What can DNA tell us about the truth of the Bible? With Dr. Robert Carter - Podcast Episode 204

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Welcome to the GotQuestions podcast. Occasionally, we like to invite a guest speaker onto the

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GotQuestions podcast to help us answer some of the questions that we frequently receive on GotQuestions.

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So today, joining me is Dr. Robert Carter. Rob is with Creation Ministries International, and he's gonna be helping us to answer some questions related to humanity and how

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DNA worked with very early humanity. Rob, welcome to the program.

00:41

Thanks for having me on, Shay, this is gonna be fun. Yes, so why don't we just go ahead and jump straight in.

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Tell me a little bit about Creation Ministries International. What is it, what do you do, and how did

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God give you that passion? Well, we're about a 46 or 47 -year -old organization, and we speak in churches.

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We're gonna be about 1 ,200 churches this year around the world. We have a gigantic website called creation .com.

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We make Creation Magazine, the Journal of Creation. We publish, I don't know, 30 or 40 books. We've made several movies.

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It is my passion. I can't believe I get to work at this organization that blessed me so much when I was a young man.

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Now that I'm older, the people who started are retiring, and I'm stepping into some giant shoes.

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But it is a passion project, trying to get people to understand the Bible is true.

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I can't believe I'm standing in the shoes that I'm able to step into now. This is an ongoing, multinational program with probably 15

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PhD scientists and about 30 speakers, master's levels, in seminary degrees or science degrees, all working together, trying to get the word out that the

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Bible actually is the Word of God, and it's true, and it does reflect real history. Amen, very much needed.

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GotQuestions .org, we're a ministry. We don't focus primarily, or definitely not exclusively on creationism, but we receive a ton of questions.

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We have a whole section of questions about creationism, got a lot of questions about science and evolution, and all those things that creation .com

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specializes in, and we've used your resources many, many times, so we're very grateful for ministries out there that can have a laser focus on these areas when we tend to be a little more broad.

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But let me go and jump into some of the frequently asked questions that I would love your insight on.

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First of all, and we received this question just the other day, worded very similarly to this, is basically, if we're really starting with the literal

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Adam and Eve, how do you get from two human beings to now the approximately 8 billion human beings in the world?

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That's a great question, but we could even make it even worse, because we didn't start with Adam and Eve, we started with Noah and his family.

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So 1 ,600 years after Adam and Eve, we have Noah's flood. The Bible says we all came from Shem, Ham, and Japheth, and their three wives.

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That's six people, and it's only about 4 ,500 years ago. So how do we do that? Actually, the answer mathematically is trivial.

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All you have to do is double that population every 150 years. So 150 years after the flood, there's 12 people.

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300 years after the flood, there's 24 people. That's a very, very, very slow, it's a ridiculously slow growth rate.

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And if you keep doubling that population every 150 years, you'll get to 7 or 8 billion people today. That's just the way mathematics works and the way exponential growth works.

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So really the question is, how come there are only 8 billion people in the world? Given evolutionary time, with tens of thousands of years of humanity, there should be trillions, but war, starvation, disease, that's what had the population in check.

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It's not an objection to the Bible to think that there are 8 billion people starting from six just a few thousand years ago.

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It's trivial. Okay, there's the mathematical side of the question, but I know one of your focus, your specialties, is in DNA, genetically speaking.

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How can you start with two human beings and have it result in the gene pool that we see today?

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That's a great question, and we get a lot of objections to that on creation .com also. Some theologians have tried to say, you can't get this amount of diversity from two people.

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Absolutely you can. There's about 10 million letter differences that we see in the human genome that are shared amongst people all over the planet.

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And you and I, people listening, individually we each carry about 3 million, where the copy of DNA we got from our mother is different than the copy we got from our father.

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So 3 million places where our two genomes differ inside of cells, but it's only about 10 million across the world.

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What prevents God from engineering into Adam those 10 million variants? Nothing. And those variants that are commonly shared, they don't cause disease.

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They're just created diversity. So God engineers that into Adam. It's even easier if Eve is not a copy of Adam.

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She was made from Adam, so she didn't have his Y chromosome, but all God had to do is double her X chromosome and make her a woman.

