by John R Ecob DD
We are constantly bombarded with claims that indigenous people lived here in Australia 60,000 years ago. It used to be 40,000 but the latest figure seems to be 60,000. I don’t know what scientific evidence this claim is based on but it certainly implies that the white settlers who came here 250 years ago with Captain James Cook are very recent occupiers and therefore don’t have any right to own the land.
So who was here before 60,000 years ago? The evolutionists claim the world is millions of years old so Australia must be a lot older than 60,000 years.
Let’s just suppose with the evolutionists for a few fleeting moments that the earth was only one million years old and not 60 million years old. That means someone could have beenhere up to 940,000 years before the indigenous people arrived to conquer Australia. So surely those people have a greater claim to Australia than the present indigenous population.
The Bible says that humans have only been here for 6,000 years and the earth was created 7 days before that. You can add up the years that each generation lived over the first 4,000 years of hard factual history. All you need is a copy of the Bible and a calculator.
So is Australia 60,000,000, 60,000, of just 6,000 years old? At least we can be sure the first digit is right because they all agree it starts with a 6. It’s just a question of how many zeros you want to add to 6.
Sadly there are no people on earth today that have lived for much more than 100 years and most are dead by 80 years and we can’t appeal to any very ancient persons for help. So is there any living thing on earth that has lived long enough to help us solve this problem scientifically? Yes there is. Some trees grow for hundreds of years and we can trace the history of the world by examining ancient trees, according to some scientists.
Most trees last for less than 100 years before they are cut down, are burned in a bush fire or are eaten by bugs and then rot away. But there are some trees in the northern hemisphere where there are cold climates and these are very old and there are ways of checking the age of trees.
Scientists have given it a fancy name just to sound scientific. They call it Dendrochronology and it is the science of dating tree rings. Any primary school child could count the number of tree rings once you cut a tree down so you don’t need a university degree to do that. But it is a fact that eact year a tree adds one more ring of growth and if a tree is cut down we can count the number of rings from the centre to the bark and that gives us an idea of how many seasons the tree has lived.
The size of each annular ring gives an indication of how much growth took place each year and so scientists have concluded that they can tell what the weather was like each year. If there was a good rainy season then the tree would have a wide annular ring. If there was a drought it would be small growth and a small annular ring.
Sounds good but what if the tree decided to rest? Some fruit trees rest alternate years. Then the temperature variations can affect growth. It’s not so simple but let’s suppose there is some truth in it and we can get an idea of the weather for the life of the tree.
It is claimed there are trees over 1,000 years old living today. If we found one we would not be allowed to cut it down and count the number of annular rings. But we could drill a core sample to the centre of the tree and count the rings in the sample and it would need to be a pretty big tree to have 1,000 annular rings. If each annular ring was 2mm that would mean the tree was 4 meters diameter.
If the tree was 2,000 years old it would be 8 meters diameter. I saw an olive tree in the Garden of Gethsemane at Jerusalem that I would guess is 3 meters diameter. It could have been there when Jesus prayed in the garden depending on how large the rings were.
One scientific report states that the oldest tree on the planet is about 5,000 years old which is about 1,000 years after the Bible says the trees were created and they would have had to survive the Biblical Flood when they were 600 years old. It is hard to believe any tree could be submerged for a whole year and survive.
So how do they know these trees are 5,000 years old? Well it is only a special conifer tree called the Great Basin Bristlecone Pine (Pinus Longaeva). It grows in the cold northern regions where growth is slow. If it grew only 1mm per year that would mean the trunk would have to be 10 meters diameter and I don’t think there are any trees that big on earth.
And there is another problem dating the age of these Great Basin Bristlecone Pine, because they grow so slowly in such cold climates that they don’t have annular rings! So how can they claim they grow for 5,000 years? It sounds like the claim that indigenous people were here 60,000 years ago.
Scientists have used the science of Dendrochronology (counting rings) to interpret weather patterns back as far as AD535. It seems there is some evidence of about 150 years from AD535 that the earth went through a very cold dry period so much so that there were famines and pestilence. Millions died from plagues and it took centuries to recover.
Firstly I question the timber samples that would have to show 1486 annular rings and if each ring was only 1mm would have to be taken from 3 meter diameter trees.
The theory is that the island of Krakatoa in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra exploded in AD535 and sent so much rock into space that it blacked out the sunlight over much of the earth and this caused a drop in world temperatures which reduced rainfall since there was less evaporation and precipitation.
Examination of the historical records in various countries is used to support the theory and the collapse of the Roman Empire is attributed to this ice age lasting for 150 years.
We don’t question that there may have been plagues, droughts and a period of low temperatures during those years but to say an earlier explosion of Krakatoa was the cause is really stretching science into the realm of fantasy. It is so much easier to believe the Bible that the earth is 6,000 years old.