@Mark Houston:

Sean, we’ve had this discussion before, but I still don’t grasp where in your chronology in you squeeze in the time needed for

a) the mammoth-population, all descendants of some (one pair of ?) proto-elephants coming down the slopes of mount Ararat growing to “millions”, especially given the slow growth rate of elephant polulations.
b) mammoths (wooly rhinos,…) already having become well adapted to ice age environmental conditions before being hit by the “killer chill”.
…and the questions go on and on.

This is not a “I want you to lose – I don’t believe you” but rather the scientific “I’d like you to clarify your arguments so that maybe I could be convinced in the end – I don’t believe you”.

The time it takes to double a population of Elephants, given ideal conditions, is around 8 years, and less than ideal conditions, around 12-18 years. It would only take around 22 doublings, starting with a pair of elephants, to reach 16 million individuals – i.e., 200-400 years.

It is quite reasonable to conclude, then, that the post-Flood environment was relatively warm and lush, world-wide, for 300-400 years before the first ice age suddenly struck the planet and wiped out huge populations of animals of many different types almost instantly in northerly regions (within one season).

By the way, despite common thinking to the contrary, the Woolly Mammoths were not ideally modified to live in ice-age conditions. And, contrary to popular imagination, these creatures were not surrounded by the extremely cold, harsh environments that exist in these northerly regions today. Rather, they lived in rather lush steppe-type conditions to include evidence of large fruit bearing trees, abundant grasslands, and the very large numbers and types of grazing animals only to be quickly and collectively annihilated over huge areas by rapid weather changes.

Clearly, the present is far far different than even the relatively recent past must have been. Sound too far fetched?

Consider that the last meal of the famous Berezovka mammoth, found north of the Artic Circle, consisted of “twenty-four pounds of undigested vegetation” to include over 40 types of plants; many no longer found in such northerly regions. The enormous quantities of food it takes to feed an elephant of this size (~300kg per day) is, by itself, very good evidence for a much different climate in these regions than exists today.

Beyond this, consider that the mammoths didn’t have hair erector muscles that enable an animal’s fur to be “fluffed-up”, creating insulating air pockets. They also lacked oil glands to protect against wetness and increased heat loss in extremely cold and damp environments. Animals currently living in Arctic regions have both oil glands and erector muscles. Of course, the mammoth did have a certain number of cold weather adaptations compared to its living cousins, the elephants; such as smaller ears, trunk and tail, fine woolly under-fur and long outer “protective” hair, and a thick layer of insulating fat, but these would by no means be enough to survive in the extremes of cold, ice and snow found in these same regions today – not to mention the lack of an adequate food supply. It seems very much as Sir Henry Howorth concluded back in the late 19th century:

“The instances of the soft parts of the great pachyderms being preserved are not mere local and sporadic ones, but they form a long chain of examples along the whole length of Siberia, from the Urals to the land of the Chukchis [the Bering Strait], so that we have to do here with a condition of things which prevails, and with meteorological conditions that extend over a continent.

When we find such a series ranging so widely preserved in the same perfect way, and all evidencing a sudden change of climate from a comparatively temperate one to one of great rigour, we cannot help concluding that they all bear witness to a common event. We cannot postulate a separate climate cataclysm for each individual case and each individual locality, but we are forced to the conclusion that the now permanently frozen zone in Asia became frozen at the same time from the same cause.”

For further discussion on this topic see:

http://www.detectingdesign.com/ancientice.html#Woolly%20Mammoths

Sean Pitman
http://www.DetectingDesign.com  Sean Pitman(Quote)

Geanna,

These animals didn’t die gradually over time, but suddenly en-mass due to a catastrophically sudden extreme cold snap for which they were clearly not properly adapted to survive.

Sean Pitman
http://www.DetectingDesign.com  Sean Pitman(Quote)

@Geanna Dane:

So did the mammoths dies of cold or starvation? Maybe it wasn’t the intolerable cold, perhaps it was too much snowfall that spoiled access to the vegetation they depended on. Unless most or all of the fossils had identifiable food in their mouths or stomachs (I have heard that some did), how could one possibly know?

It really doesn’t matter if they died directly because of the cold or indirectly because of starvation (though I favor the former idea). Either way, the evidence suggests that they, along with millions of other types of animals, died out very suddenly in line with a sudden global cold snap. That’s the key point here. The cold snap would result in a rapid decrease in the ocean’s water level, resulting in an opportunity to dry out the Mediterranean basin…

Sean Pitman
http://www.DetectingDesign.com  Sean Pitman(Quote)

@Geanna Dane:

Um, I think the evolutionists are the ones who informed us about ice ages.

You’re mistaken. Evolutionists were not the first ones to propose ice age theories – theories which were around well before Darwin published Origins in 1859.

For example, Andrew Ure (1778-1857) was one of the top chemists of his day with an international reputation as a meticulous scientist, a prolific writer and an effective teacher. But he was also one of those brilliantly versatile men of science in the early 19th century. In 1829 he published A New System of Geology in which he proposed some new theoretical ideas for the reconstruction of earth history, one of which was one of the earliest conceptions of an ice age, which he speculated would have resulted from the Flood. One of the author’s he quoted was Jens Esmark (1763-1839)

Jens Esmark also argued a sequence of worldwide ice ages well before Darwin. In a paper published in 1824, Esmark proposed changes in climate as the cause of those glaciations. He attempted to show that they originated from changes in the Earth’s orbit. Adding to Esmark’s work, Bernhardi, in a 1932 paper, speculated about former polar ice caps reaching as far as the temperate zones around the globe.

http://creation.com/british-scriptural-geologists-in-the-first-half-of-the-nineteenth-century-part-4
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jens_Esmark

They have given us more information about ice ages than creationists have and nothing, I repeat nothing, is going to change that. They have no problem with ice ages whatsoever.

They have no problem with ice ages, true. But, they do have a definite problem with the idea of very rapid, even catastrophically sudden, formation and regression. It wasn’t until just a few years ago that scientists began to realize that glacial melts can happen many times more rapidly than they tought possible just 10 years ago – to include the melting of Greenland’s ice-cap as well as the Antarctic ice. No one thought that such rapid melting could ever happen as rapidly as it is taking place today.

http://www.DetectingDesign.com/AncientIce.html

What is it with Adventists suddenly talking a lot about Las Vegas, card games, houses of cards, gambling and betting? I’m bewildered.

It is often a very good way to get important statistical concepts across to those people who don’t usually deal with numbers and the scientific usefulness of statistical odds analysis… like you ; )

Sean Pitman
http://www.DetectingDesign.com  Sean Pitman(Quote)