There has been a lot of hype over the past several days about two discoveries of human remains.

The first news article, released on December 22, spoke of a find in Siberia, purported to be a 40,000 year old finger bone of a previously unknown type of human, based on a study of its DNA. This find, just the fingertip from the hand of a juvenile female, was discovered in 2008. It “looks like it could have belonged to a Neanderthal or a modern human.” But the excitement centers on the fact that this bone belonged to a “distinct population of humans that last shared a common ancestor with Neanderthals and our species about a million years ago.” You can read the entire article here.

The second article, posted today, claims that the oldest modern human remains ever found have been discovered in a cave in Israel. A team from Tel Aviv University were excavating a cave in central Israel and found teeth that are estimated to be 400,000 years old, based on radioisotope dating methods. View the full article on MSNBC.com here.

Are these discoveries significant? Are these remains really 40,000 and 400,000 years old?

Not likely.

There are a couple of problems with these time frames.

First, neither date fits into a young earth time frame. Based on a literal interpretation of Genesis, the earth is only around 6000 years old. These finds can’t be older than that. It doesn’t fit.

Second, there are some problems with using radioisotope dating methods. Dating finds using these methods requires some pre-existing assumptions. The first assumption being that the initial conditions of the sample are known accurately. This would include any daughter isotopes present in the fossil at the time of its formation. The second assumption is that we can determine whether or not the fossil has exchanged any atoms with its surroundings at any point in its history. Has the fossil been contaminated by other elements nearby? And third, radioisotope dating assumes that the rate of decay, or half-life, of the parent isotope has remained constant since the fossil was formed. For more information about the problems inherent in radioisotope dating, see Dr. Don DeYoungs summary of the research of the RATE Project (Radioisotopes and the Age of The Earth.) You can purchase his book at Amazon.com, or view numerous articles on the ICR website.

Based on these two ideas, it’s imperative that we see that these finds aren’t what they are claimed to be.

First, there are no other “types of humans,” as indicated in the first article. Humanity was created by God. There aren’t any ancient ancestral “branches of the human family” that either existed before or simultaneously as mankind as we know ourselves. A find that looks human is human; not pre-human, Neanderthal, or sub-human. These bones and teeth belong to people who were created in God’s image, just as you and I are.

Second, these finds aren’t tens or hundreds of thousands of years old. The most likely scenario is that these remains were fossilized sometime soon after Noah’s flood, as recorded in Genesis 6-9, which occurred around 4500 years ago. Shortly after Noah and his family exited the Ark, mankind’s population was growing again, but not spreading out across the earth as God commanded. So he confused the people’s speech, in order to separate groups of people from one another and distribute them around the earth.

In the process of these migrations, many of them lived in caves and primitive conditions until they could establish themselves and build some version of civilization.

These finds are significant, but not because they are the ages that they are claimed to be, or a “new breed” of humanity. These finds are significant because they point to the fact that mankind was finally obedient to God’s command to disperse across the globe.

Don’t be too quick to blindly accept the dates and speculations about these humans as thrown around by evolutionary proponents. There is another viewpoint. And it makes as much scientific sense, and more, as these ideas. Young Earth Creation is not outdated, nor is it in opposition to science.

While these two discoveries, and others like them, are exciting, they prove nothing about the evolutionary history of mankind. Instead, they create an excellent opportunity to engage in discussion about a biblical worldview of earth’s history.

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