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A Beastie,

Have you ever read the Book of Mormon?

Ether 2
1 And it came to pass that Jared and his brother, and their families, and also the friends of Jared and his brother and their families, went down into the valley which was northward, (and the name of the valley was Nimrod, being called after the mighty hunter) with their flocks which they had gathered together, male and female, of every kind.
2 And they did also lay snares and catch fowls of the air; and they did also prepare a vessel, in which they did carry with them the fish of the waters.
3 And they did also carry with them deseret, which, by interpretation, is a honey bee; and thus they did carry with them swarms of bees, and all manner of that which was upon the face of the land, seeds of every kind.
4 And it came to pass that when they had come down into the valley of Nimrod the Lord came down and talked with the brother of Jared; and he was in a cloud, and the brother of Jared saw him not.
5 And it came to pass that the Lord commanded them that they should go forth into the wilderness, yea, into that quarter where there never had man been. And it came to pass that the Lord did go before them, and did talk with them as he stood in a cloud, and gave directions whither they should travel.
6 And it came to pass that they did travel in the wilderness, and did build barges, in which they did cross many waters, being directed continually by the hand of the Lord.

They Took Beasts of Every Kind... like Noah.... Nimrod is the Valley where Noah and his family left the Ark with all the Animals and began to Multiply and till the earth.

Gen. 10: 8-9
8 And Cush begat Nimrod: he began to be a mighty one in the earth.
9 He was a mighty hunter before the LORD: wherefore it is said, Even as Nimrod the mighty hunter before the LORD.

PS... The Lord designed and Sailed the Jaredite Bardges. ;)

This Could be an archological link to the old world!!!!!

[_beastie]

They Took Beasts of Every Kind... like Noah.... Nimrod is the Valley where Noah and his family left the Ark with all the Animals and began to Multiply and till the earth.

Gen. 10: 8-9
8 And Cush begat Nimrod: he began to be a mighty one in the earth.
9 He was a mighty hunter before the LORD: wherefore it is said, Even as Nimrod the mighty hunter before the LORD.

Well, there you go. Noah did it, so could the Jaredites, all in a ship "tight like unto a dish" with a plug in the bottom

16 And the Lord said: Go to work and build, after the manner of barges which ye have hitherto built. And it came to pass that the brother of Jared did go to work, and also his brethren, and built barges after the manner which they had built, according to the instructions of the Lord. And they were small, and they were light upon the water, even like unto the lightness of a fowl upon the water.

17 And they were built after a manner that they were exceedingly tight, even that they would hold water like unto a dish; and the bottom thereof was tight like unto a dish; and the sides thereof were tight like unto a dish; and the ends thereof were peaked; and the top thereof was tight like unto a dish; and the length thereof was the length of a tree; and the door thereof, when it was shut, was tight like unto a dish.

18 And it came to pass that the brother of Jared cried unto the Lord, saying: O Lord, I have performed the work which thou hast commanded me, and I have made the barges according as thou hast directed me.

19 And behold, O Lord, in them there is no light; whither shall we steer? And also we shall perish, for in them we cannot breathe, save it is the air which is in them; therefore we shall perish.

20 And the Lord said unto the brother of Jared: Behold, thou shalt make a hole in the top, and also in the bottom; and when thou shalt suffer for air thou shalt unstop the hole and receive air. And if it be so that the water come in upon thee, behold, ye shall stop the hole, that ye may not perish in the flood.

21 And it came to pass that the brother of Jared did so, according as the Lord had commanded.

22 And he cried again unto the Lord saying: O Lord, behold I have done even as thou hast commanded me; and I have prepared the vessels for my people, and behold there is no light in them. Behold, O Lord, wilt thou suffer that we shall cross this great water in darkness?

23 And the Lord said unto the brother of Jared: What will ye that I should do that ye may have light in your vessels? For behold, ye cannot have windows, for they will be dashed in pieces; neither shall ye take fire with you, for ye shall not go by the light of fire.

24 For behold, ye shall be as a whale in the midst of the sea; for the mountain waves shall dash upon you. Nevertheless, I will bring you up again out of the depths of the sea; for the winds have gone forth out of my mouth, and also the rains and the floods have I sent forth.

