Common Ancestor News - Like Humans, Chimpanzees Have Complex Language

Chimpanzees Asanti and Akuna vocalising.

© Liran Samuni, Taï Chimpanzee Project

Chimpanzees combine calls to form numerous vocal sequences | Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

How human languages evolved is something of a mystery. I'm not talking about the neurological and anatomical development that made us able to vocalise and comprehend spoken communications because this is an obvious case of gene-meme co-evolution. What I'm talking about is the evolution of the various sounds into words and so into coded information that conveys a meaning.

This is an even bigger problem for creationists because, apart from the childishly implausible and contradictory accounts in their favourite textbook, the Bible, it offers nothing by way of a rational explanation. Firstly there is the tale that all the descendants of Noah spoke different languages, to account for the handful of Middle Eastern languages the authors were aware of (Genesis 10:1-5). Then we have the contradictory claim that the whole world spoke one language (Genesis 11:1) but God confounded their tongues so they all spoke languages incomprehensible to one another [sic] because he was afraid they would work together to build a tower up to Heaven - which in those days was just above the sky over the Middle East and accessible via a tall enough tower.

But nowhere does the Bible say anything about how we learned to combine different phonics into words. The assumption of the Bible's authors was that, right from start, language was fully formed as some sort of universal given. Even the talking animals (Genesis 3:1-5, Numbers 22:28-30) and plants (Judges 9:13) spoke with human language, using the recombination of human phonics to make the words they spoke, like humans do, even though they lack the neurological and physical means of doing so. Even when God spoke his first words (Genesis 1:3) he used a human combination of human phonics to make meaningful (to humans) words and sentences - in that case, in a language then spoken by no-one else, since there was no-one else to speak it - Ancient Hebrew.

It is of course, nonsensical. Our ability to cooperate in social groups and develop cultures in which agreed combinations of phonetics has agreed meanings, so we can construct new information by an agreed set of rules, is an evolved ability and one which we probably inherited from an ancestor we have in common with chimpanzees, as the work of scientists from the Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod, Lyon, France, the Department of Neuropsychology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive Sciences, Leipzig, Germany and the Taï Chimpanzee Project, Centre Suisse de Recherche Scientifique, Abidjan, Ivory Coast, shows.

They have discovered that chimpanzees :

Human Evolution News - Human Cultural and Technological Evolution in Northern China, 40,000 Years Ago

Ochre pieces and stone processing equipment laying on a red-stained pigment patch.

Fa-Gang Wang, Francesco d’Errico / Wang et al.,
Innovative ochre processing and tool-use in China 40,000 years ago.
Nature. 2022

Archaeologists Discover Innovative 40,000-Year-Old Culture in China | Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History

Of course, they never could have guessed it, so the people who were leaving these remains 40,000 years ago would have been oblivious of the fact that their activities as discovered by modern archaeologist, have utterly refuted the ideas that were to emerge in another part of the world some 37,000 years later.

The fact is, however that this is exactly what they have done insofar as the primitive Bronze Age origins myths of a bunch of Middle Eastern nomadic pastoralists and hill farmers are concerned, because these people who made up these camp-fire tales or elaborated on earlier ones, had no inkling that there had been people much like them around in what is now Northern China, some 37,000 years earlier.

The tales these simple people had been handed down had their origins in a part of the world where people believed Earth was very small and only a couple of thousand years old and had been created just for them by magic beings who lived above the sky-dome and who directed the affairs of man.

For these people, the entire world was a circle bounded by the Eastern Mediterranean to the west, the Black Sea and the Caucasus Mountains to the north, the Arabian desert to the south and the flood plains of Mesopotamia and the Iranian Plateau to the east. These were the tales that eventually got written down and incorporated into the state religion of a desperate, increasingly autocratic, dying Roman Empire and are now, almost unbelievably, still regarded as historical truths by some number of people alive today, albeit a decreasing proportion of the developed world's people.

Sadly for these deluded people, evidence of human habitation and cultural/technological progress in Northern China 40,000 years ago, utterly refutes their primitive beliefs which include a global genocidal flood just 6000 years ago, which, had it really happened, would have swept away the archaeological evidence of this culture, as it does the notion that the entire planet has been repopulated by the descendants of a handful of survivors of this flood.

