The Art of "OOPs"
by Eric Rauch

A little known fact of the archaeological world is that many of the artifacts that are unearthed do not fit the time period that the geologists say the rock layers surrounding the artifact are from. This field of study, known as OOPArts (Out of Place Artifacts), is yet another monkey wrench in the smoking and archaic machine of man’s supposed evolution.

Not much is made public about OOPArts, except for the occasional Discovery Channel documentary that makes you go “hmmm.” But the connection between the artifacts and other fields of study are almost never made. For instance, a rather advanced “analog computational device” was found aboard a ship that had sunk in the Aegean Sea before the time of Christ. The device included sophisticated differential gears, not unlike something we would find behind modern clock-faces.1 If we were to ask the evolutionary anthropologist what people and technology were like over 2000 years ago, he would tell us “primitive.” In other words, the artifact doesn’t fit the prevailing paradigm—it’s “out of place,” an anomaly. And this is only one of thousands of examples of these OOPArts.

When man begins his reasoning outside of the Scriptures, he will invariably turn God’s Word on its head. God tells us that Adam was created “very good” and in His own image. For this reason, Adam was rational, reasonable and highly intelligent. Man was created perfect and has been in various states of decline ever since. Yet, the evolutionary paradigm asks us to believe that man has been inclining, or improving, over the course of his existence. At first, it seems to make sense. After all, we have refrigerators and microwaves today while the early colonists of this country had to use salt to preserve their meat and an open flame to cook it, and this was only 250 years ago. Imagine how bad it was only 250 years before that. But this is simply modern arrogance and it begs the question. I may be typing this article on a laptop computer in a home with central air, electric lights, and a thousand other “modern conveniences,” but if any of these stop working, I will become the most unproductive person on the planet. Think about what happens at the grocery store when the little red-light scanner malfunctions—the line comes to a screeching halt.

Several years ago, PBS had a show called Colonial House that took modern families and placed them into 18th century colonial America. Most of the contestants couldn’t handle it and would have starved and/or frozen to death had it not been a controlled environment—so much for our “advanced” society. I remember watching a documentary several years ago about the Easter Island statues. The experts that were being interviewed were pontificating and theorizing on how such a “primitive” culture could have erected these massive stone statues. The first problem was that the figures are carved from one piece of stone and must have been brought from another part of the island; how did they transport them? Next, these massive figures had to be stood up in place in a deliberate pattern, not scattered here and there. Then there is the problem of raising them. It took a team of hundreds of moderns—using laptops, GPS, geometry, and calculus—to replicate what a bunch of primitive islanders did well over five hundred years ago. The irony seemed to be missed on the show’s participants though. They were too busy high-fiving and celebrating their “monumental” achievement to be bothered with details like this. So, which ones are really the “primitives?”

1 Donald Chittick, The Puzzle of Ancient Man (Newberg, OR: Creation Compass, 1998), 8. See also Graham Hancock, Fingerprint of the Gods.