Reverence for the long dead and the not-so-long dead

Keeper! There's an understatement.

It's near poetry. I've already forwarded the link, and I've gotten thank-yous from bone folk who I didn't know and bone folk who I didn't know were bone folk, and lots of others in between.

PZ should submit it to the NY Times, or maybe the New Yorker. (Is there any chance the St. Paul Pioneer-Press or the Minneapolis Tribune would publish such a gem from their own backyard?)

I was going to say something similarly laudatory, but Pharyngula commenters have pretty much covered it. I may have it rendered in calligraphy, frame it, and put it on the wall.

My becoming modesty is only one of my multitude of exemplary traits.

Unfortunately, it's a weblog essay, which doesn't quite fit the style of any newspaper or magazine. At about 1600 words, I don't know that it could go anywhere else.

Sunday opinion pieces frequently run double the usual 800 words that most opinion pieces must be smaller than. If National Review still had anyone of half the wit of Bill Buckley editing it, it would run the piece. New Republic could easily.

I was actually hopeful someone at the Star-Tribune might read one of these blogs and be inspired.

Good to see Dave Scot chipping in at the end of the coments.

Amazing post.

I have a question that is only somewhat related to this topic. Someone here might accidently know the answer.

It is hard to phrase the question that actually makes sense. My wife and I were talking about it over dinner so I have to translate it from spouse speak to internet speak ;)

Is there anything recorded that dates prior to what would be the biblical begining?

Or maybe...when does recorded history start? If not before Adam/Eve why not?

thanks,

Since nobody is answering, I would volunteer (although by no means an expert) that oldest writings are about 5000 years old. However, myths can reach even further back in time (as an extreme case, vedic creationism believes that the humans lived in this world for billions of years).

Or put another way: You can have myths set in "prehistoric times". But you can't have recorded history from prehistoric times. So I would answer your question with "No", there is no recorded history before young earth date of Adam/Eve, and for a while after that, too., and the reason is that myths can (and often are) be antedated, i.e. set in distant past you already have no other information about to prove you wrong.

Of course, if you'd accept cave paintings (reaching LONG before young earth date of Adam and Eve) as "recorded history", the answer to your question would be different.

The first paragraph answers the question. We were wondering how far back the oldest writings went.

What prompted the discussion was the petroglyphs we saw while vacation around Albequerque.

You're welcome.

You're welcome.

We do have RAID 1 0 on the DB servers, a live backup running now, and have done a few other things to ensure this won’t happen again. The timing was unfortunate because things were still in transition because of the datacenter move.

We do have RAID 1 0 on the DB servers, a live backup running now, and have done a few other things to ensure this won’t happen again. The timing was unfortunate because things were still in transition because of the datacenter move.