The findings by an international group of archaeologists including scientists from the Chinese Academy of Science and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, were published recently in Nature. The artifacts are from a period in Eurasian hominin history when Homo sapiens was coming into contact with the Neanderthals and Denisovans, the descendants of an earlier migration by an archaic hominin such as H. erectus, and interbreeding with them and no doubt sharing ideas and technologies.

If Ever You're Feeling Really Stupid - 20 Absurdities That Some Adults Believe

1. That Earth is flat and has a dome over it to keep the water above the sky out. The moon and sun are lamps hung on this dome so we can tell day from night and the stars stuck to it can shake loose and fall to earth during earthquakes.
2. That a magic man designed himself before he existed then self-assemble out of nothing with enough information to create a Universe out of nothing and micromanage it to the minutest level.
3. That a hundred-year-old man built a wooden boat and rounded up two or seven of every species in the world to live together for a year sealed in that boat with only one small window for air, then they left the boat onto a sterile planet on which all living things had been destroyed, including the plants, but still found enough to eat so everything alive today is descended from those few survivors.
4. That just five generations after the survivors left the boat in 2, there were enough people to support a massive civil engineering project to build a tower up to Heaven, which in those days was just above the sky over the Middle East, and that all the languages on Earth are the result of this population each being magically made to speak languages that non-one else could understand, because the project alarmed an omniscient, omnipotent god who lived in the Heaven.

A Meteor Strike in Bronze Age Jordan Destroyed a Large City - And Any Claim That The Bible is Literal History.

Location of Tall el-Hammam. (a) Photo of the southern Levant, looking north, showing the Dead Sea, the site location (TeH), and nearby countries. The Dead Sea Rift, the fault line marking a major tectonic plate boundary, runs through the area. Source of base image: NASA, Space Shuttle. “The Sinai Peninsula and the Dead Sea Rift”. Photo: sts109-708-024, taken 12/16/2009. From the NASA Langley Research Center Atmospheric Science Data Center (nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/astronauts_eyes/sts109-708-024.html). Modified by the authors using Adobe Photoshop CC2014 (adobe.com/products/photoshop.html). (b) West-southwest-facing view of the upper tall showing locations of the palace and temple behind the curve of the upper tall. The Dead Sea is in the background to the left.

An Ancient Disaster | The UCSB Current

From the Middle East, archaeologists bring us evidence that, although a couple of Bible tales may have their origins in a real event which could have lingered in the folk memories of the ancient Canaanites, the truth was very different to the highly embroidered stories these memories were subsequently woven into.

The evidence is that the large Late Bronze age city, now known as Tall el-Hammam, in the Jordan Valley, north of the Dead Sea, was suddenly destroyed by the air-burst of a meteorite larger than that responsible for the Tanguska incident in Siberia in 1908, which was estimated to have been the equivalent of an explosion and heat-wave about 1000 times more powerful than the atom bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

This explosion occurred in about 1650 BCE and, according to the authors of a paper published, open access, in Scientific Reports, could have been the origin of both the myths of Sodom and Gomorrah and the destruction of Jericho (identified as Tell es-Sultan, near to Tall el-Hammam) by an Israelite army led by Joshua.

For Bible literalists wishing to use this as evidence that the Bible is real history, these two mythological events allegedly occurred many years apart and not contemporaneously. The tale in Genesis of the destruction of the 'cities of the plain' and the survival of Lot and his daughters with whom he fathered two sons is, according to Israeli archaeologists, Finkelstein and Silberman, in The Bible Unearthed, probably a propaganda story written to discredit two rival Canaanite tribes to Israel, in Moab and Ammon, as the descendants of the children of drunken debauchery and incest. The story of the breaching of the (non-existent) walls of Jericho and its sack by Joshua's mob came much later, in Joshua, at the end of the supposed exodus from Egypt and the mythical entry into the 'Promised Land' by the Israelites.

