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Painting by Neanderthals? Study Makes a Design Inference

Casey Luskin

Photo: Cueva de Ardales, © João Zilhão, ICREA, via EurekAlert!

A longstanding question among both evolutionists and Darwin-skeptics is whether Neanderthals were capable of symbolic artistic expression. This debate has gone back and forth for years and a new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences adds to the conversation by making a detailed analysis leading to a design inference that supports painting by Neanderthals. The study looked at the Cueva (Cave) de Ardales in Málaga, Spain which contains flowstones that have been stained by iron. A nice example of what these iron-stained flowstones look like can be seen here. The question is whether the iron-staining is the result of natural processes (e.g., flowing water depositing iron oxide) or deliberate painting using some kind of an ochre-based pigment. The study ultimately makes a design inference — the iron-staining is the result of real Neanderthal painting — as Science Daily reports:

The origin and date of appearance of prehistoric cave art are the subjects of ongoing debate. Spain’s Cueva de Ardales is one point of discussion. There a flowstone formation is stained red in places. This colouring is apparently almost 65,000 years old but until now, a part of the scientific community attributed it to a natural coating of iron oxide deposited by flowing water.

However, that hypothesis has just been rejected by the findings of an international team of scientists including a CNRS researcher. The team members analysed samples of red residues collected from the flowstone surface and compared them with iron oxide-rich deposits in the cave. They concluded that the ochre-based pigment was intentionally applied, i.e. painted — by Neanderthals, as modern humans had yet to make their appearance on the European continent — and that, importantly, it had probably been brought to the cave from an external source.

Furthermore, variations in pigment composition between samples were detected, corresponding to different dates of application, sometimes many thousands of years apart. Thus, it seems that many generations of Neanderthals visited this cave and coloured the draperies of the great flowstone formation with red ochre. This behaviour indicates a motivation to return to the cave and symbolically mark the site, and it bears witness to the transmission of a tradition down through the generations.

Beautiful and Intricate Patterns 

Iron-staining is very common in porous sedimentary rocks as iron readily precipitates out of flowing water and iron oxide (rust) forms on the surface of the rock. This iron-staining often yields beautiful and intricate patterns, which can make it difficult to distinguish between naturally caused iron-staining and intelligently caused painting using iron-based pigments such as ochre. To address these kinds of questions scientists must use intelligent design reasoning, carefully analyzing to distinguish between naturally caused and intelligently caused features. That’s exactly what the authors of the study did here. 

In the technical paper they explain that the pattern of staining they observed is inconsistent with “natural geological processes”:

The staining cannot be interpreted as the result of natural geological processes typically occurring in caves such as fluvial flows, infiltration from soils, percolating waters, or weathering of the walls, either. Although flooding may coat the walls and even the roof of a cave, most accumulation occurs on the floors and is, in general, widespread. In Cueva de Ardales, traces of a deposit formed by flooding are visible neither on the floor nor on the walls of the chamber in which panel II.A.3 is located.

In other words, if the culprit was iron precipitating from water, then you’d expect to find stains not just on the flowstones and walls but also on the floor of the cave. But there is no staining on the floor or on other walls. 

Clay Particles and Flooding

They also used scanning electron microscope analysis to look at the shape of clay particles in the iron-staining, and found that their shapes were inconsistent with flooding:

In addition, clay platelets transported by flooding generally show under SEM broken or rounded edges, which is not the case with our samples.

Moreover, if water had deposited the iron oxide then it would have seeped into the flowstone, depositing the rust in three dimensions. Instead they found the ochre only appears on the separate layer over the surface of the flowstone:

Deposition of iron oxides by dripping water would produce a diffuse red staining of the calcite, while the deposit interpreted as paint occurs in the form of a distinct layer on top of and/or covered by calcite.

And quite oddly, when there is naturally occurring calcite covering the iron-staining, it contains no iron — an observation inconsistent with precipitation of the iron from water:

Ruling out the hypothesis that the presence of iron- and clay-rich minerals could be related to speleothem formation, the analyzed calcite sample includes neither…

This suggests that when water did flow down the flowstone it did not deposit iron. The authors also point out that “any iron-rich particles present in drip water would in any case not lead to the formation of the loose hematite and clay platelets seen in the pigments of panel II.A.3.”