25 And behold, I prepare you against these things; for ye cannot cross this great deep save I prepare you against the waves of the sea, and the winds which have gone forth, and the floods which shall come. Therefore what will ye that I should prepare for you that ye may have light when ye are swallowed up in the depths of the sea?

You know, Zak, if you're going to be a literalist and insist this means that they really did take beasts "of every kind", and that God waved his magic wand so a bunch of horses (to say nothing of all the other animals!) could survive a trip in a submarine the length of a TREE, then you might as well just explain everything with God's magic wand, and who cares if it makes sense or is compatible with known science? I mean, seriously, why waste time discussing details? In the end, it's just a magical "GOD DID IT."

by the way, I think you ought to go back to MAD and ask believers over there whether they think that the Jaredites actually brought animals "of every kind", including HORSES, in those little dishes.

[_Zakuska]

Whos being the literalist Beastie?

"Length of a tree" is actually another testimony to the ancient origins of the Book of Mormon. It is an Ancient Babylonian idiom. You know the tree of Life reached to heaven... that's a pretty big boat! I'll see if I can find you that reference.

PS. I think Ill just do a poll over there to see... ;)

[_Zakuska]

This is intresting...

T.A Rafter in Procs 6th international Radiocarbon Conf, Pullman, 1965. P-761.

The quote given above illustrates the preference that radiocarbon daters have had with dating wood and wood charcoal materials. These materials are the most widely used material in radiocarbon dating. Since the inception of the technique in the 1950s, charcoal has been acknowledged as a most reliable material for dating (Libby, 1955). Charcoal and wood possess a high molecular weight, so rigorous pretreatments are able to be implemented without losing large amounts of sample. Its major source of error has been 'inbuilt', or 'presample' age (McFadgen, 1982). This may be the result of growth age; in which the age of dead wood in the centre of the living tree is dated, or storage age; which refers to the amount of time elapsed from the death of the tree to its use by people (McFadgen, 1982). Inbuilt age may result in errors of up to hundreds of years unless only short-lived species, or twigs, are selected for dating. Even then, there remains an inbuilt age effect, albeit somewhat reduced.

In the late 1950's, the issue of presample age was identified as a causal factor in the difficulties encountered in accurately cross-dating the Julian calendar with that of the Yucatan Maya of Lowland Mexico. The Mayan calendar; is centred on a complex Long Count cycle which repeats every 5125.6 solar years (Fedick and Taube, 1992:404) and its decipherment in the the 1950's gave archaeologists an opportunity to develop an accurate chronology for the Mayan culture (Sabloff, 1989). An attempt to correlate the Mayan Long count with secular time resulted in two different interpretations; the Goodman-Thompson-Martinez correlation and the Spinden correlation. The two differed by 260 years at the crucial Julian year of 1539, when one of the main Mayan cycles ended, and radiocarbon dating was used to try and solve which was correct. Samples of Sapodilla wooden beams found spanning inscribed Late Classic Mayan doorways at Tikal were dated by the University of Pennsylvania, and it was found that the Spinden correlation was correct. Shortly after the dates were released, Satterthwaite (1956; in Fedick and Taube, 1992) questioned their validity because the beams had been reduced in size and their exterior bore no resemblance to the original trees. According to him, the dates were erroneous because they failed to date the event of the building of the temple. Subsequent investigations into the dating of the Mayan Long Count focussed on dating exterior bark and samples from smaller vault beams, and it was found that the Thompson correlation was the correct interpretation when inbuilt age was negligible (Coe, 1966:29).