Jews and Arabs Descended from Canaanites - Biblical Archaeology Society

Canaanite relief in basalt depicting a lion and a lioness at play, 14th century BC, from Beit She’an, Israel Museum, Jerusalem

Credit: Carole Raddato from FRANKFURT, Germany,
CC BY-SA 2.0
via Wikimedia Commons

Jews and Arabs Descended from Canaanites - Biblical Archaeology Society

In their book, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Sacred Texts, Tel Aviv University archaeologists, Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman conclude from the archaeological evidence that the history of the Jews in the Old Testament, including that in Exodus, is almost entirely invented; the Jews arose in situ from indigenous Canaanites, carving out the states of Israel and Judah on land peripheral to the Bronze Age Canaanite city states as these faded during the Early Iron Age.

The invented history simply reflects the rivalry between these closely related populations and, as with all invented histories, shows those writing them to be the superior group, having stunning victory after stunning victory over their rivals, whom they always totally vanquished and annihilated and enslaved, and having the superior tribal god(s). The stories were invented to give retrospective justification for genocide and land-theft and invariably exaggerated them, as we can see from the fact that there are descendants today of these supposedly totally annihilated tribes.

40 Million Year History of the Central Asian Steppe

Mongolian steppe.

Unfolding 40 million years of Asian steppe history | CNRS News

Young-Earth Creationist dogma, based on nothing more than a calculation by an Irish Bishop, not from looking at the geological record, but by reading a Book of Hebrew origin myths written in the Bronze Age by people who thought Earth was small and fat with a dome over it and that the Universe worked by magic and was haunted by demons, is that Earth was created in about 4004 BCE and so is about 6,000 years old give or take a century or two.

Bear that in mind as you read this article about the findings of a combined Dutch and French team of scientists who have just completed a project to map the evolution of the Central Asian steppe over the past 40 million years, then ask yourself why Bishop Ussher got it so badly wrong, if that's not already obvious.

What does this tell us about using religion, not science, to try to discover the truth about the world we live in? Answers below, please.

A news item from Le Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) (The French National Center for Scientific Research) explains how they went about this. The key to understanding how this vast area evolved over time was in the pollen grains trapped in sediments:

From the northern foothills of the Tibetan plateau to southern Siberia, and from western Kazakhstan to eastern Mongolia lies one of the world’s largest ecosystems, the Central Asian steppe. As far as the eye can see, an ocean of grass harbours a rich biodiversity. Elk, gazelles, brown bears, leopards and Siberian tigers, among other remarkable species, have made it their home.

However, until now, there was something missing from this vast region: its natural history. The evolution of the steppe over geological time remained a mystery, since it had hardly ever been studied. A French-Dutch team has now set out to fill the gap, by publishing the first-ever chronology of the main climatic and environmental events that have affected the region over the past 40 million years. This segment of history shows the extent to which this grassland is fragile and vulnerable to climate change.

Using pollen as a time machine

To reconstruct the evolution of the steppe, the researchers made use of one of the best indicators of past ecosystems: pollen. Every grain has a specific shape and pattern, making it possible to identify the plant species or family that produced it. As a result, a record of successive floras is preserved in different geological strata.

There we have a record that spans a period from 40 to 15 million years ago. It’s a unique site that provided us with an overview of the history of the steppes.

You have to be extremely careful not to contaminate samples with recent pollen.

One possible scenario is that the advance of the desert will leave only scattered islands of fertility. Then, if the barren areas continue to expand, the fertile patches will in turn disappear. What our work shows is that there is a threshold beyond which there is no turning back. Once a desert environment takes hold, it could last for millions of years. So, even if we managed to control levels of atmospheric CO2, returning to the previous situation would be impossible,

Guillaume Dupont-Nivet
CNRS researcher Université de Rennes, CNRS, Géosciences Rennes, France and Universität Potsdam, Institute of Geosciences, Potsdam, Germany.

In northwest China, the researchers found an exceptional location for the collection of pollen near the town of Xining, the capital of Qinghai province. “There we have a record that spans a period from 40 to 15 million years ago,” explains Guillaume Dupont-Nivet, a CNRS researcher at the Geosciences Rennes laboratory^[1] and at the University of Potsdam (Germany). “It’s a unique site that provided us with an overview of the history of the steppes.”

