Stupid Ancestors?

Most of us were brought up to believe that ancient people were clod-hopping morons, covered in muck, who grunted at each other; and that modern man is the pinnacle of evolutionary progress.  Which is odd, when you think about it.  After all, everything else in our world is subject to decay and deterioration.  Why not mankind?  Still, there it is.  People emerged from primeval slime, or came down from trees.  And since they’re dead, they can’t protest! 

And, of course, they thought the earth was flat, and had to wait for Christopher Columbus (or was it Galileo?) to prove it was round!  Hmm…

Try this:

The world’s oldest unit of length is probably the ‘English’ foot.  Forget about the thing on the end of your leg; think foot rather to mean foundation .

How many days in a year?  To two decimals?  365.24.

How many degrees in a circle?  360.

Multiply these numbers together, with 1000, to increase its size.  The answer is in feet.

Divide by 3 to get yards, then by 1760 for miles. (Sorry if you do metric, but metric is a modern invention with no particular value apart from ease of use.) 

So,   365.24 × 360 × 1000 ÷ 3 ÷ 1760 = 24,902.727 miles

Wikipedia says the circumference of the earth at the equator is about 24,901 miles.

How the people of old time knew this I do not know, but plainly they have been misrepresented by their successors!  They were obviously highly intelligent, and knew a great many things beside the shape and dimensions of the earth;  but my point is this: they were indeed competent to record speech and historical events accurately.

The Bible was not written by clod-hopping morons.

-Bill Ashton

Image by deluxtrade from Pixabay