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Originally posted by Ricky

I don't know, in my personal opinion based on intuition, Verlch was worse, but I can't figure out why I think this.

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I was curious because I really with to know exactly how you resolve
the question of how the earth managed to get repopulated quickly
enough to allow the rise of Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Chinese culture
in the years immediately following the Flood.

Now, the way it's been explained to me is that all human civilization
arose post-Flood. Using ages and dates in the Bible it's possible to
determine the exact year (starting from the creation of Adam at 4026
BCE):

From Adam's creation to the birth of Seth 130 years
Then to the birth of Enosh 105 years
To the birth of Kenan 90 years
To the birth of Mahalalel 70 years
To the birth of Jared 65 years
To the birth of Enoch 162 years
To the birth of Methuselah 65 years
To the birth of Lamech 187 years
To the birth of Noah 182 years
To the Flood 600 years

Thanks to Bible geneology and chronology, the flood can be pinned to
2370 BCE, roughly 4,400 years ago as you said.

Anyhow, the progenitors of the modern human race were Ham, Shem and
Japheth, Noah's three sons and their wives. They were fruitful and
multiplied after the flood down to around the time of Peleg when the
Tower of Babel was built. The building of the tower lead to the
dispersion of various ethnic and language groups to all corners of the
Earth and the rest, as they say, is history.

It's impossible to work out from the Bible the exact time of the Tower
of Babel, but it's estimated to be somewhere in the neighborhood of
180 years after the flood based on when Peleg lived.

Now, the earliest known Egyptian pyramid (the Step Pyramid) has been
dated to about 300 years prior to this date, the slightly later Red
Pyramid, Bent Pyramid and (of course) the Giza Pyramids and the Sphinx
are all generally dated as occuring before the Biblical flood date as
well. Of course, these datings must be off by somewhere in the
neighborhood of 500 years or so in order for their construction to
have occured post-Tower of Babel. So, presuming thats the case the
next question is how many people needed to be alive in Egypt at the
time of the pyramids construction in order to facilitate said
construction? It's really impossible to tell for certain, but the
generally accepted estimate is around 1-2 million people living in
Egypt at the time and a pyramid building workforce around 20,000
people.

It's not only Egypt that needs to be accounted for, of course. The
entire fertile crescent region, Sumeria, Accadia, Babylon itself, that
entire region was likewise populated shortly after the flood and a lot
of cities were built indicating minimally hundreds of thousands,
likely millions more people.

In China, by around 2100 BCE (admittedly nearly 300 years after the
flood) the earliest recorded records of a Xia dynasty are known to
exist. So, presumably the China-bound descendants of the flood
survivors, when scattered at Babel, took a while to migrate over there
and then developed their culture. There were, apparently, tens or
possibly hundreds of thousands of people in China at this time as
well.

So, in an effort to determine if I could stick the to realities of
human biology and postulate a repopulation scenario, I wrote a
computer program today (I'm a programmer). I made many unreasonable
assumptions by modern standards but I assumed that God would be using
miraculous abilities to accelerate and support the repopulation
effort. My program takes various parameters but it starts with the
initial condition that 6 breeding pairs of humans (the Bible doesn't
indicate that Noah and his wife had more children than the three)
began to procreate at the fastest rate they could. The reproduction
was divinely supported to be as effective as possible. Here are the
groundrules, as optimistic as I could imagine them being:

- The maximum human lifespan is over 120 years old
- All women who are between the ages of 13 and 55 have sex once every
single week that they do not have their period or are currently
pregnant, on average 90% of all potentially pregnant women are
pregnant at any given time
- Their odds of successful fertilization per attempt are 1 in 3
- As soon as a girl turns 13, she begins producing children, no
exceptions and she stays active producing children until the age of 55
- There is no infant mortality
- There are no deaths during childbirth
- Death rates in general are dramatically lower than in modern times

My goal in this simulation was to see what would happen if
childbearing rates were accelerated enough to account for the
populations necessary for the Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Chinese
cultures.

Ive run this program a bunch of times and I know that it is relatively
flawed, but wherever possible I have tried to err towards miraculous
reproduction rates, not to simulate known population growth rates.
After 180 years from the Flood, at approximately the time period of
the Tower of Babel, the population of the Earth the app comes up with
numbers in the following ballpark (these are from a specific run,
random factors lead to slightly different numbers with each run
through):

- Population of the Earth: 61,162

Hey, not bad, I thought when I ran it the first time. A decent seed
population for Babel, and only about 500 years after the claimed
Egyptian dates... Then, I decided to break it down and I found
something fascinating... They're almost all children under the age of
12:

- Girls under 12: 25,989
- Boys under 12: 21,446
- Adults (over age 12 qualifies as an adult here): 13,727

Also, at the time I stopped my simulation at 180 years, there were
6,694 women over the age of 13 of whom 5,291 were currently pregnant.
The rest were adult men.

So, there are some major problems at this point. First, we're running
out of time because the dates of the Pyramids are getting farther in
the past and that gap can only get so big and maintain any
believability. Second, a world made up of only about 7,000 "adult"
males, 5,300 pregnant women and 48,000 kids is not one in which the
population would spread out, build massive cities and monuments,
develop writing and all that because they'd be spending all their
time raising children and finally, we're a few million people short.
The bodies simply aren't there. You could keep this up for a few
hundred more years (and after I optimize the code a little I intend to
try) but I don't see how it's possible to keep up the required
population growth rates and still alleviate the problem of having too
many kids to adults, especially seeing as those adults are made up of
a lot of teenagers. Humans only grow so fast. Were the Egyptian,
Mesopotamian and Chinese civilations founded by hundreds of thousands
of little kids? Did human gestation speed up to be fewer than 40
wee

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Originally posted by Dave W.

SciFi Chick, you might be interested in this old thread.

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