First Americans

            This past Sunday I read an interesting article in the Atlanta paper. It seems just over in South Carolina in Allendale County an archeologist named Al Goodyear is thinking the first Americans came a lot earlier than once had been supposed. My opinion is that people were living in this land before the Great Flood, so I am not surprised if they find ancient relics that do not fit the scheme of things popular with most focusing on investigating the ancient peoples of this continent.

            However the claims for this particular site rest on some assumptions and ideas that the reader needs to know about before they conclude these people are right. As the man who heads up the project says about others “Scientists tend to see what they expect to see. And when they see something they don’t expect, they are sometimes slow to change their point of view.” This discussion will not cover all of the areas that need to be considered, but will focus in on the more important issue.

            The scientist’s talk about dating artifacts at this site with carbon dating methods is misleading. All that can be dated this way is what was once living material, like charcoal, and then assumptions are made about the inorganic material such as arrowheads found at the same level of investigation. The dating process itself is based on another set of assumptions that assumes the sample dated is not contaminated in some way.

            The researchers also talk about linguistic and genetic evidence. But there are no samples of the language of the people they are investigating and I did not read of any bodies containing DNA being found at the site they are looking in to either. In short, it is an interesting enough article, but some important elements are lacking.

            The work going on in South Carolina is interesting to me, but I know that those looking at this will never fully understand what they are seeing until they start believing things like the Great Flood did occur and that the earth is really very young. All things do not continue as they were from the beginning.