"Six literal days? Interesting. So how do you explain the various fossil layers and the real laws of physics that determine sedimentation rates.
How do you explain the fact that no human or, for that matter, mammalian fossils are present in the earliest layers?"
The Bible teaches (Genesis 1) that man was here from Day Six of the creation week – created the same day as land animals (which includes dinosaurs) and one day after the sea creatures and the birds.
Evolutionists claim that the order in the fossil record (e.g. trilobites deep down and humans near the top) is due to a succession of life forms on Earth, which occurred over many hundreds of millions of years. In this view, the rock strata represent huge periods of time.
On the other hand, creationists believe that most of the fossils were formed during the year-long global Flood recorded in Genesis chapters 6—9. Thus creationists believe that the order in the fossil record is due to the order of burial during the Flood, and the local catastrophes that followed. So, skeptics ask, why are human fossils not found with dinosaur fossils, for example?
Do the rock strata represent eons of time?
There is a wealth of evidence that the rock strata do not represent vast periods of time. For example, the huge Coconino sandstone formation in the Grand Canyon is about 100 m thick and extends to some 250,000 km2 in area. The large-scale cross-bedding shows that it was all laid down in deep, fast-flowing water in a matter of days. Other rock layers in the Grand Canyon indicate that they were rapidly deposited also, and without substantial time-breaks between the laying down of each unit. Indeed, the whole Grand Canyon sequence is bent at the Kaibab Upwarp, in some spots quite radically, and without cracking. This indicates that the strata, which supposedly represent some 300 million years of evolutionary time, were all still soft when the bending occurred. This is consistent with the layers being deposited and bent quickly, during the Genesis Flood.
[For other evidences for the non-existence of the eons of time and for the rapid deposition of the layers, please see the Answers Book, The Young Earth, and Raging Waters
Q&A: Living Fossils and Q&A: Geology.]
Evidence that dinosaurs
and humans co-existed
Much evidence suggests that people and dinosaurs lived together, not separated by 65 million years or more, as evolutionists believe:
Many historical accounts of living animals, which were known as ‘dragons’, are good descriptions of what we call dinosaurs – such as Triceratops, Stegosaurus, Tyrannosaurus and Ankylosaurus. The video, The Great Dinosaur Mystery documents some of these. The account in Job 40 of behemoth sounds like one of the big dinosaurs, such as Apatosaurus or Brachiosaurus.
Unmineralized (‘unfossilized’) dinosaur bones. How could these bones, some of which even have blood cells in them, be 65 million years or more old? It stretches the imagination to believe they are even many thousands of years old.
lRocks bearing dinosaur fossils often contain very little plant material – e.g., in the Morrison formation in North America. This is another indication that the strata do not represent eras of life on Earth. If the strata represent an age of dinosaurs, what did they eat? A large Apatosaurus would need over three tonnes of vegetation per day, yet there is no indication of significant vegetation in many of these dinosaur-bearing strata. In other words, we see buried dinosaurs, not buried ecosystems or an ‘Age of Dinosaurs’.
What about the general pattern?
Although the rock strata do not represent a series of epochs of Earth history, as is widely believed, they still follow a general pattern. For example, relatively immobile and bottom-dwelling sea creatures tend to be found in the lower strata that contain complex organisms, and the mobile land vertebrates tend to be found in the top layers. Consider the following factors:
Vertebrate fossils are exceedingly rare compared with invertebrate (without a backbone) sea creatures. The vast proportion of the fossil record is invertebrate sea creatures, and plant material in the form of coal and oil. Vertebrate fossils are relatively rare and human fossils are even rarer.
If there were, say, 10 million people at the time of the Flood and all their bodies were preserved and uniformly distributed throughout the 700 million cubic kilometres of fossil-bearing sedimentary rock layers, only one would be found in every 70 cubic kilometres of rock. Thus you would be unlikely to find even one human fossil.
A global Flood beginning with the breaking up of the fountains of the great deep would tend to bury bottom-dwelling sea creatures first – many of these are immobile, or relatively so. They are also abundant and generally robust (for example, shellfish). As the waters rose to envelop the land, land creatures would be buried last. Also, water plants would tend to be buried before land-based swamp plants, which, in turn would be buried before upland plants.
On the other hand, land animals, such as mammals and birds, being mobile (especially birds), could escape to higher ground and be the last to succumb. People would cling to rafts, logs etc. until the very end and then tend to bloat and float and be scavenged by fish, with the bones breaking down rather quickly, rather than being preserved. This would make human fossils from the Flood exceedingly rare.
Further, the more mobile, intelligent animals would tend to survive the Flood longest and be buried last, so their remains would be vulnerable to erosion by the receding floodwaters at the end of the Flood and in the aftermath of the Flood. Hence their remains would tend to be destroyed. The intelligence factor could partly account for the apparent separation of dinosaurs and mammals such as cattle, for example.8
Another factor is the sorting action of water. A coal seam at Yallourn in Victoria, Australia, has a 0.5 m thick layer of 50 % pollen. The only way such a layer of pollen could be obtained is through the sorting action of water in a massive watery catastrophe that gathered the plant material from a large area and deposited it in a basin in the Yallourn area.
‘Cope’s Rule’ describes the tendency of fossils (e.g. shellfish) to get bigger as you trace them upward through the geological strata. But why should evolution make things generally bigger? Indeed, living forms of fossils tend to be smaller than their fossil ancestors. A better explanation may be the sorting action of water.9
See geologist Woodmorappe’s paper for an in-depth treatment of the fossil record of cephalopods (such as octopuses and squid) and how it concurs with Creation and the Flood.
These are some factors that could account for the patterns seen in the fossil record, including the general absence of human fossils in Flood deposits. Most of the fossil record does not represent a history of life on Earth, but the order of burial during the Flood. We would expect a pattern with a global Flood, but not an entirely consistent pattern, and this is what we find in the geological strata.
There are problems in reconstructing any historical event, but especially one that has no modern analogue. And such is the Flood. So we have problems imagining the precise sequence of events by which the Flood eroded and deposited material, creating fossils. It may well be that some enterprising creationist scientists will come up with a model of the Flood that will fully account for the fossil and rock sequences.
Of interest in this regard is the TAB (Tectonically Associated Biological) provinces model of Woodmorappe. Dr Tasman Walker has suggested a model of the Flood that also seems to explain much of the data. The catastrophic plate tectonics model of Drs Austin, Baumgardner, and colleagues also looks interesting in explaining much of the fossil distribution (see Chapter 11). Other models are being developed which may also be helpful in explaining the evidence.13
One can be confident that the evolutionary view of Earth history is wrong and the record in the rocks and fossils, including the distribution of human fossils, makes much more sense in the light of the Bible’s account of Creation, the Fall and the Flood.
For more on creation visit www.answersingenesis.org. Their Q&A section deals with many issues like this one and they can answer and questions about science that you have. That will save me loads of time I don't have to explain everything. If you want to ask me a question I prefer to be emailed.