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But what if he added some diversity to her? Or what if he engineered some diversity into their reproductive cells?

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I mean, they were created. They could have been created with a lot of diversity in themselves and everyone after them has to come about through the normal process of sexual reproduction.

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Fine. But it's not hard to envision Adam being front -loaded with what we see in humans today.

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So again, it's not a good objection. What people think though, is that diversity we see is all caused by mutation.

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And that would have driven that to extinction. If all that mutation had to happen and then spread across the entire population, that would take a really, really high mutation load, really high mutation rate.

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That would have been really bad for us. But they're not mutations. There's God created diversity.

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I think a lot of the problems I've seen is that people, when they think of Adam and Eve, they think of the flannel graph or the pictures that they see.

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You know, Adam and Eve, a white couple were the first two human beings. How in the world do we get all this genetic diversity, different skin colors, different genetic features in people?

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If we start with two white people and it's like, the Bible nowhere says anything about Adam and Eve's skin color.

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I honestly, I picture them as being somewhere in the middle. Or Adam could have been -

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Even on the darker side of middle, yeah. Adam could have been Caucasian and Eve could have been

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African in complexion. We have truly no idea what the original people look like, but to think they were both homogeneously white, completely foreign to the

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Bible. Yeah. If you have mutation happening in a population over thousands of years, you can get a lot of skin color, hair color, and eye color changes.

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The same genes that control skin color in humans are the genes that control coat color in horses and dogs and cats and all sorts of other mammalian species.

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It's the same genes. And we see the same mutations popping up in multiple different groups of organisms causing the same color patterns.

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So God could have front -loaded all the skin color, hair color, and eye color genes into Adam and Eve, but I don't think so.

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Because when you look at red hair, it's really only found in people of Scottish and Irish descent.

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So it's probably a mutation that occurred later on in history after Babel, after we spread out in a small population that went on to settle in Scotland and Ireland, and they just have a high frequency of red hair and it's really nowhere else, et cetera.

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The races should arise after Babel because whatever's in Adam and Eve is going to be on the

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Ark. And whatever's on the Ark is going to be in that pre -Babel population. All right, Noah's children, their children are going to have to marry each other, and the grandchildren have to marry each other, and nieces and nephews and uncles and whatever.

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You know, you have this big melting pot, all the genes mixed together. But then at Babel, a couple hundred years after the flood,

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God separates the nations into isolated little populations, divides them up by language, and they spread out.

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Well, each little group is only going to have a subset of all the genes of the Babel population. And then over time, because there's going to be even more inbreeding within each little group, they're going to lose a lot of diversity differently.

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So you can get pruning and weeding out of a lot of genes, and so the groups start to look a little different.

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But we still share 99 .99 something percent of all our genes. I mean, it's not like Africans are different than Europeans.

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I mean, almost everything in Africa is found in Europe, and almost everything in Europe is found in Africa. It's even strangely, more strange, there's not a single letter in the genome that you can use to separate the so -called races.

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There's not a single letter said everyone in Africa has this or everyone in Europe has that. No, you have, well, some people in Europe have red hair, okay, and no one in Africa, unless they have

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European ancestry, has that gene, but that's a late development, the red hair gene.

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We share almost everything else. So in your view, that was another one of the questions on my mind was the origin of races.

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You trace that to as after Babel, humanity spreading around the world, limited gene pools, and so genetic features were amplified, so to speak, so that a slightly dark skin became darker skin and the skin became really dark skin amongst a particular people group.

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Yeah, and if you really want to get into it, the genetics of skin color are fascinating and not what we expect.

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I've written about this on creation .com several times, but when you look at Africa, the ancient most

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Africans didn't have the genes for the really dark skin that the majority of Africans have today. There was something that happened probably less than 2 ,000 years ago.

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It was called the Bantu expansion. The Bantu speaking peoples in Central Africa spread out. They migrated eastward and southward, and they took over a huge territory that lighter skinned people had originally lived in.

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So the dark skin of Africans is not natural selection. It's not like, oh, you need dark skin to live on the equator.

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Well, that's not true because there's plenty of people in Papua New Guinea that don't have really dark skin or people in Ecuador that don't have really dark skin.

