Between the Fall and the Flood

The evidence shows a massive loss in male diversity around the world starting around 10,000 years ago until around 5,000 years ago when diversity recovers. Click for larger view.

"11 The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence.
12 And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth.
13 And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth." - Genesis chapter six

The Christ-Centered model for early Genesis is a different take about what the text is saying from the traditional view that the church inherited from Judaism. Adam doesn't have his traditional, but non-biblical, role of "sole male progenitor of the human race". Instead he has his New Testament role of "figure of Christ" (Rom. 5:14). He is only the first man in the sense that Christ is the second, or last man (1st Cor. 15). That is, in God's plan to reconcile humanity to Himself. There was a population of "Adam", IOW humans, outside the garden and the LORD God formed Adam and Eve inside it. Some of you reading this may think that you know of other scriptures which contradict what I have written above. I once thought I did too, but I was wrong about what I thought they meant.

Jesus said in John 5:46 that Moses was talking about Him. If we don't see the text as pointing to Him, then we don't have the view of the text that He has. The Christ-centered view of the text does that, the traditional, non-New Testament, view of Adam does not.

The Christ-centered model has Adam introduced up to 12,500 years ago (but perhaps somewhat less, the key is that Ussher's accounting gives dates which are too young) along with "helper" animals and plants which gave mankind a "leg-up" in shifting from hunter-gatherers to agricultural and animal pastoral lifestyles. Ground zero for plant and animal domestication fits very well with the Christ-centered model for Adam.

All of that brings me to the graph pictured above from this report in "Nature".  Astoundingly, the evidence suggests that there was a massive plunge in Y-haplogroup diversity, passed from fathers to sons, starting about eleven thousand years ago but accelerating steeply until perhaps five to seven thousand years ago, and then a radical recovery. Many of the surviving Y-haplogroups saw a burst in diversity from seven to five thousand years ago, indicating that the conditions which produced the plunge in diversity were mitigated. The diversity of females, as shown by mtDNA, did not take a corresponding plunge. This would be what the data looked like if females outnumbered men, at least in terms of genetic diversity, seventeen to one! It is an astounding period as this happened globally, albeit with a slight lag in Africa.

The most reasonable explanation for the vast drop in male diversity suggested by the paper is that clans of related males wiped out competitors and took their women. In other words, a surge of violence. Though I don't give exact dates for the fall, a point at which everyone's eyes are opened to their own sinfulness and innocence is lost, the range fits extremely well with the date range shown in the graph above where diversity first starts taking a dip (due presumably to an increase in violence). My proposed date range for the flood of Noah (which did a reset- not on all life on earth but only the more limited set of living things formed in chapter two including the line of Adam) fits very well with the point at which diversity begins to increase again- from five to seven thousand years ago.

The paper speculates as to why diversity decreased and why it started up again once city-states came along. I don't dispute those claims. I just think they go hand-in-hand with the scriptural account. People became aware of their own sinfulness, and there will always be those who, when faced with the reality of their own nature, embrace it and go even worse. It is true that with agriculture and herds and flocks there was more to fight over, but Adam had a role in that too. And despite their attempts to draw some comparisons to other much smaller events, this period seems unparalleled in scale and degree.

Look, the world today is full of those who "deny the truth in unrighteousness". Remarkable correlations such as the ones shown in this piece won't move them, because they will simply deny the evidence means anything. Deny. Deny. Deny. That's what they do. And we shouldn't be surprised by this, but we should understand the reason for it. It's not that the evidence is lacking, but that the conditions of their hearts to receive it are lacking. They are unwilling to receive for whatever reason, evidence which points to the truth of God and His Word. Someone who is able to receive can look at the same evidence, as I have, and be astounded at how strongly the signal matches up with the account in scripture once rightly understood. In the same time frame that scripture reports that the earth was full of violence, scientists find strong evidence of violence to a degree which has not been equaled globally before or since. It ends about the time of the flood which scripture says God used to wipe out those who were leading the earth astray. The unbelieving heart is hard to it all, and well able to dismiss it all with the waive of a hand. We should pray that their eyes become opened so that they may see what is, without letting it get us down. Rather, let us wonder and glory at the truth of His Word displayed in our natural world.

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