A few weeks back, I had written a blogpost about two amazing discoveries that could potentially change the way that we look at history, including American history. [1] According to one of my sources, Thema News, anthropologists had discovered the remains of two small girls and were able to recover the DNA of at least one of them and found that their origins were not entirely Asiatic in nature. Roughly half the genetic material recovered from the remains showed the girls to be of western European descent which meant that the first settlers in the Americas may have been more diverse at one time than previously thought.
I went on to explain what I believed the potential implications of the discoveries might be and I invited any interested readers, including Native Americans, to share their thoughts, but rather than being granted a constructive dialogue, and as soon as I posted a link to my blogpost on a forum I found myself being assailed by godless leftists who weren’t at all interested in having a constructive dialogue, but immediately falsely accused me of being racist and guilty of what they called “implicit” or “unconscious” racism and later accused me of other things that they themselves were guilty of and this heated exchange took place on a forum called Christian Forums.
They obviously had no interest in seeking the Lord or hearing the Gospel. Their only purpose, it seemed, was to punk the platform and obfuscate but the reason why I am sharing this is because that entire debate did raise some issues that need to be addressed.
1. Implicit or unconscious racism
That does not make any sense to me. You either hate someone or you don’t. You either feel superior to a people different than yourself or you don’t. You either harbor prejudice and mistrust of a people different from you or you don’t. And you should be able to know whether or not you harbor feelings of superiority, prejudice, and mistrust against a particular group of people.
If you possess no feelings of hatred, prejudice, or mistrust against a particular group of people and strive to apply the same set of standards and judgment to all people regardless of their skin color, nationality, ethnicity, gender, etc. then it should be simple: You are non-discriminatory, harbor no prejudices, and you treat all people according to their conduct. Nothing more.
Accusing people of “unconscious” racism does nothing to bring about racial reconciliation. It only causes further racial divide and there are those who, for wicked purposes, of every skin color attempting to keep this racial division alive.
If we really want to bring about reconciliation. We need to surrender ourselves to the God who made us all in His image, (Gen. 1:26) who is no respecter of persons, (Acts 10:34) and who will judge all people under the same standard of judgment, but who also in His love for us has desired to show us mercy in that He sent Jesus Christ to die on the cross for our sins and to be raised from the dead so that any placing their trust in Him would be redeemed out of their sins and be given salvation.
God has made from one blood all nations (Acts 17:26) but that blood, having once been pure, was tainted when the man and woman from whom we all descend disobeyed their Maker by eating the fruit of a certain tree that they were commanded not to eat form (Gen. 2:16-17) and in the day that they ate that fruit, the pure nature they once had became corrupt and twisted when sin entered into them and then was passed down to all mankind which is why all people sin. Sin affects not just how we behave but it also darkens and hardens our hearts, perverts our thoughts, and corrupts our motives which is why our own goodness will never be enough to gain us entry into Heaven and deliver us from what will otherwise be a judgment full of torment terrifying and agonizing beyond imagination since all sin, no matter how slight, must be punished as it cannot dwell in a Kingdom designed to be pure and holy.
And because all sin, all die (Rom. 5:12, 6:23) just as Adam and Eve eventually died, and not only that, sin is what estranges us from our Maker. It affects and taints more than we realize and is the cause of every form of suffering, grief, misery, hardship, and turmoil throughout all of creation (Rom. 8:19-22) but we have in Christ a redeemer, by whose sacrifice and resurrection our sins are taken away and it is in Him that we are reconciled to our Maker. Any calling upon the name of our Lord to be saved will forever be with Him in His Kingdom and just as our souls have been liberated from condemnation, so our bodies will also be liberated from the bondage of death and corruption (1 Cor. 15:51-55, 1 Thess. 4:13-18) and lastly, creation itself when this present world passes away and a new and better one is created in its place. (Rev. 21-22)
If we really want racial reconciliation, it is in Christ Jesus alone that it can be done because and it is a unity built upon His truth, doctrine, and promises that racial reconciliation can be accomplished much more effectively than by any other means.
Anything we attempt to do apart from the teachings, morals, precepts, and laws of our Creator will always result in disappointing failure.
2. Was the Thema News item wrong?
Much of the debate had centered around the claims of the Thema News item claiming that some of the first American settlers were of ancient European origin based upon DNA recovered from the remains of an infant girl discovered in Alaska. [2] The girl belonged to a people called Beringians, named after a region that included both Siberia and Alaska, both of which had once been connected by a land bridge that was used as a migratory pathway into the Americas. and over the course of the exchange I examined the sources they had presented claiming that the news piece was a lie and did my own independent research to determine the basis for Thema’s claims.
Rather than proving Thema to be a liar, the sources, both theirs and mine, actually strengthened the basis for claims of the Thema news piece. An abstract of an article from Nature admitted that gene flow entered into the early Native American populations from Northern Eurasia [3] which would also include Europe or at least the Northern most parts of Europe.
