The Clovis Incident
(Just filler until Dave Pack , Gerald Flurry, Ron Weinland or Bob Thiel says something incredibly stupid)
I went to a bit of trouble to get this 12,000 ish year old Clovis Point from my collection onto the plane and out to my last refresher program. I wanted to show it to Dr. Hoeh and get his comments on the Clovis people populating North America approximately 13,500 years ago.
The Clovis culture is a prehistoric Paleo-Indian culture, named for distinct stone tools found in close association with Pleistocene fauna at Blackwater Locality No. 1 near Clovis, New Mexico, in the 1920s and 1930s. The Clovis culture appears around 11,500–11,000 BCE, at the end of the last glacial period, and is characterized by the manufacture of "Clovis points" and distinctive bone and ivory tools. Archaeologists' most precise determinations at present suggest that this radiocarbon age is equal to roughly 13,200 to 12,900 calendar years ago. Clovis people are considered to be the ancestors of most of the indigenous cultures of the Americas.
The Clovis Culture is thought now to have perhaps fallen victim to a comet burst or impact over the Northern Michigan and Canadian ice sheet, then two miles thick around 12,900 years ago.. The melt water may have been responsible for the Younger/Dryas cooling event around the same time and the tens of thousands of elliptical ice splash circles in the Carolinas seen only in the 1930's when air travel was becoming popular.
Carolina Bays near Fayetteville, SC
I approached Dr. Hoeh during the break and asked him about the Clovis people in the Americas while handing him the point to examine. Of course, in the back of my mind was the church view that humans had been created a mere 6000 years ago in the form of Adam and Eve and this point presented quite a problem for that view, which I had long ago personally given up on.
His reactions was telling and caught me completely off guard.
Dr Hoeh would not take the point in his hand. He simply said...
"That's lovely"
...and walked away
I'm thinking he didn't wish to discuss the issue
20 comments:
Wow! That is a nugget which I will definitely use in some way at some future point!
BB
That is a beautiful Clovis point. My Dad used to do flint knapping and became quite an expert at it. He is deceased and I have his collection and it is quite impressive. But replicating a fluted point like Clovis or Folsom is extremely difficult. I won't say anything more about the mechanics than if the knapper strikes through the base lengthwise to knock off a large flake to form the flute, the point will almost always break across the middle.
Hoeh was odd. I could relate some anecdotes but I won't take the time. I tried to talk to him once and it was not a success. Ray Kurr who recently passed away up near Tulsa once told me that Hoeh absolutely hated to have people step up to him out of the crowd and ask questions about history.
Physically modern man, an evolutionary product, has been around about 250,000 years. Much earlier than Ussher's 6000 years. Clovis is just an instance of modern man being here earlier than Ussher's date. Dryas did not exterminate the Clovis people. A skeleton of a young Clovis boy was found in Montana (Anzick Child) and his genome was typically Native American. He did possess some genetic nuances that indicated that he was most closely related to South American Indians rather than North American Plains Indians. This would mean that the South American Indians were resident in North American at that time, later to move south, and were the Clovis people. The current Plains Indians were likely much farther to the north then, maybe in Beringia.
I visited Blackwater Draw some years back and it was fascinating. Archaeologists had excavated wells that Clovis man had dug during the Alti-thermal. Surface water had dried up and they were sinking shafts in creek beds to get to underground water.
My personal view is that there was not a biological break between modern man and what we might call Adamic man. Adamic man was modern man who had received Imago Dei. It was an upgrade in sentience and not a change in physical morphology.
One can only guess when Imago Dei was conferred on physically modern man. There seems to have been an ascendancy in civilization about 10K years ago. I think Imago Dei was conferred on all at the same time over the entire population of humans - probably a pretty small population worldwide. Adam of Genesis may have been a man that God dealt with as representative of all the rest, if there was a literal Adam. It is also possible that the account in early Genesis is allegory with "Adam" being a personification of all mankind.
Haha Dennis.
I love that story.
I remember a Feast site in the early seventies where a bunch of us went to see some 4000 year old remains of human constructed stone piles older than the pyramids.
