Why Aren’t There Any Fossils of 900-Year-Old Humans?
TNRTB Archive – Retained for reference information
For many skeptics the long life spans recorded in Genesis 5 and 11 seem absurd. If the biblical account is correct, then why aren’t there any fossils of 900-year-old humans? Recent work offers a possible explanation. Anatomists from Japan have developed a new method to determine the age of a human at the time of death based on the ilium (one of the bones of the pelvis). Like all methods of this type, age is determined from biological changes in the skeleton that are correlated with chronological age. This approach critically depends on the individuals that make up the reference sample. Age determination of modern humans in the fossil record is based on calibration derived from contemporary humans, and therefore, would not necessarily be applicable to humans that aged differently prior to the flood. Thus, with some calibration adjustments, anthropologists may yet find evidence for 900-year-old human fossils.
- Yuriko Igarashi et al., “New Method for Estimation of Adult Skeletal Age at Death from the Morphology of the Auricular Surface of the Ilium,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology : early view published online April 4, 2005.
- https://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/110436520/ABSTRACT
- Related Resource
- Fazale R. Rana, Hugh Ross, and Richard Deem, “Long Life Spans: ‘Adam Lived 930 Years and Then He Died’—New Discoveries in the Biochemistry of Aging Support the Biblical Record”