How old is the human race?

Question

It has been assumed that the human race is thousands of years old and probably tens of thousands by some scientist. The Biblical community feel it is around 6000 years old. Technolocically, we have evolved more in the last 100 years the most. In that time we have seen jet passenger planes, automobiles, indoor plumbing for the masses, electricity as a common utility, and color TV, computers, and on and on. What were people doing for all of the millions of years up until then? Why did it take so long? Were people just unconcious or what?

Answer 1

Good point! That's why I believe the human race is only 6,000 years old. The same can be asked about the population growth rate. By the average population growth rate, there should be mass findings of previous civilizations, on top of previous civilizations, on top of previous civilizations....x 1,000,000 (give or take a few million years.)

Answer 2

For thousands of years primitive man possessed little knowledge except that which was necessary for bare existance. He killed whatever animals he was able to, and ate the fruits, nuts, and berries that grew wild.
After a period of subsistance living, some learned that if the seeds that they ate were scattered on the ground they would grow, making it unnecessary to travel long distances to find them.
A simple discovery led to the extensive agriculture that is practiced all over the world today. Once a discovery or invention is made, improvements come rapidly.
The invention of a simple wheel made millions of inventions possible. Once electricity was controled, all kinds of wonderful products followed.
Not long ago the microchip came into being, and with it computers, digital cameras, and all the devices in use today.
Back to your question - - - why did it take so long? Because each invention leads on to many more. A simple invention like a primitive wheel made a fine Swiss watch possible.
No way, people were not unconcious. They were working hard to lay the foundation for all of the wonders that we enjoy today. You might ask why the Wright brothers made a plane that flew only a few hundred feet ? Why didn't they build a Boeing 717 instead ? We know that the 717 would never have been built except through evolution of the Wright plane.

Answer 3

I would have to say that the human race is at around 200,000 years old.
That's have far back mitochondrial DNA can be raced back for. As to what we've been doing up until now... it's difficult to say, we don't have any records (or any writings publically known) that go back further than 7000 years. There are however ruins in South Africa that could be around 200,000 years old.

Answer 4

Don't talk smack about the huma race!!!

As a side note, to include all of those inventions that you mentioned, you'd need a span of about...300 years...not 100 =)

Anyway, humans have existed for thousands of years but were just very primitive. They had simple tools, and perhaps a very primitive sort of communication (pointing and grunting). Think about some inventions and you will realize that there needed to be a whole host of previous inventions to culminate to the newer one. For example, irrigation! To irrigate, you first need something to irrigate, like a farm, therefore, farming needed to be invented. Secondly, to dig the irrigation channels, one needed a shovel, hoe, and other digging tool. And each of those can be further shaved into ever thinner wafers. But of course, it is even more complex that that. To have even the simplest inventions, people needed to invent them! You needed a certain sort of mind, to create what did not exist, to imagine what was not there. And mind you, these sorts of people do not come along often.

And so the process continued through thousnads of years. So thats why it took so long, inventions need to be made first.

And as a reason why we seem to have "suddenly" invented so many things, education. When more people aspire to greater knowledge above farming, shoemanking, iron smithing (though these are respectable arts), people are able to think more creatively and utilize things that they have learned.

Answer 5

WELL barring the "it was all God and I cannot think for myself because the world and universe escape my scientific comprehension level" answer, lets explore that.

First there were primitive "ape-like cavemen" who lacked the brain processing power to do much with the tools they had. Time went by and they learned to make things bleed with pointy sticks, to make fires, and that you live longer if you stay inside of a structure where you could maintain body temperature.

Nature did what nature does, as you can see from the Universe around you down to the tiniest molecule, it changes things. The ancients began to evolve and change, as you can see by the fossil record. There were a few trials and errors on the part of nature, but by and large the 2 legged super-species was getting smarter and more adapted to world domination and such.

The squishy meat-bags killed each other off and interbred and just about the time of the ancient Sumerians were an integrated superspecies capable of speech, civilization, hunting, cooperation, and warfare. There was a problem though, some were not as capable as others. Different brains and such.

The gap became more evident over time. Enter the bible which was written during the bronze age by disassociated people writing in the name of biblical figures. The bible itself is set sometime between the stone and bronze age, and would famously set mankind back hundreds of years by exploiting the society gap.

First, before explaining the tech age and why its taken so long to get there, I must impress upon you the basic scope of how great the three ages were prebiblism. From stone, to copper. From copper to bronze, and from bronze to iron. This is the general scale of how weaponry and tools evolved in the ancient days.