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It's not like evolution's driving darker skin on the equator. It's a darker skinned people spread out and conquered a vast territory.

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So if you went to Africa 2 ,000 years ago, it wouldn't quite look like it looks today. Same's true in Europe.

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First people to live in Europe are the Neanderthals. Another group of people came in, the hunter -gatherer people.

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They didn't have farms yet, but all the genes that we're pulling out of these old graves for those people, they had the genes for dark skin.

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A lot of them had dark skin and blue eyes, which is a very strange combination, but it's very common in Europe.

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In fact, they all had dark skin as far as the genetics is concerned. Then after that, the third group of people moving into Europe were farmers coming from Turkey, ancient

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Anatolia. That's the first time the light -skinned genes get into Europe. It comes from Turkey, actually.

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They migrate into Europe, take over that territory, intermingle with the people that lived there before.

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The hunter -gatherer genes are in new population. The Neanderthal genes are also in the new population.

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Then later on, another light -skinned group of people that live north of the Caspian Sea in the middle of Asia, they invade

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Europe. 70 % of the European genome actually comes from Asia. A huge chunk comes from Turkey, and the stuff that's actually there before was dark skin.

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What's a race in this context? You can't define what a race is when you realize we're all melting pots of very dissimilar people.

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There's more differences between hunter -gatherers and the farmers moving up, and they mingle together to make the

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Europeans. There's more differences between them than between modern Europeans and Chinese people. So there's no race.

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That whole notion's been destroyed. But biblically, there's no race either. We come from Adam and Eve.

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There's only one people group. We come from Noah and his family. We're all cousins. I mean, how much time has there been since the flood?

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150 generations, 200 generations, maybe? In all of human history. That means we're all really closely related, and the genetics is telling us we're really closely related.

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So a lot of the evolutionary speculations in the 1800s were, I mean, some people were literally saying the

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Asians evolved from orangutans, the Africans evolved from gorillas, and the Europeans evolved from chimpanzees.

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That was a scientific theory that was being popularized in several books.

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It's not true. I mean, sorry, destroyed that whole theory with genetics.

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We're all one people group because we came from Adam and Eve, et cetera, et cetera. There's so much more. I could talk for hours on just that one question.

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I could listen to you for hours. I truly am fascinated by this stuff. A question that is not something we receive very often and something that I've heard about is that through tracing human

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DNA back, you can get to a point where you have a, I'm probably gonna say this backwards, but a

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Y -chromosomal Adam, and where they can tell that humanity can be traced ultimately back to one man and one woman.

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Is that true? And to what extent can we say that what they're tracing back to is the biblical

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Adam and Eve? All right, how much time you got? Again, this is a question that could just go on. How about five minutes?

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How about that? Five minutes, all right. Okay. The evolutionary community did not predict a

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Y -chromosomal Adam or a mitochondrial Eve. There you go. The Bible demands it. They discovered in 1980s that the little piece of DNA we only get from our mothers, only 16 ,000 letters long, it's a little circular piece of DNA.

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We all carry it from our moms. When you look at them across the world, the family tree collapses very quickly to a single person.

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They tongue in cheek named her mitochondrial Eve, and they placed her 200 ,000 years ago in Africa.

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Later on, when we started sequencing Y -chromosomes, we realized there's also a Y -chromosome Adam, and they placed him 100 ,000 years ago in Africa.

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And they said, oh, you silly creationists. Adam and Eve didn't live at the same time. They never even knew each other, et cetera.

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Well, ancestry .com discovered a brand new branch of the Y -chromosome tree, which is even further down than anyone thought.

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And that caused a complete redating of Y -chromosome Adam. So now the evolutionists are saying that they're about the same time period.

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I think that's really funny. Now, my Y -chromosome Adam is not their Y -chromosome

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Adam. In fact, our Y -chromosome Adam is Noah. So that's a mistake on their part. It should be Y -chromosome

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Noah. But either way, the Y -chromosome ancestors of all people is not where the evolutionists put it.

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Because what they did was this. They looked at the tree, and they realized the Africans have some really long branches.

