What does the Bible say about cavemen?

In what dense moral darkness was man, that Jehovah was to many unknown. In what depths of degradation and filth were they found, that God had to warn Israel against the ways of the nations of the land, both social and religious (18:24-28), because of which the land would vomit them out as a nauseous thing. What had man become, man made in the image of God, and originally after His likeness also? But how had this come about? Had he got into this condition, or was he originally made in it? Was primitive pre-historic man originally in a state of savagery, out of which he gradually raised himself by self-culture? God made man upright (Ecc. 7:29). Man before the flood was no savage, dwelling in caves or like habitations. Cain built a city. His descendants were noted for arts and musical instruments. Cain, too, at first tilled the ground, and Abel was a keeper of sheep. After the flood Noah became a husbandman, and Ham's descendants were noted as builders, and rulers. Man's primitive condition, whether before the flood or after it, was not a state of savagery, but quite the reverse. How, then, did he descend into the degradation and uncleanness characteristic of savagery and idolatry? As with earth, so with man, the chaotic state of the former, and the degraded state of the latter, were the consequences of causes at work after the creation of both the one and of the other. God did not create the earth a chaos (Isaiah 45:18), nor man a savage. This question, then, about man's condition, which history cannot answer, nor can archeology solve, God in His word has cleared up to us.

We look upon this first man, not a cave-man, not a ferocious half-ape, not an unintelligent brute, but a being of wisdom and knowledge. He possessed superior knowledge of the creation to be put under him. He has names for every beast of the field and of the forest. Without a moment's hesitation he names them. Could our present day scientists do this? But the highest was not the superior knowledge of the first man, but his fellowship with God. He enjoys His presence, has communion with Him. And the Creator expressed His loving kindness towards the creature created for His pleasure. "Behold the Man!"

To this day the people in Northern Abyssinia use stone hatchets and flint knives, along with iron poignards. And as to cave dwellers, they are still found, not only in distant lands, but even in a land so near as Spain, where many perished quite recently through sudden floods which surprised whole families. It is a question, not of antiquity, still less of definite ages in that imagined succession, but of civilisation; and scripture is express that the settled, ordered, and combined life of a city, as well as the working of metals, and the invention of musical instruments within two main divisions, began early in the life of Adam. The mythical treatment of the question is entirely due to sceptical men of science who prefer hypothesis to well ascertained fact, and seem pleased in opposing revelation.

Unlike the Second Man, who in His wondrous grace was born a Babe, and "increased in wisdom and stature" (Luke 2:52), Adam came forth from the divine hand full of vigour from the moment that he first drew breath. He was, moreover, no savage having to work his way upward by painful stages; he was endowed with understanding from the beginning, able to receive and comprehend communications from his Creator (Gen. 1:28), capable also of giving names intelligently to all the lower orders (Gen. 2:19-20). The savagery subsequently observable in the greater part of the human family came in through sin, and especially as the fruit of idolatry. Rom. 1:18-32 shows this clearly.

The modern notion of "the ascent of man" is downright folly. It was no savage that God created, with power and responsibility to raise himself from degradation to dignity. God created man perfect. The moral and physical degeneration, which perplexes the philanthropists and statesmen of today, is the result of sin and rebellion against God. Men appear to have lapsed into barbarism very early; witness Job's description, in Job 30, of the abjects of his time. But it was an absolutely perfect being that came forth at the beginning from the workshop of the Almighty.

As known in the world, civilisation supposes the fall, but so indeed does barbarism, though in a different way; in fact civilisation began, on man's being driven out from God, in Cain's family; Gen. 4:16-24. Adam in Paradise had no basis of civilisation, the simplicity of his life in innocence gave no occasion for it; what the effect of Genesis 1:28 might have been, supposing Adam had remained unfallen, can be only supposition. Barbarism was the natural effect of Adam's state when he had lost God, and civilisation is the effort to make, by the development of human faculties and the resources the earth furnished, the world pleasant without Him. What could a naked creature, thrown upon his own resources outside Paradise, be but a barbarian? - though the hunting state was a lower state when alone, and the means of life, but connected with natural energy as in Nimrod - though God had sent him out to till the ground, and clothed him with skins, not utter barbarism, but little more, only peaceful.

If we begin again with Noah, we get something more - barbarism was that into which men sank.