Collecting these microscopic grains is a particularly tricky job. “You have to be extremely careful not to contaminate samples with recent pollen,” the researcher explains. Under the microscope, it is indeed very difficult to distinguish a 30 million-year-old grain from one that has just been released from a nearby flower.

To reconstruct the history of the climate and environment of the region, the scientists also used other information. They relied on climate models, animal fossil records, and isotopic data that can help track variations in temperature and precipitation over millions of years. This enabled them to identify three major ecological phases in the steppes of Central Asia.

Successive climate upheavals

Looking for pollen in sediments, bushes and plants (Xining Basin, Qinghai province, China, 16 August 2017).

© Guillaume Dupont-Nivet

Some 40 million years ago, two families of shrubs, the Nitrariaceae and the Ephedraceae, were found everywhere in the region. These plants fostered the emergence of a remarkable fauna dominated by the ancestors of horses and rhinoceros, the Perissodactyla, or odd-toed ungulates.

But then the local climate started to change. The Himalayas and Tibet began to rise, pushed up by the collision of the Indian subcontinent with Eurasia, leading to a change in the monsoon regime. To the north of Tibet, rainfall started to decrease. At the same time, the Paratethys, the extensive sea that stretched from Mongolia to the Mediterranean, gradually dried up, causing the area to become increasingly arid.

However, the final blow that ushered in the end of these early steppes occurred 34 million years ago. A global crisis known as the Eocene-Oligocene Transition brought about a mass extinction of species in many regions around the world. It was largely caused by the formation of the Antarctic ice sheet, an event that rapidly cooled the planet, leading to a sharp drop in precipitation in Central Asia. The steppes turned into a desert as arid as the Sahara. Sand dunes covered the last refuges of life. In this hostile environment, the fauna mainly consisted of a few rodents and rabbits.

Evolution of the geographical distribution of pollen records in Central Asia from the Eocene period (40 million years ago) to the modern era. These paleogeographies also show mountain ranges gradually rising and the Paratethys Sea receding westwards.

© G. Dupont-Nivet/Sciences Advances DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abb8227

The desert persisted for millions of years. Then, in the middle of the Miocene, 17 to 14 million years ago, the climate became wetter again. As Dupont-Nivet admits, scientists don’t know what caused the change. Yet for whatever reason, there was a significant shift in conditions, which once again became more favourable to life. Steppes like those seen today, covered with grasses and shrubs, emerged. Large mammals, such as lions, aurochs and megaloceros (giant deer) encountered their ecological niche there, before being ruthlessly hunted down by a new invasive species that arrived 50,000 years ago: Homo sapiens.

The uncertain future of the steppes

This great ape may well turn out to be the cause of another environmental upheaval. Climate change models show that Central Asia is fast becoming one of the hottest and driest places on the planet. Researchers think that the steppes could turn into a highly arid desert again. Ecosystems are already visibly deteriorating, as shown by the expansion of the Gobi Desert, which has led the Chinese authorities to embark on a massive reforestation programme dubbed “the Great Green Wall”. “One possible scenario is that the advance of the desert will leave only scattered islands of fertility. Then, if the barren areas continue to expand, the fertile patches will in turn disappear,” the scientist predicts.

The problem is that this process could be irreversible. “What our work shows is that there is a threshold beyond which there is no turning back. Once a desert environment takes hold, it could last for millions of years. So, even if we managed to control levels of atmospheric CO2, returning to the previous situation would be impossible,” Dupont-Nivet warns. If this worst-case scenario were to come about, the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people would collapse in just a few decades.

The team's open access paper was published last October in Science Advances:

Abstract

The origins and development of the arid and highly seasonal steppe-desert biome in Central Asia, the largest of its kind in the world, remain largely unconstrained by existing records. It is unclear how Cenozoic climatic, geological, and biological forces, acting at diverse spatial and temporal scales, shaped Central Asian ecosystems through time. Our synthesis shows that the Central Asian steppe-desert has existed since at least Eocene times but experienced no less than two regime shifts, one at the Eocene–Oligocene Transition and one in the mid-Miocene. These shifts separated three successive “stable states,” each characterized by unique floral and faunal structures. Past responses to disturbance in the Asian steppe-desert imply that modern ecosystems are unlikely to recover their present structures and diversity if forced into a new regime. This is of concern for Asian steppes today, which are being modified for human use and lost to desertification at unprecedented rates.