We stood there gazing silently and perhaps a bit bored by the empty tombs, longing for coffee.... Suddenly a sound cracked the silent atmosphere and awkwardly asked.......that's all........?
From that I developed a lifelong fascination of "human constructed stone piles" and visited many around the world from Malta (9 to 11 thousand years old to the inner chamber of the Cheops pyramid, the carnac lines in brittany and many more), so I feel your pain.... and both the joy of the posession of the clovis artifact.
Not so long ago I was having a coffee at McDonalds restaurant preparing for "important meeting", suddenly realizing I was in fact sitting in the actual Neanderthal, while many eons must have looked over my shoulder in meeting with eternity.
Recently I photographed dinosaur tracks on the "ceiling" of a cave system.
Now that would have taken millions of years to have the earth move in such a way that the tracks would turn a 180 degrees. Other dinosaur tracks I found on the edge of a cliff, looking over the mountains. A long time ago that cliff was a beach where dinosaurs came to drink and the mountaintops used to be islands in a huge enlclosed sea. Fascinating stuff.
nck
WCG always taught the Earth was nearly 7 billion years old and that huminoid type creatures, including neanderthal people, walked the face of the planet. So I'm not sure what your point is. Before you get on your high horse, I am not a member of ANY of Armstrong's cults!
Thanks NEO. Would love to see the collection. One of the benefits of my past was being moved around in Ohio, NY, Pennsylvania and the SE Mound Builders country for a time. I started collecting when a church member in KY gave me a point he found. It was an instant love. Nothing like walking a field along a river and reaching down to pick up something someone dropped thousands of years ago before Adam and Eve of the OT came on the scene. lol.
Many mornings before work I walk the shore of the Willamette behind where I work and have found a nice little collection of very worn points and tools , but human made nonetheless. The beach I walk has been occupied by Native Americans and paleo types for the past 6000 years according to local research.
Recently I spotted a softball size chondrite meteorite on the Kiddies Rock Shelf at the local rock and gem shop. A real shocker. How could the owner not know? Long story short, he said it came in a Estate sale box so I knew he did not know what it was nor did he deliberately buy it for the shop. $20. I bought it, had it looked at the Prehistoric Shop along the coast and the owner there said, "Nice Meteorite" lol. He said he'd have to get $700 for it in his shop. The Karma Fairy was being nice to me that day.
Dennis: My Dad and I hunted for flint tools in central Kansas. These were surface finds. There is an area called the Flint Hills a little north of where my Dad grew up. Indians from all over the country would gather there to hunt buffalo. Ornamental shells from the Pacific Ocean (Dentalium, I believe) were found there. It was the perfect combination: an abundant supply of gray flint and large herds of buffalo. Everything we found there seemed to be much more recent than Clovis.
Clovis man was present in the area where I am now. I have spoken with archaeologists working on National Park lands. They have found a little direct material but they mostly tend to find Clovis tools from distant locations made from the obsidian native to where I am. I found an obsidian hide scraper, beautifully formed, that was exposed in a creek bed by fierce monsoon rains. I believe it is very old. Hard to tell.
The orthodox Herman Hoeh belief is that Native Americans were brought from Britain across the Atlantic in boats by a Scandinavian leader named Odin or Scaef. This supposedly happened a couple of thousand years ago post-Flood. And the Native Americans were descendants of Canaan - the red-skinned Phoenicians.
This, of course, is all fabulous - the worst kind of pseudo-history - an obvious manipulation to support an idiosyncratic Biblical interpretation. Your Clovis point shows the weakness in Hoeh's flawed historical model. Your Clovis point, based on age, should have been knapped by Pre-Adamic man living in North America. Whereas, Native Americans are supposed to be descendants of Adam, post-Adamic. But there is genetic continuity between Clovis and modern, currently living Native Americans (see Eske Willerslev's work on the Anzick Child.) This means:
1. The idea of a global flood interpreted from the Genesis text does not hold water.
2. The idea of Adam being the biological progenitor of all of mankind does not hold water.
Maybe Hoeh was thinking of this when he said "lovely" and walked away.
