Macrobotanical remains from El Gigante.
Photo Credit: Thomas Harper
Photo Credit: Thomas Harper
The thing about creationists claims of a global genocidal flood with just eight survivors, is that there is no evidence that such a flood ever occurred and what evidence there is all points to it never having happened.
If creationism were based on evidence, those two demonstrable facts should at least cause them to do the unthinkable and consider being wrong. However, considering being wrong is such an existential threat to creationists that it is something that must never even be contemplated.
So, what are these demonstrable facts?
- The evidence that should be there is of course the global layer of silt containing a jumble of fossils from disconnected land masses than would be the inevitable result of such a flood with no land barriers to how far debris could float. Creationists also claim that extinct orders such as dinosaurs were living at the time of the flood, so the predicted jumble of fossils should contain extinct and extant species in haphazard order.
But that's not what we see. - The evidence that should not be there is of course archaeological evidence of continuous cultures which pre-dated the supposed flood 4,000 years ago and continues in an unbroken sequence through the time of the alleged flood and up to modern times. The culture should have been destroyed along with the evidence for it in a catastrophic global flood, of course.
But that's what we see.
Evidence of the latter fact, which shouldn't be there but is, was the subject of a recent paper on PLOS ONE a couple of days ago. It concerns the stratified layers of the remains of food plants in a the 'El Gigante' rock shelter in Honduras, Central America, going back to 11,000 years. The site was recently nominated as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Not only does this show a pattern of continuous occupation but it also records the dynamic nature of hunter-gatherer societies and the adaptations to climate and environmental change.
Of course, the scientists were interested in what this tells us about how the local culture evolved from hunter-gatherers to farmers and what lessons can be learned of relevance to today's society. The refutation of the creationist flood myth was purely incidental, like the other frequent scientific refutations of creationism, where the revealed facts speak for themselves.
The international research team included scientists from the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB).
A UCSB news release explains the discovery and its significance:
The El Gigante rockshelter in western Honduras is among only a handful of archaeological sites in the Americas that contain well-preserved botanical remains spanning the last 11,000 years. Considered one of the most important archaeological sites discovered in Central America in the last 40 years, El Gigante was recently nominated as a UNESCO World Heritage site.Technical details are given in the team's open access paper in PLOS ONE:
“No other location shows, as clearly as El Gigante,” state UNESCO materials about the site’s universal value, “the dynamic character of hunter-gatherer societies, and their adaptive way of life in the Central American highlands, and in Mesoamerica broadly during the early and middle Holocene.”
Now, anthropologists Douglas Kennett and Amber VanDerwarker of UC Santa Barbara, UCSB postdoc Richard George and colleagues from multiple institutions have excavated and analyzed botanical macrofossils — such as maize cobs, avocado seeds or rinds — from El Gigante using modern technologies. Their results are published in the journal PLOS ONE.
Our work at El Gigante demonstrates that the early use and management of tree crops like wild avocado and plums by at least 11,000 years ago set the stage for the development of later systems of arboriculture that, when combined with field cropping of maize, beans and squash, fueled human population growth, the development of settled agricultural villages and the first urban centers in Mesoamerica after 3,000 years ago.
Douglas J Kennet, lead author
Department of Anthropology
University of California, Santa Barbara,
Santa Barbara, California, USAThe study provides a major update to the chronology of tree and field crop use evident in the El Gigante with 375 radiocarbon dates, finding that tree fruits and squash appeared early, around 11,000 years ago, with most other field crops appearing later in time — maize around 4,500 years, beans around 2,200 years ago. The initial focus on tree fruits and squash, Kennett noted, is consistent with early coevolutionary partnering with humans as seed dispersers in the wake of megafaunal extinction in Central America. Tree crops predominated through much of the Holocene, and there was an overall shift to field crops after 4,000 years ago that was largely driven by increased reliance on maize farming.The quality of the plant preservation at El Gigante is simply unmatched, giving us a deeper understanding of how ancient Hondurans managed their forests, domesticated a variety of plant species and intensified their cultivation of key resources over millennia. What seems clear is that practices of forest management and field cultivation were closely linked and evolved in tandem.