Revelation, as it kept intact two chronological lines in Gen. 5, here too supplies the manifest and invaluable light of God with a special view to His earthly people, followed by the moral cause laid before us in Gen. 11 which brings in (as it ought) the name of Jehovah throughout its earlier paragraph; whereas it only appears exceptionally, though for good reason, in Gen. 10:9. All the lessons and monumental records of all the earth combined are not to be compared for certainty or comprehensiveness with this sacred ethnography, grounded on genealogy, and linked with geography. God gave it by Moses as He alone could. Facts of great weight as to the antediluvians are related in Gen. 4, and, what to some may seem strange, in the family of Cain with religion but without faith. Therein arose city life, arts, and sciences, literary verse, among men who forgot the fall, ignored sin and the Saviour, and strove to embellish the earth into a worldly paradise. As the unity of the race was absolute at the beginning, so it was virtually in Noah after the deluge. The outward progress of mankind must have been all the greater because of their longevity. Whatever it was, the sons of Noah possessed all on their new start. No theory is more fallacious than the pretended ages of stone, bronze, and iron. Men, in their wanderings into rude forest life or other forms of savagery, fell into the circumstances of such facts, which still exist under similar conditions: to generalise them, as successive periods through which all passed, is mere myth, not history.

What can be vainer than the dreams of men? From the only evidence we have, happily the highest, surest, and most authoritative of testimony we know that primeval man was as far as possible from savagery. He was set in a garden or park of delights, where grew every tree pleasant to the sight, and good for food. Even when transgression entailed man's expulsion from Paradise, and sons were in due time born, the elder was a husbandman, the younger a shepherd. Town life began for some, nomad habits for others, the forging of tools, bronze and iron, and the making instruments of music, wind and stringed all this before our first parents died.

It would seem in fact that it was after not only the deluge but the dispersion of the various families, that the more distant and isolated tribes degenerated into a savage condition. To this deserts and forests, marshes and mountains, would expose men, when they found themselves severed from others by distinct tongues, and the national barriers drew in their train opposing interests, and the difficulties of subsistence increasing with population. Hunting soon led to encroachment on human liberty, as our chapter has shown. There was corruption and violence before the flood, a great reason for it though by no means the only one; but there is no evidence of idolatry till after. We know it had set in even through Abraham's progenitors before his call. But idolatry, once introduced, spread like fire, and added enormously to the debasement of its victims.

Tonight, then, we will look at what God tells us of the creation of the first man. Him I am bold to call "The First Young Man," because the man spoken of in these scriptures I have read to you tonight comes on the scene fresh and new — a brand new man. I believe God's record, not man's theory of the way man came into the world. I know perfectly well we are told nowadays — for men are coming to wondrous conclusions — that man is only developed protoplasm, or — could only a "missing link" be discovered — the direct descendant of an ape; in plain language, a pretty well-grown monkey, with his tail worn off by sitting on it. We are told to believe that insensate folly as to our origin. I believe it to be a downright lie of the devil, from top to bottom of the whole theory. I believe God gives us here the account of the origin of man, and what is more, it gives us all that is necessary for us to know about the origin of man. Perfectly well am I acquainted with the fact that men are busily engaged today in trying to dig up relics of what they are pleased to call "prehistoric man," but when I read in Scripture of "the first man Adam" (1 Cor. 15:45), I believe that God speaks about the first man that ever existed, and that He has spoken the truth regarding his origin is certain.

H. Better to wait till I have adequate grounds to judge, than bewilder myself by premature assertions. Take an example of precipitancy in a confessedly able man. Sir C. Lyell gave in his second edition at least one hundred thousand years for the formation of the delta of the Mississippi, and human remains had been found deeply buried there. In his third edition he says his data were wrong and it was at least fifty thousand years. How can we trust conclusions liable to such errors as that? Further, he insists that in the cutting through the gravel brought down by a torrent at the head of the lake of Genoa, iron, bronze, and stone remains were found, and a skull connected with the latter which must have been long anterior to the date assigned to man's creation. But I know members of the Antiquarian Society at Lausanne who examined the locality; and one of them assured me they all thought him wrong, and that one side of the skull was evidently stained with bronze. On the other hand, that which is alleged as the most ancient of human remains, as the cave at Aurignac, has its antiquity only proved by the presence of Elephas primigenius, Rhinoceros tichorinus, and perhaps Ursus spelaeus. But the first and second have been found with the flesh on them frozen up in Siberia, and Ursus spelaeus does not appear to be more geologically ancient, and similar species are found in Market Weighton in Yorkshire with existing local species of fresh water shells. So that there is nothing in the extinction of the species to prove any geological antiquity of man. It is as likely the beasts were late, as that man was early. As to Albeville, Eliè de Beaumont, President of the French Geological Society, declares the strata to be quite recent ones.