When mammoths roamed Vancouver Island: SFU and Royal BC Museum delve into beasts’ history in our region - SFU News - Simon Fraser University
There are no elephants in the Bible.
This news often comes as a shock to creationists brought up with fanciful drawings of pairs of animals walking up the gangplank onto a wooden boat in the childish tale of Noah and his Ark. Why? Weren't there a pair of elephants, as large as life, along with zebras, rhinos, hippos and penguins, according to the Bible?
Hmmm... LOL!
Well, no there weren't, for the simple reason that there is nothing in the Bible that wasn't known to the people who wrote the tale. Nothing outside a day or two's walk from the Canaanite Hills where they herded their goats and built their mud-brick dwellings, like any other Middle Eastern Bronze Age pastoralists.
And of course, although creationists will insist that the Bible records dinosaurs roaming the countryside at the time the tale was set, if you change the meanings of a few words, not only are elephants not mentioned, but nor are their ancient ancestors, the mammoths. And nor are continents like North and South America, Australia, Antarctica and of course islands like Vancouver, Greenland, Madagascar, Great Britain and Ireland were entirely unknown and unsuspected by the Bible's imaginative authors.
Which is why they imagined setting the beginnings of it all just a few thousand years earlier, made perfect sense. The entire history of Earth and life on it was as unknown to them as its geography and geology. These were simple people who lived on a flat, magical planet with a dome over it and who didn't know where the sun went at night, or that rain formed in clouds.
So how could they possibly have known about mammoths living on Vancouver Island in North America? It wasn't their fault that they were so poorly educated; they were probably about as well educated as any other Middle Eastern pastoralist of the Bronze Age - i.e., not very well at all, being illiterate and innumerate. The people who've let them down are the later cult leaders who collected their tales, bound them up in a book and decreed it to be the inerrant word of an omniscient god.
Weirdly, there are people alive today, in modern, technologically advanced countries, who believe what those ignorant goat-herders wrote has never been equaled, let alone bettered, by modern science, for its completeness, reliability and accuracy.
But there were mammoths living on Vancouver Island between 13,000 years and at least 35,000 years before the Bronze Age authors of the Bible set their creation myth to try to fill the gaps in their knowledge and understanding with narratives that made sense within their narrow framework of understanding, and this is how any rational person can tell the claims that the Bible was written of inspired by an omniscient creator god is nonsense - a dishonest fiction intended to deceive - false witnessing on a grand scale.
The evidence of these mammoths has just been published in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences and explained in a press release from Simon Fraser University. The authors examined 32 suspected mammoth samples from Vancouver Island, of which 16 proved suitable for carbon dating. One of the samples proved to be beyond the age at which \(\small \ce{^14C}\) dating gives accurate results (45,000 years) so we only know that there were mammoths on Vancouver Island before 47,500 years ago.