ‘Cared for them alongside other children.’ How sweet. But quite possibly wrong. How can Ana Gracia Tellez, a palaeoanthropologist at Complutense University in Madrid, who led the research,exclude the possibility or likelihood that the child was not only spared but revered because her bizarre and to them terrifying countenance led her people to believe she had extraordinary shamanistic or magical powers?
She can’t and my guess is certainly as good as hers.
In the same way, the assertion that the proto-Israelites died out and were superseded much later by others from further south is just another guess.
But what can we assert from this? Nothing really.
It enables us to suppose that what was eventually recorded in Genesis and Exodus embodied a subtle and altogether wonderful blending of ancient tribal memories with much more recent material, providing a framework with historical verisimilitude for the preservation of a set of Ur-menschlich traditions that this very special group had been chosen by God since the very beginning for a special purpose.
And thus it presents to us the real and tantalising possibility that this proto-nation was able to keep its memories and beliefs alive and relevant for 100,000 years.
Since this is way beyond any comparable achievement or behaviour or…well…anything done by a group of people, ever, it becomes reasonable to suppose that God chose those people for something special. Which, as it happens, is exactly what they have always said.
Praise God, folks.
Chris
Play With Strangers 