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But because those branches are really long, and they're assuming that mutations happen at the same rate across all of time, well, that means the tree is a clock.

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And halfway from the end of the African branch to the other ones, you go halfway down, you're still on an

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African branch. That means we arose in Africa. I say, wait a second.

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How do you know that Y -chromosome mutations happen at the same rate in all people at all times? They clearly don't.

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When you look at the Y -chromosome tree and even the mitochondrial tree especially, you see some people with really long branches compared to their cousins.

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They have more mutations in the same amount of time. That is demonstrable from the data.

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Therefore, you can't put a clock on the tree and now throw in a biblical idea. It's something

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I wrote about in our Journal of Creation. The article's now on creation .com. I call it patriarchal drive.

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It's the genetic effect of really old people having children late in life.

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The Bible says that the patriarchs lived for a very long time. Noah was over 500 years old when

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Shem, Ham and Japheth were born. He's the oldest father recorded in the Bible. And because his little reproductive cells would have been copying themselves from puberty for potentially nearly 500 years, they would have gone through so many generations, they should have picked up a lot of mutations.

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And so what do we see after the flood? The lifespans go, not Noah's lifespan. Shem lived two thirds of Noah's life.

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And then the lifespan goes down, down, down, down, down. And population -wise, we don't live very long right now, but those old men and women also, but the men especially, having children in that post -flood pre -Babel population, you could have like one man has a child at age 20.

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Okay. But then he lives to 500 years old and has a child. That second child will have like, you know, 8 ,000 mutations compared to 10.

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The amount of mutation load being dumped in our population is huge, which means that some of those branches on the tree, it's not time, it's how old the father was when he had the child.

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So I have no reason to believe in a molecular clock. We don't see the molecular clock, even the evolutionary data.

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They can put Adam and Eve anywhere they want. But when you look at the mutation rate, even today, just look at how often a

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Y chromosome mutates, like one to three mutations per generation. How often a mitochondria mutates, it's like one mutation every other generation, every third generation maybe.

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You put that on the tree and you realize that all those long branches can be explained in 4 ,000 years.

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So we actually have to slow the mutation rate down to get the data that we see.

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It's orders of magnitude wrong compared to the evolutionary answer, which is a really slow mutation rate.

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So all that together tells me Adam and Eve are real, and the biblical Adam and Eve are real. That was my five minutes.

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I did my best in five minutes. That's great. Like you said, I'm sure we could do an entire episode just on that.

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So there's kind of two different directions I could go here based on questions we received. You've touched on them briefly, so I'll do one and then the other.

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You've definitely discussed this already, but let's get really specific. A frequent question we receive is, who is

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Cain's wife? And biblically speaking, it had to be his sister or perhaps if other siblings had children, it could have been like a niece, but sister is the highly likely explanation.

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So how is that genetically safe? And then we can ask the same question with Noah's basically grandchildren who would have had to intermarry.

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How is that genetically safe? When today it's not genetically safe. It's not.

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And yet Abraham married his half sister, Sarah, and they were unable to get pregnant.

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It took a miracle of God to intervene. And then their son Isaac had Jacob and Esau, and Esau was covered in hair.

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He had the hypertrichiosis gene. He had the wolfman gene maybe, but he had something very strange about him.

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He's an extremely hairy person. What's going on with that? Well, mutations are starting to accumulate.

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It's not good to marry your close relatives. I mean, Leah had weak eyes, whatever that means. We don't know, but I assume that her family over there in Haran was also intermarrying many times.

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Yeah, actually that's true because her grandfather married her aunt, something like that.

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I mean, yeah. So we have seen lots of loops in the family tree and problems are starting to already appear.

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And then 500 or more years later, God tells Moses, don't let anyone marry their cousin.

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And that was smart. Okay, but going back to Adam and Eve, I read an article in our

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Creation Magazine, which is now on creation .com. How old was Cain when he killed Abel?

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That's an interesting question. Everyone assumes they're young men, but the Bible doesn't say that.

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In fact, the next son that's named is Seth, which basically means replacement.

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So the next son born after the murder is there to replace the one that Eve lost, but that happened when

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Adam and Eve were 130 years old. So there are very few time statements in early Genesis.