To 4:43 AM: From 1956-1975, I don’t recall any age having been assigned to planet Earth as a part of the official HWAcaca. I also don’t recall any acknowledgment of pre-Adamic man, as they would generally reference the Piltdown hoax when this topic came up. What they did teach is now called “gap theory” creationism in which Satan’s creatures, the dinosaurs, had been killed, and the Earth laid tohu and bohu in a huge battle between God and Satan, and Genesis 1:1 began the narrative of a re-creation, this time with God’s creatures, including mankind, God’s children whose destiny was to become greater than the angels, greater than Satan and the demons. Very simplistic, not supported by any specific science, and the church members all lapped it up as being God’s truth revealed by the Apostle.
I do not know at what point Dr. Hoeh’s Compendium of World History became generally available, but apparently some of the students knew of its existence while I was a student at AC in Pasadena in the ‘60s.
We seem to have a number of commenters who left in 1995 and have either left the orgs or have been part of the splinters for the past
23 years. Their perspectives, although including memories of the same kinds of abuse, are vastly different from the perspectives of those of us who realized that that God was not validating HWA back in ‘72-75. I feel very blessed for having been able to see Armstrongism for what it was in time to salvage most of my life. Life has been good, overall, although ups and downs are a natural part of the human condition, and there is no silver bullet for that no matter what anyone teaches or promises.
BB
No WCG I ever worked for taught earth was 7 billion years Old. No one anywhere ever used that number unless some loon taught "the 7 billion year old plan of God" somewhere.
The COGs are all mucked up trying to explain early hominids in their Genesis literalizations.
You would think cult-millionaire Hoeh would have used some of his six-figure-salary to fix his teeth?
Top WCG executives who did not believe HWA's Theology/Cosmology/Anthropology: Stanley Rader, Herman Hoeh, Garner Ted,...
Dennis,
As a federal ARPA officer, I need to inform you and others that the collecting of any artifact on federal land is strictly prohibited by law. Please make sure you do not collect nor give the impression to others that it is permissible to do so on federal land.
Anonymous said...
WCG always taught the Earth was nearly 7 billion years old and that huminoid type creatures, including neanderthal people, walked the face of the planet. So I'm not sure what your point is. Before you get on your high horse, I am not a member of ANY of Armstrong's cults!
April 24, 2018 at 4:43 AM
At no point in time did the WCG EVER teach that the earth was 7 billion years old. It was only after HWA's death that people had sense enough to know the earth was far older than the 6,000 years it had previously proclaimed. When I came to Pasadena in 1975 the pre-adamaic man concept was just starting to take off and was actually taught in classes. That teaching was that cavemen and dinosaurs were the things created by angels and did not have the "spirit of man" in them yet, and that when Satan rebelled they were destroyed so that God could create beings in his likeness. Since the angels created the pre-adamaic men they were rough drafts of what was to come. The myths that the church created could never have been imagined by the brightest science fiction writers!
I'm well aware of the rules 1004. Most are purchases or private farm surface finds with the occasional gift. No digging ever a d nothing on Federal lands. Kentucky flea markets were great 30 years ago.
I'm pretty sure wcg adhered to the scientific age of the earth.
True, it was believed that the earth was "recreated" as the earth "had become" tohu and bohu after the fallen angels messed up by creating the dinosaurs end all. This left space for billion of years between the first two sentences of genesis.
The plan with mankind left to its own devices would last 6000 years, then the cavalry would come in to save all and teach for a 1000 years (that would have been us)
The entire Odin bringing Native Indian to America is a reflection of 33 degree masonry teaching and reflects the travels of the viking lords of the orkneys to the skrealig of canada and new england around the year 900 ad. Supposedly it is the lords of the orkneys who passed on the stories of america to a young sailor from genua on trading mission in scotland.