Look to China and you can see how traditionalism also affects the scales of thought. They did much better than the more western world, and yet allowed culture and warfare cap their development.

Mankind first fashioned stone into tools. They began to learn to work certain harder stones into better tools and such, there you have the three ages in a nutshell. This is impressive because before mankind it had not yet been done. The fact that they learned to do this within a few thousand years is mind blowing. You go from scattered settlements little better than apes to the glories of Greece and Egypt. If you say that your god had a hand in this, please stop reading here as you're a moron and my words are too good for you.

Famously, Rome and her underlings conquered the ancient world, they extended northward to where the Anglo-Saxons lived and spread their christ crap with them. The "Holy Roman Empire" aka Germany and such split from the Byzantine. You can now truly begin to understand the gap between the advancing and the power hungry. The western Romans were more interested in bloodbaths and conquest whereas the eastern Romans were more interested in comfort and learning. Eventually the westerners got a bigger gun and knocked Constantinople down, and with it marked an era of technological standstill.

The western rulers kept their people dumb in an effort to maintain power over the centuries. Learning was looked at as heretical. See Galileo if you have any doubts. It took a very long time for mankind to shake this oppressive yoke. Once they did, and the church was jammed into a dark corner to pay for its crimes, we entered the industrial era. From the industrial era we are now in the age of technology.

If you have any questions about this heavily abridged explanation, allow me to suggest some simple research as it should give you any help you may need to understand the entire concept.

God and religion, that is why you're dying of diabetes and there is no cure.
That is why children with cystic fibrosis cannot be helped and will generally die at about 30 years old.
That is why we are stuck on a dying planet in a remote corner of an insignificant galaxy.

Religion controls your mind and limits your thinking.
There is no invisible man in the clouds. There is fire and brimstone under the crust of the earth, but no it isn't hell. Its friction and motion that not only keep the earth from freezing, but give you life. Please....


Please.... bible bangers... pull your heads out of your asses.... Have a nice day.

Answer 6

Some say 100s of thousands but I have to go with the biblical account of 6000 simply due to the fact that in just 200 man has gained the power to destroy earth.

I would have to say that if man was as old as the scientists say we would have killed each other off by now or ruined the earth totally!

Answer 7

In many cases (the ancient Egyptians, Europe during the Dark Ages, etc.) either the government or the church (in some societies, one and the same) repressed scientific inquiry and technological advancement.