Amber VanDerwarker, co-author
Department of Anthropology
University of California, Santa Barbara,
Santa Barbara, California, USA.Archaeological excavation of El Gigante rockshelter.Photo Credit: Tim SchefflerThe transition to agriculture is one of the most significant transformations of our Earth’s environmental and cultural history. The domestication of plants and animals in multiple independent centers worldwide resulted in a major demographic transition in human populations that fueled the transition to more intensive forms of agriculture during the last 10,000 years. Agriculture also provided the economic foundation for urbanism and the development of state institutions after 5,000 years ago in many of these same regions.
Douglas J Kennett.The botanical materials at El Gigante, remarkably well preserved, reflect the transition from foraging to farming, providing a rare glimpse of early foraging strategies and changes in subsistence. Unique in its location along the southern periphery of Mesoamerica, and for its lower elevation than the dry caves of central Mexico, the authors note, El Gigante serves as a macrobotanical archive for interactions and the flow of domesticated plants between Mesoamerica, Central America and South America. Broader still, it enables researchers to examine the long term evolutionary and demographic processes involved in the domestication of multiple tree and field crops.Our work shows that different types of agricultural systems supported human populations in Central America and that some were more sustainable than others. Forest management and arboriculture persisted for thousands of years before it was eclipsed in importance by the expansion of maize farming after 4,000 years ago. The archaeological record provides an archive of human adaptation that should be considered in the context of anthropogenic alteration of our Earth’s climate today. These ancient archives could help rural farmers in Central America adapt to changing conditions moving into the future.
Douglas J Kennet
And therein, Kennett added, some lessons for modern society can be inferred.
Fig 1. Map indicting the location of El Gigante rockshelter in western Honduras and planview map of the rockshelter showing the locations of test excavations and looters’ pits.
All elements of the map come from Natural Earth (http://www.naturalearthdata.com/) and are compatible with the CC-BY 4.0 license.
AbstractOnce again, a piece of archaeology quite incidentally refutes creationism and leaves creationists to babble, without a shred of evidence, about C14 dating being wrong because the half-life of C14 used to be much shorter (or is it longer?), forgetting that they also try to argue that the Universe is so finely tuned for human life that to change a fundamental constant by even a small amount would make life impossible, therefore God did it.
El Gigante rockshelter in western Honduras provides a deeply stratified archaeological record of human–environment interaction spanning the entirety of the Holocene. Botanical materials are remarkably well preserved and include important tree (e.g., ciruela (Spondias), avocado (Persea americana)) and field (maize (Zea mays), beans (Phaseolus), and squash (Cucurbita)) crops. Here we provide a major update to the chronology of tree and field crop use evident in the sequence. We report 375 radiocarbon dates, a majority of which are for short-lived botanical macrofossils (e.g., maize cobs, avocado seeds, or rinds). Radiocarbon dates were used in combination with stratigraphic details to establish a Bayesian chronology for ~9,800 identified botanical samples spanning the last 11,000 years. We estimate that at least 16 discrete intervals of use occurred during this time, separated by gaps of ~100–2,000 years. The longest hiatus in rockshelter occupation was between ~6,400 and 4,400 years ago and the deposition of botanical remains peaked at ~2,000 calendar years before present (cal BP). Tree fruits and squash appeared early in the occupational sequence (~11,000 cal BP) with most other field crops appearing later in time (e.g., maize at ~4,400 cal BP; beans at ~2,200 cal BP). The early focus on tree fruits and squash is consistent with early coevolutionary partnering with humans as seed dispersers in the wake of megafaunal extinction in Mesoamerica. Tree crops predominated through much of the Holocene, and there was an overall shift to field crops after 4,000 cal BP that was largely driven by increased reliance on maize farming.
Kennett DJ, Harper TK, VanDerwarker A, Thakar HB, Domic A, Blake M, et al. (2023)
Trans–Holocene Bayesian chronology for tree and field crop use from El Gigante rockshelter, Honduras.
PLoS ONE 18(6): e0287195. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0287195
Copyright: © 2023 The authors.
Published by PLoS Open access.
Reprinted under a CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication licence (CC0 1.0)
In fact, of course, the overwhelming evidence is that there was no global genocidal flood because the story is simply an origin myth/morality tale that was originally never intended to be included in a book declared to be inerrant. If there had been, not only would there be that global layer of silt I mentioned at the start of this blog post, but the evidence uncovered in Honduras would have been destroyed along with the culture that created it.
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