The Evolution of Skin Color vs Noah's Flood

Roger Hopkins

doi:10.67690/ejfg6119

The Evolution of Skin Color vs Noah's Flood

Authors

R. Hopkins

Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.67690/ejfg6119

Abstract

I have cut and carved stone for over fifty years, and that trade has taken me many times into the quarries and tombs of Egypt. On those tomb walls the ancient artists did something I never thought to much about till the idea of young earth creation was introduced to me: they painted human beings in clearly different colors, deep red-brown for the Egyptians themselves, brown and black for the Nubians of the south, and paler, tawny tones for the Libyans and Asiatics of the north and east. They saw a world full of different colored peoples and they marked it, carefully, in mineral paint, from the very first painted tomb at Hierakonpolis around 3200 BCE, a thousand years before the Great Pyramid, straight through the Book of Gates processions of the New Kingdom. In this paper I set that eyewitness record beside two other things. The first is what modern science says about why human skin varies: the work of Jablonski and Chaplin and others showing that skin color is the slow adjustment of melanin to ultraviolet sunlight, built up over tens of thousands of years as people migrated into different light, with specific light-skin genes spreading only within the last several thousand years. The second is the chronology of the Flood account, in which one closely related family leaves the Ark only a few centuries before these tombs were painted and yet must give rise to every diverse people on earth. Laying the art beside the biology beside the calendar, I argue that the timing does not hold, and that the painted walls of Egypt record a world far older than a single-family origin allows. I take the main objection, that a few genes can shift skin tone quickly, seriously, and explain why I do not think it closes the gap.

Author Biography

R. Hopkins

Roger Hopkins is a world famous stone mason, best known for his television appearances on History channel and PBS shows like This Old House and the NOVA "Secrets of Lost Empires" series and educated in Geosciences from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

References

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Jablonski, N. G., and Chaplin, G. (2010). Human skin pigmentation as an adaptation to UV radiation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(Suppl. 2), 8962-8968. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0914628107

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