Antiquity of Man by Dr. Saville

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Aug 1, 1871

Antiquity of Man.

By Dr. Saville

As REGARDS the antiquity of man, no scientific proof has ever yet been adduced of man’s existence on earth much more than 4,000 years ago. All evidence of the antediluvian world is dependent upon the statement of Scripture alone. What Champollion wrote in his work on Egypt—“They will find in this work an absolute reply to their calumnies, since I have demonstrated that no Egyptian monument is really older than the year B. C. 2200”—is true in the main, though recent discoveries may throw back the oldest monument of that country one or two centuries earlier. The only real scientific attempt to prove man’s antiquity greater than what Scripture allows, was made by the late Mr. Horner, when manufactured articles were discovered at a certain depth in the alluvial deposits of the Nile. Estimating the sinkage at the rate of three and one-half inches per century, the late Baron Bunsen hastily declared that it was sufficient proof of man’s existence on the earth at least as early as 13,000 B. C. But when Sir Gardener Wilkinson detected the figure of the Grecian honeysuckle upon these very ancient pieces of pottery, which limited their date to some period later than the conquest of Egypt by Alexander the Great, or three centuries B. C., it was seen that Bunsen’s anti-scriptural theory was at once blown to the winds. And if any further proof is needed of the untenableness of such a theory, it is seen in the fact that the late Sir Robert Stephenson, when engineering in Egypt, discovered in the mud of the Nile, at a greater depth than was ever reached by Mr. Horner’s diggings, a brick bearing upon it the stamp of Mohammed Ali.—Dr. Saville.