Barbolini, N.; Woutersen, A.; Dupont-Nivet, G.; Silvestro, D.; Tardif, D.; Coster, P. M. C.; Meijer, N.; Chang, C.; Zhang, H.-X.; Licht, A.; Rydin, C.; Koutsodendris, A.; Han, F.; Rohrmann, A.; Liu, X.-J.; Zhang, Y.; Donnadieu, Y.; Fluteau, F.; Ladant, J.-B.; Le Hir, G.; Hoorn, C.
Cenozoic evolution of the steppe-desert biome in Central Asia
Science Advances 09 Oct 2020: Vol. 6, no. 41, eabb8227 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abb8227

Copyright: © 2020 The authors. Published by American Association for the Advancement of Science
Open access. Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).

So there we have a clear, coherent picture of how the Central Asian steppe came to be what it is today over a period of some 40 million years.

Which all goes to show how:

The Bible is a book about what people used to believe before we knew any better.

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Look What Religion Can Cause!

Covid-19 Vaccine fact sheet produced by Hennepin Healthcare

This is not a joke, not even a belated April fools joke.

There really are people who, because they suffer from religion, can be induced to believe these absurdities.

An American health-care provider has had to put out a disclaimer stating that the anti-Covid-19 vaccine does not contain something called 'luciferase' or 'the mark of the beast" to mark recipients as followers of Satan.

Luciferase is the enzyme found in bioluminescent organisms responsible for making them glow in the dark. There would be absolutely no purpose in putting it in a vaccine. But what on earth is 'the mark of the beast'? Oh, I know all about the nonsense in Revelations about the number 666 and all that tosh, but how can it be a substance included in a vaccine?

Apparently, this is one of the latest QAnon-type conspiracy theories concerning the Covid-19 vaccine, which is circulating in fundamentalist Christian circles, as though, fresh from their success with the "Deep state, cannibalistic paedophile ring", Bill Gates' "tracking nanobots" and "gay genes", nonsense, the originators of this idiocy have gone one step further round the bend and taken their dupes with them.

I suspect that a small group somewhere is betting amongst themselves to see who can get people to say the most idiotic thing in public. I wonder if Republican politicians and evangelical, Talibangelist 'prophets' realise they're being made public fools of for someone's entertainment.

The scary thing is that, as Voltaire said:

People who believe absurdities will commit atrocities

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Creationism News - 120,000 Year-Old Footprint Blunder

Researchers surveying the Alathar lake, situated within an interdunal depression in the western Nefud Desert, Saudi Arabia

© Palaeodeserts Project

Ancient Human Footprints in Saudi Arabia Provide Snapshot of Arabian Ecology 120,000 Years Ago | Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History

One of the way in which Creationist frauds explain the precise ordering of fossils in the sedimentary geological column - which they claim was all deposited during the biblical flood, is by the mysterious, magical process of 'hydrological sorting'.

In this magical process, global flood water somehow sorted all the fossils so they just looked like there has been an evolutionary progression even though they had all been created as is during a single week a few thousand years earlier, and before which nothing ever died.

The other way is with the, if anything, even more desperate and preposterous 'explanation', that the precise ordering was achieved by the more advanced animals running to higher ground to avoid the flood. None of them were ever sick, injured or lame in any way that would impede them and make them appear out of place un this advancing silt layer, apparently. How that translates to moving up the geological column and the fact of fossil shellfish being found at the top of mountains is never explained because the dupes never ask, and if they do, they are speedily condemned to Hell as blasphemers and removed from the website on which they asked it.

Another Factual Finding Debunks the Bible Narrative

Recent view on the Selenga River close to the archeological site Ust-Kyakhta-3.

© G. Pavlenok

Oldest Connection with Native Americans Identified Near Lake Baikal in Siberia | Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History

Some 35,000 years before the origin myths in the Bible were being invented by Bronze Age Canaanite hill farmers, the ancestors of Native Americans were living in the Lake Baikal area of Siberia, and even dying of plague.

This was the conclusion of a massive study led by the Department of Archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.