A Conspicuous Location

Another observation that supports a non-natural origin is that the pigment appears only in a small, conspicuous location — an easily accessible and obviously visible section of stalagmites where one might expect painting to occur — with such features observed nowhere else in that part of the cave:

Weathering of the bedrock is the only process that could produce thin layers of well-preserved iron oxides and clay platelets but is inconsistent with the exclusive affection of a small area in the middle of a stalagmite located in a large room, on the walls of which no similar deposits are observed.

So far the authors have done a good job of ruling out natural causes. But what about making a positive case for intelligent causation? They do that too:

[I]n terms of morphology, the markings are characterized by a central area with high color density surrounded by an aureole that features a gradual reduction in the concentration of red matter. This pattern suggests an application of the paint by splattering as experimentally reproduced. 

In other words, they found a shading gradient pattern consistent with painting, not a natural process.

The authors go on to explore other possible explanations, but they think they’ve made a pretty strong case. The paper concludes: “Our results strengthen the hypothesis that Neanderthals symbolically used these paintings and the large stalagmitic dome harboring them over an extended time span.”

The Final Word? 

Will this study be the final word on Neanderthal art? Probably not. The authors make a good case, but as with so many aspects of prehistoric archeology, the evidence is indirect and not clear-cut. They even admit that what they found isn’t exactly what we typically think of as “art”:

[W]e hypothesize that panel II.A.3 is not “art” in the narrow sense of the word — “the making of objects, images, music, etc. that are beautiful or that express feelings” or “the activity of painting, drawing, and making sculpture” — but rather the result of graphic behaviors intent on perpetuating the symbolic significance of a space.

The authors made a design inference. Whether they’re right or wrong, the point is this: this study uses intelligent design reasoning, trying to discriminate between naturally caused iron-staining and intelligently caused painting. It provides yet another example showing that ID reasoning is a normal part of the scientific process. 

Jehovah the sun/moon god courtesy trinitarian logic.

  Trinitarian logic;It's the gift that keeps on giving.As we continue indulging our guilty pleasure for its beguiling fruit we stumble across this priceless plum,the warrior prophet Joshua was in fact a sun worshiper.Shocking,I know but inescapable once we make consistent application of the interpretive logic of our trinitarian friends.Now it's true that Joshua declares his loyalty to Jehovah God at his famous final address to the nation Joshua24:15 ASV "And if it seem evil unto you to serve Jehovah, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve Jehovah."

 Ah, but is he referring to the Jehovah that modern day Christians think of, a careful examination of the scriptures in the light of trinitarian logic decisively clears up the matter. Joshua10:12 ASV "Then spake Joshua to Jehovah in the day when Jehovah delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel; and he said in the sight of Israel, Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; And thou, Moon, in the valley of Aijalon." Clearly then the holy binity of Sun and moon was Jehovah to Joshua and his fellow Israelites. One key point to understanding the scriptures trinitarian style is that one need only locate one trinitarian style proof-text to make ones point any apparently contradictory scriptures say suggesting that Jehovah cannot be part of his own creation can then be easily waved away.

  So there we have it a 'deeper' understanding of the scriptures trinitarian style.

On scrutinizing the thumb print of JEHOVAH.

 Editor’s note: This is Part 2 in a series. Read Part 1 here.

Continuing my evaluation of philosopher James Croft’s challenge to the God hypothesis as presented in his debate with Stephen Meyer, I’ll pick up where I left off in Croft’s Substack summary, just after he distills Meyer’s argument in a few key points. Croft had three major problems with the argument. We’ll start with his first one.

Philosophers Clash

Croft proposes that Meyer’s abductive inference “is extremely unusual, in that it suggests that the cause of an observed effect is a designer about which we have no background information.” This is a popular challenge, one that’s been developed more formally in the philosophical literature around design. Does it have merit?

