In the paper today I found a very interesting piece! Two professors at the NW University took on a colleague who had written (my translation!) in a journal: "Mankind did not come from any animal and all species can not be coupled to each other." The two who replied stated: "Such a short and sweet conclusion denies a lot of scientific results of evolutionary biology." (Again my own translation!) This little bit of news sparked a question in my mind: How old is the Earth?
I consulted some scientific books on astronomy and found very interesting facts!
1. A Greek philosopher, Xenophanes (560 – 478 B.C.) had already pointed out that the earth must be very old as he had seen seashells embedded in rocks on mountains, which meant that the sea level must have been much higher in the past and that this type of change could only occur over long periods of time.
2. A church historian, Eusebius of Caesarea (260 – 340 AD) used statements in the Bible to calculate the birth of Abraham and decided that it took place in 2 016 B.C.
3. Some Jewish rabbi's went even further and used the genealogy given in Genesis to calculate the creation of the earth and arrived at a figure of 3 761 B.C., still being used by the Jews as this is the year 5 670 in their calendar.
4. Then an Anglican bishop, James Ussher (1581 – 1656) calculated from data in the Bible that the earth was created 4 004 years before the birth of Christ which makes the earth (and the rest of the universe) 6 014 years old.
Yet many prominent persons were not satisfied with an answer of "about 6 000 years" and the first to say so openly and in detail was a French naturalist, Georges de Buffon (1707 – 88). He spent fifty years writing a 36 volume encyclopedia on natural science and in the fifth volume, published in 1778, he gave his ideas on the development of the Earth and theorized that the sun and another heavy body had collided and thus formed the earth which in time cooled down and animals, and finally, mankind appeared on earth. He also imagined a form of evolution though degeneration – some horses degenerating into donkeys and some men into apes.
I rather fancy the last one as I know quite a number of people who behave like apes!
Oupa
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