As their press release explains:

Bible Debunked Again by Science Without Even Trying

Illustration of one of the early settlers in the Caribbean. The Caribbean Sea served as a kind of ‘aquatic highway’ that connected the islands with the mainland.

Illustration: Tom Björklund.

Ancient DNA provides new insights into the early peopling of the Caribbean – University of Copenhagen

According to a new study by an international team of researchers from the Caribbean, Europe and North America, led by Cosimo Posth, of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, humans were busy populating the Caribbean islands from North and South America at around the time the Bronze Age pastoralists who wrote the Bible were recording their origin myths. These myths include that of a global mass genocide and repopulation of a sterile world from 8 survivors, just a few thousand years ago.

Bible Authors May Have Been High on Cannabis

Iron Age Judahite shrine

New research reveals Cannabis and Frankincense at the Judahite Shrine of Biblical Arad.

Cannabis was used in early cultic ceremonies in the Iron Age kingdom of Judah, according to researchers from Tel Aviv University. This may explain some of the more bizarre stories and claims of revelations and experiences related in the Bible.

This comes from analysis of the material found on two Iron Age altars discovered at the entrance to the "holy of holies" of a shrine at Tel Arad in the Beer-sheba Valley, Israel, which were found to contain Cannabis and Frankincense.

The findings were published free access yesterday in Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University

Silly Bible - History The Authors Got Wrong

The Bible is not only full of bad science - which is at least understandable given that the earliest parts of it were based on myths and legends from, as Christopher Hitchens put it, the fearful infancy of our species - but it is full of very bad history too.

Much of the 'history' is a retrospective attempt to give legitimacy to land claims or to give credence to the claim to power and authority of dubious regimes, or supremacy over neighbours, of course. Giving this spurious credence to despots and insecure rulers of one form or another has frequently been the role of 'historians' and 'genealogists' throughout history, no less in Canaan and the Levant, than in more recent times and places.

The problem is, much of this 'history' was written by people who knew little or nothing of actual history, so they made what can only be described as wonderfully anachronistic schoolboy howlers. Not that they expected their readers (or mostly listeners) to realise this of course. They would have been equally ignorant of real history.

Hypocrisy News - Kim Davis

Kim Davis - Rejected

Apparently, Jesus has decided on a change of career for Christian arch-bigot, Kim Davis, now she has been rejected in favour of a Democrat by Kentucky voters in the midterm elections.

Readers will remember how the (now former) Rowan County clerk gained notoriety and became the poster-girl for white right Christian extremism when she decided her religious prejudices entitled her to victimise homosexuals by denying them marriage licences for same sex marriage, while being paid by Kentucky taxpayers for doing a job she was refusing to do. She even achieved glorious martyrdom by being sent to prison by a court for refusing to do the job she was taking money for doing.

She acquired even more notoriety and the adoration of the extreme Christian right, when she helped Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò embarrass Pope Francis and give hope to the extreme right that his reforms were mere PR and not to be taken seriously. Viganò , then Papal legate to Washington and bearing a grudge, arranged a clandestine meeting between Davis and Pope Francis at the end of his visit to the USA, in which Francis appeared to encourage Davis to continue breaking the law in his host country. Details of the meeting were immediately released to the press by a triumphant Viganò.

Fake Dead Sea Scrolls an Intelligently Designed Hoax

'Dead Sea Scroll' display, Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C.

Credit: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit at least partly fake, museum admits | CBC News

In the search for certainty, concern for truth takes a low priority.

The dangers of being over-eager for confirmation of bias were highlighted yesterday when a fundamentalist Bible museum was forced to admit that at least five of its sixteen claimed Dead Sea Scroll fragments were forgeries.

Despite highly dubious provenance, the museum had purchased the fragments which began mysteriously appearing on the international market in about 2002, despite the actual scroll fragments being tightly controlled by the Israeli Government's Antiquities Authority. Bible scholars had warned that these fragments appeared to be intelligently designed to target American evangelical Christians. A Baptist seminary in Texas and a evangelical college in California reportedly paid out millions of dollars for some of them.

Pope Francis Thinks the Bible is Wrong!

Lord's Prayer: Pope Francis calls for change - BBC News

Pope Francis has been thinking.

