Apr 14 2008
What Do Young-Earth Creationists Do With Mammoths?
Scribal Terror has a short piece on the discovery of a pristine baby woolly-mammoth carcass. From a National Geographic report:
A Russian hunter traipsing through Russia’s remote Arctic Yamalo-Nenetsk region in May [2007] noticed what he thought was a reindeer carcass sticking out of the damp snow. . . .
On closer inspection, the “reindeer” turned out to be a 40,000-year-old baby mammoth, perfectly encased in ice.
The six-month-old female mammoth [nicknamed 'Lyuba' after the hunter's wife, which may not be a compliment] is the most well-preserved example yet found of the beasts, which lumbered across the Earth during the last Ice Age, 1.8 million to 11,500 years ago.
“It’s a lovely little baby mammoth indeed, found in perfect condition,” Alexei Tikhonov, deputy director of the Russian Academy of Science’s Zoological Institute, told the Reuters news agency.
So how did the critter come to be ‘perfectly encased in ice’ 40,000 years ago? How do you respond to this from a young-earth-creationist perspective? Did Lyuba fall off the ark? What do you do with those pesky ice ages that show up periodically in the natural record? On which creation day did the ice ages (plural) occur?
The natural record can’t conflict with Scripture, it can only conflict with our interpretation of it. Trying to shoehorn wooly mammoths (or dinosaurs for that matter) and multiple ice ages into a YEC interpretation of the creation account gets interesting, to say the least.
