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THE HUMAN RACE

FRENCH AND INDONESIAN CAVE PAINTINGS PROVE

THAT HUMANS EXISTED 40,000 YEARS AGO.

     The never-ending debate about the origin of our species and all living matter will never be resolved by words alone. What do you expect? It’s biblical mythology versus anthropology.  

     Same as politics, it would require more than a magic wand to get the human race to agree on anything. What’s scientific logic for one side is spiritual reality for another. When theists like those who believe in Intelligent Design are convinced that a scant 6,000 years ago God created man, woman and the whole shebang, why fight it. That’s their doctrine.

     But if what they preach is fact, why is there a cave known as Cave of Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc in Southern France that contains more than 100 wall paintings that anthropologists and paleontologists using radiocarbon dating claim were created by human artists 40,000 years ago?

     The cavernous cave, about 400 miles from Paris, was discovered by three French speleologists, or scientific cave explorers: Jean-Marie Chauvet, Eliette Brunel Deschamps and Christian Hillaire. On December 18, 1994, they found an air current coming from the side of a cliff. They dug and crawled through narrow passages and traversed into pitch-black recesses where they came across an anthropological treasure of prehistoric paintings.  

     On the jagged rock and limestone walls of the hermetically sealed cave, the explorers found meticulously drawn paintings and sketches of galloping horses, cave lions, bison, bears, woolly mammoths, hyenas, rhinos and an engraved owl. It was like Paleolithic man was preparing an art show some thirty-thousand years ago to prove, at least intellectually, that the Neanderthals had lost the evolutionary human race.

     Sadly, there were no paintings of humans on the undulating limestone walls. One artist with a damaged pinky finger left his signature: hand prints throughout the prehistoric bear cave that was curtained in icicle-shaped stalactites hovering above floors cluttered with thousands of animal bones.

     The reason these cave painters created such a show of art is unknown. But there’s no doubt that their gallery was haunted by thoughtful ghosts of the past whose artistic ability rivals contemporary painters and sketchers.

     If it was possible to bring their work to “The Antiques Roadshow,” the value of their creations would leave Picasso, da Vinci and Michelangelo in the cultural dust of time.

     Of course, these ancient people weren’t using brushes, palettes, tubes of color they could purchase from art suppliers the likes of Aaron Bros. or Michael’s. Their “canvas” was a slab of rock. And they worked by torch-light rather than incandescent lamp. Thomas Alva Edison wasn’t even a twinkle in those days.

     Plus, they created their own colors: ocher, red, blue and shades of gray, brown and black.    

     Now, reports the journal Nature, there’s another 40,000 year-old cave art discovered in Indonesia by Dutch archaeologists more than a half-century ago. Finally, through a new U-series dating technique, the reddish-brown hand stencils and paintings of prehistoric animals on limestone cave walls on the island of Sulawesi are scientific time period proof of authenticity.

     What more biblical mythologists biblical say regarding their

claim that God created man a mere 6,000 years ago? They’ve gotta go back to the drawing board and come up with a more logical-sounding approach. “Whoops!” won’t do the trick.

                 — Boots LeBaron —

(“THE HUMAN RACE,” Boots’ new Kindle and

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