No, it's not about how the church can avoid taking responsibility for the child abuses carried out by it's priests and nuns and certainly not about how it can compensate and support their victims and avoid creating any more.

It's about how to resolve a curious contradiction in the Bible that has been taxing the brains of theologians and biblical scholars for close on 1700 years, ever since the Bible was compiled. The contradiction is between James 13:1 with:

Seriously Christians? Really?!

Joshua 'stopping the sun'.

There are actually adults who believe the sun can stand still and performs strange manoeuvres in the sky!

Not just that but they believe these could be visible only in a small village or town, and non-one else on Earth would see them!

Seriously! There are actual grown ups who believe the following:

Then spake Joshua to the LORD in the day when the LORD delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon. And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is not this written in the book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day. And there was no day like that before it or after it, that the LORD hearkened unto the voice of a man: for the Lord fought for Israel. And Joshua returned, and all Israel with him, unto the camp to Gilgal. But these five kings fled, and hid themselves in a cave at Makkedah.

Joshua 10:12-17

DNA Study Shows Bible is Fiction

Researchers sequenced whole genomes from five Canaanites skeletons found in Sidon, Lebanon.

Photo Credit: Ali Hashisho/Reuters/Newscom

Ancient DNA counters biblical account of the mysterious Canaanites | Science | AAAS.

We've known for a long time that the supposed 'history' in the Old Testament is mostly, if not completely, fiction, and I'm not just talking about the frankly ludicrous creation myths in the opening chapters.

As Silberman and Finkelstein showed in The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts, not only did the events described in Exodus never happen but nor did the destruction of the cities and the Canaanite genocide. Indeed, the Bible contains evidence of its own inaccuracy, being clearly written by people who did not know the history of the times in which they set their tales. Briefly, and by no means exhaustively:

The Great Flood Happened - In China

Evidence of the exceptional outburst flood in the upper valley of the Yellow River.
(A) Distributions of OFS, DLS, and landslide dam. Light purple and dark green shaded areas indicate purple-brown mudrock and greenschist, respectively. Line AB across the Lajia site shows the location of the reconstructed cross section in fig. S6C.
(B) The vertical distribution of the OFS, landslide dam, DLS, Lajia site and reconstructed lake levels relative to the longitudinal profile of the present Yellow River.
DLS are classified into lacustrine sediments (LS) and fan delta deposits (FD).

Outburst flood at 1920 BCE supports historicity of China’s Great Flood and the Xia dynasty - Science

One of the many problems faced by Bible literalists is the singular lack of evidence for any of it, especially the much-cherished early creation myths found in Genesis. This means that those who try to cling at all costs to this primitive superstition have to perform all manner of frankly idiotic mental gymnastics to either explain away the lack of evidence or try to force-fit other geological evidence into their mythology.

One traditional attempt is to claim that many/most/all other cultures have a flood myth in their history. No matter how little these, where there are in fact any, match the biblical flood myth, they will always be waved around as proof of the historical accuracy of the Bible, as though not actually equating to the biblical myth in time, location, scope or detail actually mattered. There is the story of a flood at some point, therefore this is the biblical flood - case closed!

Lesson From Lot - The Rocamadour Fraud

Rocamadour, Lot, France.

Rocamadour, just outside the Dordogne in the Lot Department, France, is a mediaeval pilgrimage site consisting of a cluster of building clinging to the almost sheer side of a deep gorge. It is also the site of the ‘Sanctuary of the Blessed Virgin’ sitting just below the top, accessible only via a steep and winding path (before the modern lift was installed).

If only the pilgrims had looked across the gorge, and had even a superficial understanding of geology and the courage to shake off their theophobic superstition, they would have seen the glaringly obvious evidence that their superstition was (and still is) based on a lie.

If The Bible Is True, Why So Many Religions?

Let's assume for the moment that the Bible is true in its substantive claim that there was once a single couple from whom we are all descended and that, some time later, the population of the Earth was reduced again to a single family. This family all believed in and worshipped the 'one true god' and had even spoken to this god and witnessed his powers first hand in ways in which few people could have any doubts.

This all happened just a few thousand years ago. Although there is no common agreement about