Attaching any error to charcoal dating using old wood is obviously impossible, since it is non-systematic. Any wood selected for dating incorporates an inbuilt age error but errors are significantly reduced if only short-lived species or twigs are selected for dating. In these cases, it is fair to say that identified charcoal will always date the event more closely than older wood. In New Zealand archaeology, radiocarbon daters and archaeologists alike have grappled with issues of inbuilt age and old wood. The problem in this context has been pronounced due to the brevity of prehistoric occupation. Polynesians finally reached New Zealand less than 1000 years ago. A recent re-analysis of New Zealand's corpus of radiocarbon determinations from the Rafter Laboratory at the IGNS has suggested that problems associated with inbuilt age of wood had created spuriously old dates which needed to be culled with the help of a discard protocol. This analysis suggested a prehistory of perhaps as short as 700 year rather than the 1000+ which had been favoured according to conventional wisdom. McFadgen et al. (1995) reached similar conclusions.

http://www.c14dating.com/charc.html

[_beastie]

Zak,

I'm not sure how you're applying that to this conversation.

Are you still intending to do a survey on this? I'd really like to see the results. For me, I will engage in interactions like this as long as I have the expectation that the believer still adheres to "the way the world works" without invoking a sort of divine intervention that nullifies the way the world works. That's why your latest statements about the Jaredite barges are a deal-breaker to me. I'm not going to try to talk seriously with someone who actually believes that a flood covered the entire earth and that all the animals of the earth were on a big boat, either. I'm not being prejudiced in declaring these sort of things deal breakers, but just realistically recognizing that the disparity between our expectations of how the world works is SO wide that conversation is really pointless.

But I did find a few more citations, provided by a friend with more access to the Ice Age book, and these further citations do explain a few things. I'll be putting that together in a post later today. (yes, another snow day)

[_beastie]

Horsey hammocks?

Beastie, you have the patience of Gandhi.

Either that or a touch of insanity. ;)

[_Zakuska]

I never said I believed in a Global Flood however... I do beleive in a man named Noah. As well as a man Named Jared, who mad boats like his grand father did.

Got those Citations? I'd like to see the information.

I wonder when Chris is going to bring in the scans.

[_CaliforniaKid]

I'll bring the scans whenever my ILLs arrive. They take a while.

[_Zakuska]

Thanks Chris. I know the library system takes a while.

[_beastie]

I never said I believed in a Global Flood however... I do beleive in a man named Noah. As well as a man Named Jared, who mad boats like his grand father did.

Make up your mind. You've clearly been implying that maybe the jaredites or nephites brought horses with them on their ships, and those horse remains would look like a modern, post-conquest, horse, unless they were carbon dated. Are you now shying away from your theory? If not, then you might as well believe in the global flood and two of every single animal on the face of the earth tucked up in a big ole' boat, because it would require about the same level of divine intervention to work. Here's one reason why - (from my book Horses Through Time, page 99:

When the Spanish followers of Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas after 1492, their most effective weapon against the native civilization was their ability to move rapidly on horseback. The ships of all the voyages were loaded with horses, but so many died during the sea crossing that the part of the ocean between Spain and the Canary Islands was called the Gulfo de Yeguas (Gulf of Mares) in later times. The part of the Atlantic Ocean just east of Mexico that is infamous for its ceaseless calms became known as the Horse Latitudes, possibly because so many horses died while the ships waited for the breeze to stir. Despite the hazards at sea, by 1503 there were sixty to seventy horses on the island of Hispaniola.

Besides the fact that it was difficult for professional ship builders and sailors to get horses to the New World alive, your theory has another very ugly problem. While you and other believers may hop and skip around trying to prove the slightest, slimmest, possibility of a horse in the New World, you cannot deny that, for whatever reason, this horse remained unknown to the natives and unused. So why in the world would that be? If the Israelites, as some point, brought horses WITH them, they would certainly know how to USE them, and would breed them and teach the natives to USE them. Once the horse arrived in the New World, after a brief rough start, they reproduced like wildfire and within fifty years there were over 10,000 in the area of Queretaro (again, my book Horses Through Time).

You see, the reasons apologist devise strange theories about tiny little horses that couldn't really be ridden is to try and compensate for this fact - while you may play with history in terms of bones, you can't play with history in terms of the native american's history with THE HORSE. Your theory allows no possible loophole for why this "modern horse" wasn't use in exactly the way it was used in the Old World by the very people that brought it over with them.

Yes, I have the quotes, I'll post them next, I just had to get this off my chest first. There is a reason apologists haven't suggested this already, or if one or two has, it hasn't been popular.