The first natural point here is that we all start out in life with the same amount of background information about all entities and minds besides our own — which is to say, none. A newborn infant has no background information about the strange creature licking his face, or the shadowy figure lifting him out of the crib. Nevertheless, through gradual data-gathering, he forms his understanding of cause and effect. I doubt Croft would claim that infants are born with innate concepts of these things. The data-gathering process must begin somewhere. Croft objects that “the phenomena to be explained (the explanandum) is supposed to be part of our evidence that God even exists.” But by the same token, the wet-washcloth sensation of puppy tongue on baby cheeks is part of the baby’s evidence that Puppy exists.

Now, it is true that for any given body of evidence, we can patch together an explanation that will deductively entail the whole. Perhaps the universe was set up from the beginning so as to make puppies, mommies, trees, etc. inevitable. The problem is that our “making-all-the-evidence-inevitable” factor has no other epistemic virtues to commend it. We may still be right. But it’s not the way to bet. The hypothesis of intelligent agency, on the other hand, may have a variety of virtues and explain a variety of phenomena.

What Did You Expect?

In the debate, Meyer uses a car break-in as an intuition pump. We reason backwards from the scene of the crime to the inference of human agency. But Croft believes this is importantly disanalogous to the God hypothesis, because we know a lot about human beings already — that they exist, that they have the power to break into cars, and that they can have a motive to do so. With all of that in the background, we can reason backwards. Not so with God.

By coincidence, someone I know did have his car broken into this summer. It was fairly anti-climactic (he had carelessly left his door unlocked), but the car’s glove box and utility space had clearly been rifled through. There was nothing of value to be pilfered, but small missing items included a clump of cheap face masks, some of which had been amusingly left in a trail like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs behind our runaway thief. This was several months before the Delta wave, but our perp apparently thought the masks might still be worth something. Two small, unremarkable pocket knives were also missing. 

Now, a priori, before the fact, there was no reason to predict that a thief would be especially interested in either a wad of face masks or a couple of cheap pocket knives. And yet, a posteriori, after the fact, burglary was the natural inference. I’m reminded of a story Fran Lebowitz tells about finding the windshield of her high school car broken, her cigarettes and an apple plucked from the dashboard. Miffed, she called over the nearest representative of the NYPD and pointed out the damage. “What did you have on the dashboard?” the officer asked. “I had an apple and a pack of cigarettes.” “Well,” he said, throwing up his hands, “what did you expect?”

This is very funny, but also very apt. What did Fran expect? What did my friend expect?

Generic Gods, Generic Men

To take another example, from a paper by philosopher Lydia McGrew in response to philosopher Thomas Crisp, McGrew recalls receiving an e-mail from an admiring reader in Croatia. Prior to getting this e-mail, she was aware of Croatians in general, but she was unaware of this Croatian in particular. Indeed, she was unaware that anyone from Croatia would be especially moved to send her a fan letter. But, upon reading said letter, she acquired new knowledge.

It is true that we don’t know a priori whether there exists an entity outside the universe with means and motive to communicate his presence to human beings. But what if there were such an entity? In that case, how could we tell? These are the questions the theist is actually interested in, because the God hypothesis is not contentless. It’s the very hypothesis he wants to test-drive. But Croft has blocked the road right out of the gate.

And indeed, if we applied this reasoning consistently, it would block the road for our discovery of any new, non-human intelligent agent, never mind God. If aliens existed, why would they want to send the team in Contact an extended message consisting of the digits of pi? Nobody knows. There’s certainly no “independent evidence” to that effect. But there it is. 

Returning to our “magic ratio” from part one, the likelihood ratio P(E|H)/P(E|~H) (where we’ll say E = evidence and H = hypothesis), McGrew makes a further technical point: To have such a ratio that favors the God hypothesis, one doesn’t necessarily need to have independent knowledge of motive, only capability. “God,” by definition, is certainly capable of design, whatever his motives. This is the key to answering the popular academic claim that our magic ratio loses its magic when H = God hypothesis, because our numerator P(E|H) is inaccessible, a number we can’t get our hands on. We can still say something about a ratio even if we lack full access to its component parts. One doesn’t need a highly specific high number for the numerator to know that it’s much higher than the denominator.