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All we know is that this murder, Cain killing Abel, happened within the first 130 years of creation.

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And I suspect it's closer to the 130 year mark because I don't think that Seth is the third child born.

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That means Eve's only having a child like every 43 years or something like that. That's ridiculous. She had more children than that.

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So Cain could have been a great -grandfather, great -great -grandfather by this point in time.

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We don't know. It could have been anywhere in there. There could already be a lot of people in the world. There were probably already more siblings because Adam and Eve had other sons and daughters, the

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Bible says. So that answers the question of where'd Cain get his wife. It's a woman in that population.

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It could be his sister. It could be his niece. It could be his great -niece or great -grandniece. It's just a woman. It explains the anyone who finds me shall kill me.

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Why is he worried about anyone who finds him if there's only now three people in the world? He just killed his brother, right?

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No, there's not just Adam, Eve, Cain, and Abel. There's probably lots of other people, and he's afraid someone's gonna kill me.

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It answers the problem. How could he build a city? Well, city doesn't mean like Manhattan, right?

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City means a village with a wall. It's an enclosure. It's a group of houses, a city, not a gigantic millions of people strong edifice.

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But there could have been thousands of people. It could have been hundreds, at least dozens of people. He could have already had a family.

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It's like the whole problem evaporates when you actually dig down into what the

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Bible actually says, and you look at the assumptions that are in our mind. All my life, I had the assumption that Cain and Abel were like 15 years old.

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And it's kind of reasonable because it's like Cain and Abel are born, and then

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Cain kills Abel. And we don't know anything else. There's nothing else stated. But then the next statement is 130 years later,

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Seth is born. Oh, it's a rich story with very few details.

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But the details that were given allow us to realize that there's a huge number of possible things here that answer the whole problem.

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Therefore, I don't think Cain and Abel really were teenagers when this happened. Anyway, et cetera.

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And then the genetic aspect of that question, how is it safe for siblings to intermarry in the very early stages of humanity?

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Well, if Adam and Eve are created with no mutations, maybe some genetic diversity, but no mutations, no bad alleles, there's no reason why their children can't get married.

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There's nothing risky about it. I mean, God didn't put a law, don't marry close relatives, until what, 2 ,500 years after creation?

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Something like that, in the time of Moses? I mean, that's a long time later. We see lots of intermarriage.

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I mean, Moses's father married Moses's aunt. Oh, no, Moses's father married his own aunt.

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We see Esau marrying one of Ishmael's daughters.

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Of course, the horrible example of Lot, that's not good. But even in modern times,

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I mean, Charles Darwin married his cousin, and her brother married one of Charles Darwin's sisters. And all of his wife's brothers and sisters all married first cousins.

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And first cousins, it was a very common practice up until, in fact, there's still people today who do this, certain religious groups still marry cousins on purpose.

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The reason they do that, it keeps the money in the family. So brother and her sister will say, okay, your son marries my daughter, and we get to keep the farm, essentially, or the apartment, or the savings account.

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That's why people do it. It keeps money in the family, and it's what people have done throughout history.

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People always tended to marry people who were born and grew up very close to them.

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So you get all these little pockets of inbreeding all across the world. Each little village in the ancient world was a little pocket of inbreeding.

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It's not safe today. In Adam and Eve's time, it would have been fine. But look what happened after the flood.

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You get a lot of inbreeding, and the lifespan plummets. So I suspect that's the effect of mutation accumulation with inbreeding.

25:52

Makes sense to me, very much does. So one question that comes to mind, and something you mentioned earlier, you mentioned

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Neanderthals. So we'll get a lot of questions about who are the Neanderthals, who are cavemen, what do they have to do with humanity?

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But a really funny story that I like to share, and my sister will get a kick out of this. She, a few years ago for Christmas, got me one of those online

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DNA tests. And we both took those tests and found out that we have a 50 %

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DNA match. So I legitimately have to claim that she actually is my sister. But one thing that I was fascinated by is there's a report of how much

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Neanderthal DNA we have. And it comes up with a report saying,

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I am far less Neanderthal than my sister. So I love that particular test, and I send her a text message with that picture.

