The other night I caught out of the corner of my eye a couple of minutes of a ‘serious’ TV programme on archaeology. That was enough to prove yet again that ‘serious TV programme’ is an oxymoron, a bit like ‘a young person’.
Two young women were looking at a man’s skull displayed side by side with several others, supposedly belonging to man’s ancestors. What excited their girlish imagination was that the man’s skull was noticeably bigger, which they redundantly demonstrated by filling all the cavities with grit and then putting the grit into transparent glass jars.
This they held as yet another proof of evolution, not that any proof was needed of something the girls held as self-evident. In the admittedly brief excerpt I saw before switching to footie, they didn’t mention the Iceman, but then even Darwinists laden with degrees and honours seldom do.
The Iceman was discovered in a melting glacier high in the Tyrolean Alps on 19 September, 1991. This chap (Homo tyrolensis) is the oldest man found intact. (Some Egyptian mummies are older, but their brain and vital organs were removed.)
Actually, ‘pre-Iceman’ is a more accurate description of him as he lived before the Ice Age. Radiocarbon dating put his age at about 5,300 years old, but many scientists believe such a number is outside the reach of this method. So in fact he could have been much older than that.
Though the Iceman was only about 5’3”, his skull had a volume of 1500-1560 cm3, much bigger than the head of today’s man. This presents a problem for the evolutionists, even those more accomplished than those TV girls. They have to explain an evolutionary process that would account first for a huge increase in head size compared to apes – and then a gradual reduction to today’s average size of 1200 cm3. Yet again what we observe is not so much progressive development as degradation.
The Iceman had the same skull shape, facial features and DNA composition as the present inhabitants of these regions. But in some respects he was more advanced: even though he was 25-30 years old at the time of his death, his body had not yet reached physical and sexual maturity. This tallies not with Darwin but with the biblical accounts of people’s longevity, much higher than ours.
In fact, radiographic studies conducted by research orthodontists concluded that the Neanderthal reached maturity at age 28-32, with the concomitant increase in his average lifespan. In fact, studies of the characteristic features of Neanderthals’ teeth and jaws showed that they lived to about 200-300 – which casts doubt on the notion of progress implicit in Darwinian evolution.
It wasn’t just the Iceman’s physique that was astounding, it was also his artefacts. The Iceman had in his possession tools that we normally associate with the Palaeolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic, Copper Age – or even the Middle Age. And yet he used them all at the same time, presaging, say, our contemporary Australian aborigines who are equally adept at using boomerangs and I-phones. This suggests that dating on the basis of artefacts isn’t quite all it’s cut out to be.
The Iceman was armed with flint weapons and a long yew bow resembling both in size and material the English longbow so fondly remembered by the French. Yew doesn’t grow in those parts, so it must have been a foreign import. He also carried an axe of almost pure copper. This was similar in shape to the axes found in Northern Italy and dated 2,700 BC.
His arrows revealed the Iceman’s knowledge of basic ballistics. Carved from viburnum and dogwood branches, they had flint points and feathers. The feathers had been affixed with a resin-like glue at an angle that would cause spin in flight and help maintain a true course. They were carried in a quiver, together with an untreated sinew that could be made into a bowstring, a ball of fibrous cord, the thorn of a deer’s antler probably used to skin an animal, and four antler tips tied together with grass.
The Iceman was also armed with a tiny flint dagger with a wooden handle, a grass net possibly serving as a carrying bag and a pencil-sized stone-and-linden tool that was probably used to sharpen arrowheads and blades. He toted much of his gear in a rucksack with a U-shaped wooden frame.
Amazingly, the Iceman was adept not only at ballistics but also at pharmacology. More than five millennia before Alexander Fleming he carried a medial kit containing two Piptoporus betilinus mushrooms known to have antibiotic properties.
His clothes belie the image of a primitive savage the Darwinists have conditioned us to expect. The Iceman wore a well-cut fur robe cleverly stitched together in a mosaic-like pattern – a far cry from crude skins. He obviously cared about his appearance: his hair was cut and he had highly ornamental tattoos, a grooming idea that scientists believed to be at least 2,500 years closer to our time.
The overall conclusion is that the Iceman wasn’t much different from us, and where he was different he was superior. Progress works in mysterious ways, wouldn’t you say? Charles Darwin, call your office.