An NCBI publication went on to more specifically state that the Beringians had ancestral ties to western Eurasian peoples:
The MA-1 mitochondrial genome belongs to haplogroup U, which has also been found at high frequency among Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic European hunter-gatherers and the Y chromosome of MA-1 is basal to modern-day western Eurasians and near the root of most Native American lineages5. Similarly, we find autosomal evidence that MA-1 is basal to modern-day western Eurasians and genetically closely related to modern-day Native Americans, with no close affinity to east Asians. This suggests that populations related to contemporary western Eurasians had a more north-easterly distribution…than commonly thought…
Gene flow from the MA-1 lineage into Native American ancestors could explain why several crania from the First Americans have been reported as bearing morphological characteristics that do not resemble those of east Asians…
..if the gene flow direction was from Native Americans into western Eurasians it would have had to spread subsequently to European, Middle Eastern, south Asian and central Asian populations, including MA-1 before 24,000 years ago. Moreover, as Native Americans are closer to Han Chinese than to Papuans…Native American-related gene flow into the ancestors of MA-1is expected to result in MA-1 also being closer to Han Chinese than to Papuans. However, our results suggest that this is not the case (D (Papuan, Han; Sardinian, MA-1) = 20.002 ± 0.005 (Z = 20.36)), which is compatible with all or almost all of the gene flow being into Native Americans…
Our study has four important implications. First, we find evidence that contemporary Native Americans and western Eurasians share ancestry through gene flow from a Siberian Upper Palaeolithic population into First Americans. Second, our findings may provide an explanation for the presence of mtDNA haplogroup X in Native Americans, which is related to western Eurasians but not found in east Asian populations. Third, such an easterly presence in Asia of a population related to contemporary western Eurasians provides a possibility that non-east Asian cranial characteristics of the First Americans…[4]
A Guardian news piece further confirming ancestral ties between modern Europeans and those who had journeyed towards the Americas:
…all
modern Europeans had a mixture of western European hunter-gatherer and early
European farmer DNA, but with a good measure of ancient north Eurasian ancestry
thrown in.
The north Eurasian DNA was identified from the 24,000-year-old remains of a young boy buried at Mal'ta near Lake Baikal in eastern Siberia.
The findings suggest that the arrival of modern humans into Europe more than 40,000 years ago was followed by an influx of farmers some 8,000 years ago, with a third wave of migrants coming from north Eurasia perhaps 5,000 years ago. Others from the same population of north Eurasians took off towards the Americas and gave rise to Native Americans. [5]
Europe had been settled before the Last Glacial Maximum. The migrations towards the Americas happened after the LGM had commenced, probably due to much of Europe becoming uninhabitable because of the glaciers. Europe did not receive any migrant influxes until after the LGM migration into the Americas.
During the LGM migrations into the Americas, not only were there Asiatic peoples migrating there, but it appears that there were, to a lesser extent, ancient Europeans migrating there as well and from whom the ancient Beringians had in part descended.
The conclusion reached after examining all the relevant sources is that the first American migrants were more diverse than what has been commonly believed and rather than discredit Thema’s claims, actually lend a basis for them.
But
rather than admit that the cited sources did nothing to support their
challenges and actually did support the claims of Thema, they repeatedly
insisted that I was lying and misrepresenting my sources when in reality, they
were the ones who were lying and misrepresenting their sources and resorted to
ridicule and name calling.
3. Where Contender’s Edge failed
Since the debate began on a thread Contender’s Edge began on Christian Forums, he was not about to allow himself to appear defeated on his own thread. He stood his ground and countered every argument and every railing false accusation to the best of his ability, and he was able to direct the argument to an issue that he should have included in his blogpost but never did.
What was most significant about the Thema news item as well as other sources is that they suggest that man had diversified and dispersed throughout the world much more rapidly than what evolutionists claim. Evolutionists claim that diversification or natural selection takes place over a very long period of time, but the date ranges of the remains found in Beringia and Siberia suggest that mankind was diversifying into distinct people groups very rapidly and if mankind was able to diversify into European, Mid-East, Asian, African, Native American, and Aboriginal groups very quickly, then what does that say about how rapidly other forms of life have been able to diversify?
I do not know why the Holy Spirit did not prompt me to include this issue in my blogpost. Might I have been too quick to post it? I don’t know, but I may very well update the blog so as to include it. If indeed, there was a rapid dispersal and diversification within mankind early on in our history, that would be consistent with a biblical event called the Tower of Babel; that very tower which man, in his pride attempted to build as high as he could but was stopped by a sudden forced confusing of tongues and dispersal by God. (Gen. 11)
That being said, a rapid dispersion would have also led to a rapid diversification into all the recognized ethnic groups among mankind that we see today (African, European, Asian, Australian Aborigine, etc.) and yet they did not remain entirely isolated from each other for very long, which is why, if the Genesis account of the history of our world is true, and if man really was forced into a dispersion because of his pride at a place called Babel, we should not at all be surprised that different people groups would have been established very quickly due to a rapid dispersal and we should not at all be surprised that there would be two peoples interacting with one another at a time that we otherwise would not think.
Whenever I engage in a debate on any given platform I try very hard to not deviate from the topic at hand but I am not always successful and when my detractors found that my sources were being used as evidence that the history of man is but only a few thousand years old, the authority of scripture and the reliability of the translation thereof from the original language came under attack as well.
I did manage to succeed in bringing the discussion back to the thread topic though, at least to a point and my detractors finally just stopped responding to my posts there. Does pay to stand up to the bullies.
For those of you who might wish to examine my thread on Christian Forums, [5] I have included the link to it in the end notes section of this post. Feel free to review it and decide for yourselves who won that exchange and share your thoughts if you wish.
Detractors, I already know what YOU will say.
End notes:
Scripture references:
1. Genesis 1:26
2. Acts 10:34
3. Acts 17:26
4. Genesis 2:16-17
5. Romans 5:12
6. Romans 6:23
7. Romans 8:19-22
8. 1 Corinthians 15:51-55
9. 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
10. Revelation 21-22
11. Genesis 11
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