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Every once in a while, just a reminder. So who were the Neanderthals, and what do they have to do with our

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DNA today? That's a great question, and we get asked this a lot also. I did write an article for creation .com

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that pointed out that Neanderthals are post -flood people. So that's the first thing we can answer.

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They're not pre -flood people. They're not a half monkey, half ape people that lived on the earth.

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They're not a separate creation. They are descendants of Adam. They're also descendants of Noah. They're buried in modern sediments.

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Sometimes they're mixed with modern humans. They weren't washed into caves, like some people would believe, because the caves can't form until after the flood anyway.

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That's flood -deposited limestones that then has to be dissolved to make a cave. They lived in Europe and Asia after the flood, and again, even more so than normal, shockingly inbred little communities.

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They have long runs of what are called runs of homozygosity, long pieces of their chromosomes that are identical in both copies because they had the same grandparents or whatever, but they never achieved a large population size.

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Looking at their genetics, there might've been 5 ,000 of them at most at any point in time, and we're talking from the

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Atlantic coast of Portugal all the way to where Kazakhstan, Russia, China, and Mongolia come together in Eastern Asia.

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That's a huge, huge range for only a few thousand people. So they were very spread out, very inbred, and very human.

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And that's the thing that the evolutionary community has resisted for a long time. As the data have piled up, you can no longer say they're not human.

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When they first sequenced a Y chromosome in the Neanderthals, a partial Y chromosome, said, oh, look how different it is, ha, ha, ha.

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Well, that was weird because they had like 15 skeletons they were pulling

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DNA out of, and all of them were female. That was for like 10 or 15 years, like where are the males?

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They finally got a partial male, it didn't look, but then they got a good Y chromosome sequence from a Neanderthal, and it is modern human.

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It is a human Y chromosome. It is as clearly as human Y chromosome as you can be. So they said, oh, well, maybe a modern human male mated with a

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Neanderthal female, and that Y chromosome spread out and replaced all the other Y chromosomes in the

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Neanderthal population. Maybe, or maybe they were human to begin with.

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We've got archeological evidence. They made musical instruments.

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They made makeup. They had decorations. They possibly painted in caves.

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They would, we know they sailed across the Mediterranean because they ended up on islands that have never been connected to the coast.

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You can't even see them from the coastline. So they had to be able to sail. They dove down 20 to 30 feet to collect shellfish that only live at 20 to 30 feet and would have a clam bake on the shore.

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They had a diverse diet. All these things are just screaming that they're humans.

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They had some sort of a symbolic, spiritual understanding of things like any other ancient human did.

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And we know they intermarried with modern humans because you and I carry Neanderthal DNA. But consider the out of Africa theory.

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We're told that Homo erectus was living around the world and some population in Africa went through a crash and they crashed down to an effective size of about 10 ,000 people.

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That's a near extinction event. That would usually drive most species to extinction. And during this long bottleneck, because of all the inbreeding, most of genetic diversity was lost.

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And somehow Homo sapiens evolved in this bottleneck. So a thing that usually drives species extinct, we went from this inferior

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Homo erectus to the superior Homo sapiens. And then 20, 30 ,000 years ago or so, we spread across the world out of Africa.

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And when we ran into the Neanderthals who did not go through that bottleneck, they were supposed to be a different branch, a pre -human branch.

31:13

We're not supposed to be Homo sapiens. Well, we intermated with them, intermarried with them and left children behind.

31:20

That's crazy. That's not the out of Africa story. They're supposed to be a different species and yet all humans on earth today,

31:29

Africa a little bit, but everyone else in the world a lot of it, about 3%, we have Neanderthal DNA.

31:36

So they're humans. They're descendants of Adam, descendants of Noah, and they lived on the earth and as the population in the

31:43

Middle East grew and expanded up into Europe, which was a marginal environment for a long time after the flood where the

31:48

Neanderthals are living, we ran into them. I suspect there's probably some rape and a lot of murder and a lot of warfare, but also normal marriages and children left behind and therefore we carry their

32:00

DNA. So the pictures you see of the Neanderthals with their unique genetic features were due to the

32:08

Neanderthals likely interbreeding far too closely, eliminating any genetic diversity.