Many south amwrican myths confirm the anticipating of the "return" of bearded blonde god(s). On alternative history channels stories float that the Top leaders of the aztec were viking descendants receiving in peace and anticipation the conquistadores as the returning viking ancestors. The conquisadores seemed to have been surprised with the "christian symbolism" in the aztec religion.
All armstrongism centers on the elites of most peoples being of different race than the peoples they rule. It is misrepresented by stating that the entire populace was of the same race as the elites.
This is a 19th century concept when the european aristocrats were marrying the jewish and american heirs to large fortunes in order to maintain the immortallity of their status.
In the 1990 movie about columbus one of the nobels insults columbus while jumping of a cliff. His last words are that he is part of the immortals even if he jumps of the cliff and colombus would always be a peasant.
I could go on for hours on the bloodlines of the elites, ranging from the european elites of yonder years, the americans like winston churchill and the king of thailand, the vanderbilt malboroughs and the line of pocahontas extending into the bush family of new england related to 4 presidents of the usa.
I should write a book. The compendium of compendiums of alternative compendiums based on true stories helieved in part by billions (through writers like dan brown, or hollywood productions like star gate) believed as a whole by non.
Nck
"WCG always taught the Earth was nearly 7 billion years old and that huminoid type creatures, including neanderthal people, walked the face of the planet."
Not so sure about that. As I recall any verbal discussion of time prior to Genesis' genealogies was folded into "tohu and bohu, angelic rebellion, we don't really know, but remember SATAN could have planted some of those scientific finds!"
The official literature I can recall usually avoided that subject entirely. Maybe some of you older than I can cite something I don't recall.
The myths that the church created could never have been imagined by the brightest science fiction writers!
Totally agree.
I have long thought that the COG doctrinal interpreters have long lost their calling. They would be MILLIONAIRES right now if they took their mythology and turned it into a great science fiction type story. The story-lines are all there. The plots, the subplots, the contexts, the twists, the drama.
It would also make a GREAT star-trek like story - imagine the likes of Kirk and/or Picard happening on a planet completely and totally absorbed and indoctrinated in Armstrongism. Imagine Picard beaming down in front of Herbert Armstrong at one of the Feast of Tabernacles. They would all think Christ had returned right there in the Ambassador Auditorium!!!!!
Or what about THIS story line - everyone in some alternate reality is in Petra. The Enterprise comes, and beams down right in the middle of the crowd while one of the high ranking evangelist types is down there preaching. They'd think the Enterprise was the Ezekiel Vision come to life!!!
Here's another one: Armstrong had actually been a Ferrangi all along, intent on creating profit!!!
And finally, The Ambassador Auditorium was one of those jelly-creatures at the Encounter At Farpoint Episode of the Next Generation. ;)
Like I said - there's a GOLD MINE in Armstrong Mythology if written properly. Maybe no one else would care, but with some tweaking, it would be absolutely interesting.
When I came into the WCG in the late Sixties, this was the story:
1. God created the heavens and earth long, long ago. Billions of years. The earth was created to be inhabited - the Angels rejoiced.
2. Satan was assigned to the earth with one third of the angels. He rebelled and the earth became tohu and bohu and stayed that way for a long time. Earth was in chaos in the first part of Gen 1:1.
3. After the earth became tohu and bohu, the re-creation began approximately 6,000 years ago (this was the latter part of Gen 1:1 and the rest of the chapter).
4. Neanderthal and other early men were descended from Adam and lived prior to the Noachian Flood.
Although the above timeline is scientifically untenable, Armstrongists at least never maintained that men co-existed with dinosaurs like the Young Earth Creationists.
Considering that when I attended WCG in the '80's & '90's during a certain bible study the minister let it slip that he personally believed that the story of Adam and Eve, as well as the flood story, was not to be taken seriously. I actually agreed with the man.
Funny how we all throw out tohu and bohu so casually in comment. Attests how often we heard it. :)
NEO is correct, WCG basically accepted scientific calculations for the age of the earth
The GAP in Gen 1.2 could be any length of time. I had assumed we were talking of a long time, so I was surprised to hear HWA say on a WT radio program in the 60's that he didn't think God would leave the earth desolate for very long
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