The “Woven Mat”

Croft concludes this section by saying the theist is in the “unenviable position” of “trying to use the explanans [proposed cause of phenomenon] to explain the explanandum [phenomenon to be explained].” But this just smuggles in the silent assumption that the only legitimate sort of causal hypothesis is a hypothesis for which we already have “independent evidence.” If rather, to quote Charles Sanders Peirce, everything is “a woven, felted mat of abductions,” if indeed all of our empirical knowledge is constructed by inference to the best explanation, then there is a first time for every new thing. On the other hand, if Croft is correct that IBE always requires independent evidence before we can use something as an explanans to remove our surprise at an explanandum, then the question for Croft is how we learn anything for the first time. 

This is Croft’s first problem: If he bites the bullet and says we don’t use inference to the best explanation for anything, then his argument is a universal acid. His second problem is the problem McGrew raises: Neither Meyer nor any ID proponent is bound to deliver a number for the probability of our evidence given God. That number need not be high. It need only be higher than the denominator. 

This concludes my assessment of Croft’s first objection. Next time, we’ll look at his claim that Meyer is misapplying writers like Charles Lyell and Michael Scriven.

Yet more on why the trinity dogma is poor philosophy.

  Revelation4:11NWT2013Edition:"You are worthy, JEHOVAH our God,to receive  the glory and the honor and the power,because you created all things ,and because of  your will they came into existence and were created."

Jehovah God alone is worthy of absolute worship because he alone is both necessary and sufficient as a cause and preserver of the cosmos. Obviously there cannot be anyone else who is both necessary and sufficient. To take the emotion out of the equation let us consider another trinity. Food,water and air. Let's call these three the trinity of life. Given a moderate climate an abundant supply of these three elements would be sufficient for a prolonged life. Of course no single element of these three would be sufficient to sustain a prolonged life though it would be absolutely necessary. But lets say we discovered that we could survive on just water. Then water alone would be both necessary and sufficient. The other two elements would become merely optional. What if we found that any of the three elements (i.e food/water/air) could sustain our lives by itself. Then all three would be come optional none of them would in/or of themselves be necessary. Thus we see that the three can either be all necessary or all optional but not both. The problem with Christendom's trinity is that each of the three elements are being presented as being both necessary and sufficient in and of themselves. Which of course is as we have demonstrated an absurdity. Another issue is that JEHOVAH is supreme. According to the dictionary this implies that he is peerless. A thing that cannot be stated of any of the constituents of Christendom's Trinity.

Webster's definition of supreme:

Definition of supreme

1: highest in rank or authoritythe supreme commander

2: highest in degree or qualitysupreme endurance in war and in labour

The world wide web: a brief history.

 The history of the Internet has its origin in the efforts to build and interconnect computer networks that arose from research and development in the United States and involved international collaboration, particularly with researchers in the United Kingdom and France.

Computer science was an emerging discipline in the late 1950s that began to consider time-sharing between computer users, and later, the possibility of achieving this over wide area networks. Independently, Paul Baran proposed a distributed network based on data in message blocks in the early 1960s and Donald Davies conceived of packet switching in 1965 at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) and proposed building a national commercial data network in the UK. The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the U.S. Department of Defense awarded contracts in 1969 for the development of the ARPANET project, directed by Robert Taylor and managed by Lawrence Roberts. ARPANET adopted the packet switching technology proposed by Davies and Baran, underpinned by mathematical work in the early 1970s by Leonard Kleinrock at UCLA. The network was built by Bolt, Beranek, and Newman.

Early packet switching networks such as the NPL network, ARPANET, Merit Network, and CYCLADES researched and provided data networking in the early 1970s. ARPA projects and international working groups led to the development of protocols for internetworking, in which multiple separate networks could be joined into a network of networks, which produced various standards. Bob Kahn, at ARPA, and Vint Cerf, at Stanford University, published research in 1974 that evolved into the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP), the two protocols of the Internet protocol suite. The design included concepts from the French CYCLADES project directed by Louis Pouzin.

In the early 1980s, the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded national supercomputing centers at several universities in the United States, and provided interconnectivity in 1986 with the NSFNET project. Thus creating network access to these supercomputer sites for research and academic organizations in the United States. International connections to NSFNET, the emergence of architecture such as the Domain Name System, and the adoption of TCP/IP internationally on existing networks marked the beginnings of the Internet. Commercial Internet service providers (ISPs) emerged in 1989 in the United States and Australia. The ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990. Limited private connections to parts of the Internet by officially commercial entities emerged in several American cities by late 1989 and 1990. The NSFNET was decommissioned in 1995, removing the last restrictions on the use of the Internet to carry commercial traffic.