32:15

Yeah, in fact, the earliest Neanderthals don't have the classic Neanderthal shape. There's still more

32:20

Neanderthal than what we call a modern human, but it's the later ones who have the heavier brow ridges and the no chin and the occipital bun and I don't remember which one.

32:32

I think this part of our arm is longer than this part of our arm and Neanderthals are opposite and the legs too.

32:39

So they wouldn't have been very good long distance runners, but they had a lot extra power because their muscles and their bones are shaped a little different.

32:46

They would have been really strong. But that tends to be the last Neanderthals. The earlier ones,

32:52

I mean, in caves in like Spain, they're looking at these things, they're like, is this Neanderthal or not? We call these Homo heiderbergensis or do we call it

32:59

Neanderthal? And it's really confusing, but when you look at it genetically, these people are the ancestors of the later very

33:07

Neanderthal looking peoples because like you said, the inbreeding caused them to morph into maybe we call it a race, a people group,

33:17

I don't know, but they looked different and they were tough, they were strong.

33:24

They call us gracile, they call them robust. So we're thin, they're thick, they're strong, but they're also humans.

33:33

There's another group of people though. They're called Denisovans. The first evidence from them came from a fragment of a pinky bone found in Denisova cave in Eastern Europe.

33:45

And they are as different from us as Neanderthals are. They're slightly more related to Neanderthals, but they're still, they're very different.

33:53

The Neanderthals are very different from us. And they intermarried with Neanderthals and they intermarried with humans too, modern humans.

34:01

There are some people, basically anyone from Eastern Asia is about 3 %

34:07

Neanderthal and less than 1 % Denisovan. But there are some people living in Indonesia or the

34:13

Philippines that are 7 % Denisovan and still 3 %ish

34:20

Neanderthal. That means 10 % of their genomes did not come out of Africa. 10 % of their genome is non -human or not

34:30

Homo sapiens. And yet they're just as smart as everybody else. They're just as beautiful or handsome as everybody else or just as inquisitive, just as creative.

34:40

They're as human as any human can be. And yet 10 % of their genome is archaic.

34:47

Well, maybe Neanderthals and Denisovans really are humans and really are descendants of Noah, et cetera.

34:53

I mean, that's a long story, a fascinating story. And modern genetics is actually shooting itself in a foot as far as evolution is concerned.

35:04

Fascinating, Rob. Thank you for answering these questions from a more scientific background than we typically do at GotQuestions.

35:12

I mean, I am fascinated by these issues, been studying and enjoying them. And I'm very grateful for ministries like Creation Ministries International who can dive into these things in more in -depth than GotQuestions typically does.

35:24

So how can people learn more about you and Creation Ministries International? Well, simple, just go to creation .com.

35:33

You can type in Carter in the little search box or you just click around and you find one of my articles, anything about genetics. I've written a lot of them on there.

35:41

We're on Facebook, we're on YouTube, all the social media channels. We've got a huge presence there.

35:49

We're as busy as we can be. We have made several movies. We have a gigantic website.

35:55

We have a Creation Magazine, a Journal of Creation, and we speak in churches all over the place. But you know, we also lean on you a little bit too.

36:01

I regularly, when I'm looking on Google for an answer to something, a GotQuestions article will pop up and like, oh, look at that, they've already written on it.

36:09

So I'd be able to just reference your article in something that we're writing also. So we're working along parallel lines here and it's really exciting to see more people engaged in trying to back up the

36:20

Bible and trying to answer basic questions and trying to refute straight up evolutionary theory because that is really difficult to deal with in a gospel sense, if evolution is true.

36:33

Absolutely. So we'll include some links in the show notes and the description of this video goes on YouTube and also at podcast .gotquestions

36:40

.org where people can read some of the direct articles you've written to the things we discussed today. So Dr.

36:46

Robert Carter, thank you again for joining me on the GotQuestions podcast today. It was my pleasure to be here.

36:53

This has been the GotQuestions podcast discussing some of the common questions we receive about early humanity and DNA and how those things worked and how the picture the

37:04

Bible presents is true and matches what we find in the genetic record.