Answer 8

I would have to say I'm not sure. Cosmic Star made some fairly good points about how one sees the world determines how one approaches it. However his diatribe about the church or christianity was more of a simplistic talking point than rather than a thoughtful exercise about human scientific and technological development.
It is generally agreed in the scientific community that homo sapiens--to include the neanderthals (which I have come to believe were as fully human as we) arrived about 300, thousand years ago for the neanderthals and 150 thousand for us. The intriguing thing, however is that about 60 thousand years ago man began to make tools for things other than for killing such as primitive calendars and other quite complicated devices requiring at least a simple concept of mathematics. This implies abstract thinking. But to go further, even before then men, including the neanderthals seemed to be conducting what may be understood as religious rites, especially in that they buried their dead with an idea of an after life. Some think the explosion in abstract thinking as implied in their calendars and such was due to the introduction of language, but I have to disagree. I think it was Piaget, the great founder of the cognitive modeling paradigm in psychology appeared to be convinced that language was as much a part of our nature as burrowing and nest making is to other species. Also if language was an "invention" of man, why would it spring up all over the world almost simultaneously? Wouldn't it take time to spread? Besides the ability to speak was there all the time, so why then?
So we have language which to me is a mystery in itself. I'm convinced that man was born to speak. This suggests an innate rationality in our nature that appears to rise above the usual adaptive processes in nature.
As far as intelligence goes, I also am convinced that we today are no more intelligent than the earliest of men. Yet why did we spend so much time in caves? Think about it: if the time man had spent on the earth were divided into 800 generations, over 600 of them would have been spent as hunter gatherers. We haven't been civilized that long. The scientific method as expounded in Francis Bacon's "Novum Organum" has only been around some four hundred years. That means that if man's existence on the earth was reduced to a year, science would have occurred about 8 hrs into the 31rst of December. What I think brought about science was a mindset, not as much brought about by the Rennaisance as some believe, but a deeper change under going in the minds of men: The Protestant Reformation and the concept of "Solo Scriptura"---scripture only. Before then, mankind was usually under the yoke of authoritarian ideologies and political leaders. As Cosmic Star states, the western powers for fairer and foolisher reasons pretty much kept their people in a state of ignorance. However, with scripture being the standard, rather than the esoteric pronouncements of religious and philosophical authority blindly followed, the common man was not only allowed to use his own reason to understand the God the universe and reality, he was morally obligated to do so. Christianity also provided another building block in the development of science: The idea that the world--that is reality--was an existent in itself---i.e. not merely an extension of the ultimate--an absolute unity--as the Indians and many other Asians believed in their pantheistic outlooks. Nor was it accidental and chaotic--a complete diversity--as the ancient polytheists believed. The concept of "Trinity"--of rational unity and diversity--in which there was independent and yet unified and eternal "otherness" in the very nature of reality made the idea of a rational and understandable universe possible.
Aristotle put forth the idea of the logos--the rational principle--of the universe, but it was not adequate because it was neither personal nor had the concept of diversity. Romans and Greeks were brilliant, but their own philosophies limited them. They had no true belief in a personal universe in that even their own gods were the result of chaotic, naturalistic processes. They had no guarantee that the universe really could be understood. They were in effect atheists in that their deities were a part of the universe that created them. They remind me of the modern day UFO enthusists who believe that man was a creation of aliens. I'm fairly convinced that modern naturalist mindset--that is the idea that reality is the result of natural cause and effect--would be pretty much in the same position scientifically as the Romans and Greeks if they had not borrowed the concepts of "Novum Oganum" which was produced by a protestant, christian mind. This is because philosophically in the minds of the Greeks and Romans there was no guarantee that the universe was indeed rational and could be understood by reason. They were always in doubt on that point. Democretous, the Atheistic Greek philosopher who first put forth the atomic theory did not do so through observation and experiment, but rather through metaphysical speculation. Therefore the theory, though correct in some ways, could not be modified or verified. The idea of the Logos was not enough because of the lack of specificity in the concept of unity and diversity. The idea of experimentation just didn't occur to him. The Hindus never produced Science because their belief that reality was an extension of Brahman, and that that which was diversity--i.e. the universe and man--was merely the dream of the One (which was more like a force and a person). To them everything was One, and anything perceived as diversity was "Maya"--illusion. Great art and technical wonders came from both the polytheists and pantheists, but not true science. Islam also was inadequate in its concept of unity and diversity.
Therefore I would say that "Bible Bangers"--as cosmic star was prone to call them (rather arrogantly too, I might add) might often get hung up on their own particular views of that great book, and come across as ignorant in certain matters, it is to their forefathers that we owe the concepts of science, experiment and most of all, the presupposition that the world is rational, understandable and open to reason. The mind of the pre-christian atheist (and there were more than you might think) contributed a pittance of scientific understanding when compared to the great discoveries of Gallileo, Bacon, Leevonhook, Newton, Locke and dozens of others who advanced our understanding of the natural world to the point where it is today, so that those who now call themselves Atheists, skeptics, pragmatists, naturalists and the lot can now hitchhike on the presuppostions that the early, christian founders of science gave to us.

Answer 9

This is going to sound strange, but when the Fall happened, when Adam and Eve were separated from God, the Father's of the Early Church say, that everything got instantly OLD. With God there is no time, so for a while there was no time effect on His creation. So, it is very old, but actually, it isn't that old at all. When Jesus returns, Everything will be made new again, and the timelessness will be restored. We are in a trapped world in time, for the time being. But it is a good trapping, because we can choose God and reap the benefit of choosing God in this present darkness...which is more valuable than choosing God in light. Angels worship a God they have always known. But the Angels consider us amazing when they see the faith of those who worship God whom they have never seen.

So to answer your question. Yes, the earth is as old as the bible says, AND the earth is as old as the scientists say. It is BOTH!

With the Eastern Orthodox Christianity, if you don't understand the idea of paradox, you won't get very far in it.

Answer 10

They call it evolution,and it takes millions of years,its in the fossil record.All of this stuff is on the Net.

Answer 11

This question can not be answered until we all agree on what it is to be human.

Is it the genetic composition? The nomenclature? The living being resulting when the Spirit was breathed into one formed from the dust?

If we don't know and agree what a human is, we will never agree on from whence and when it came.