Research at CERN in Switzerland by British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989–90 resulted in the World Wide Web, linking hypertext documents into an information system, accessible from any node on the network. Since the mid-1990s, the Internet has had a revolutionary impact on culture, commerce, and technology, including the rise of near-instant communication by electronic mail, instant messaging, voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone calls, video chat, and the World Wide Web with its discussion forums, blogs, social networking services, and online shopping sites. Increasing amounts of data are transmitted at higher and higher speeds over fiber-optic networks operating at 1 Gbit/s, 10 Gbit/s, or more. The Internet's takeover of the global communication landscape was rapid in historical terms: it only communicated 1% of the information flowing through two-way telecommunications networks in the year 1993, 51% by 2000, and more than 97% of the telecommunicated information by 2007. The Internet continues to grow, driven by ever greater amounts of online information, commerce, entertainment, and social networking services. However, the future of the global network may be shaped by regional differences.

Early Coptic translation on 1st century Christology..

 

Corroborating Early Christian Christology

The Sahidic Coptic version corroborates early Christian Christology in many of its readings. This is especially true regarding the doctrine of the Trinity, since the most that can be read from Coptic John 1:1c is that "the Word was divine," not "the Word was God." Literally, what the Coptic version says is "the Word was a god."

This is consistent with what historians know about the development of the doctrine of the Trinity. As one edition of the New Encyclopedia Britannica puts it, "Neither the word Trinity, nor the explicit doctrine as such, appears in the New Testament....The doctrine developed gradually over several centuries and through many controversies." (Micropedia, Volume X, p. 126) It was not until the 4th Christian century that the doctrine of the Trinity was firmly established in the churches.

Likewise, the book Encyclopedia of Early Christianity, edited by Everett Ferguson, says, "Primitive Christianity, like Judaism, was distinguished from paganism by its unqualified monotheism." (page 912) This "unqualified monotheism" also distinguished the Christology of primitive Christianity from later Trinitarianism.

Since the Sahidic Coptic version pre-dates the 4th century, being dated in the late 2nd or early 3rd century, it is not surprising that it does not labor under the doctrine of the Trinity. Not only does the Coptic version refrain from identifying Jesus as God Almighty at John 1:1c. It also does not contain the Trinitarian addition at 1 John 5:7 ("these three are one"), nor speak of 'the church of God which he purchased with his own blood,' (Acts 20:28) nor does it say that 'God was manifested in the flesh.' (1 Timothy 3:16) Rather, it speaks of the "church of the Lord" and says merely "this one who" was manifested in the flesh at 1 Timothy 3:16, not "God." Nor does it contain the added words at John 3:13, "[the Son of man] who is in heaven," which incorrectly indicates that Jesus could be God in heaven and Man on earth at the same time. Instead, like the earliest extant Greek manuscript of the Gospel of John, the p66 [Papyrus Bodmer II], the Sahidic Coptic text omits that unauthorized addition.

Other renderings of the Sahidic Coptic version also corroborate the fact that early Christian Christology, while an exalted Christology, was 'unqualifiedly monotheistic,' not Trinitarian. The Coptic readings are theologically neutral and frequently very literal readings of the New Testament Greek text.

The trinity dogma vs. The dictionary.

 According to the trinity dogma a person is not a being.

According to the dictionary a person is:a being as distinguished from an animal or a thing.

an individual human being who likes or prefers something specified (used in combination):I've never been a cat person.

Sociology. an individual human being, especially with reference to his or her social relationships and behavioral patterns as conditioned by the culture.

Philosophy. a self-conscious or rational being.

the actual self or individual personality of a human being:You ought not to generalize, but to consider the person you are dealing with.  According to the trinity dogma a divine person is not a god.According to the dictionary a god is:any deified person or object.: that is right any person deemed superhuman or worthy of religious devotion is a god. Thus according to the dictionary  Trinitarianism is polytheistic  in its assertions.