Dr Paul Allen

An Australian-led team has dated cave art in Sulawesi at about 40,000 years old, putting it in the same vintage as the oldest known paintings in Spain and France. The images are spread across more than 90 sites in a limestone area 45 minutes’ drive from Makassar , Indonesia’s fifth-largest city. Archeologists have known of them for more than 50 years but assumed them to be less than 10,000 years old. Griffith University geochemist Maxime Aubert said he had first visited the site briefly, taking samples from a few caves. “I ran them in the machine and when I saw the numbers coming out, I thought, ‘Oh shit’,” he said. The study, dates the earliest image — a hand stencil — as at least 39,900 years old. The world’s oldest known cave painting, a red disc in Spain, is dated at 900 years older. The Sulawesi sites also include images of pig-like animals painted more than 35,400 years ago, possibly making them older than the earliest known figurative rock art in Western Europe — a painted...

Image by digitaljournal.com via Flickr According to a  recent article in Newsweek , in 2010 there were: 141 million active blogs . 2 billion daily Google searches. 1,052,803 books published. 247 billion emails sent. 4.5 billion text messages sent. 10 billion songs downloaded on iTunes . In the midst of this avalanche of information I can’t help but think of Jesus ’ words to Martha : Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her. (Luke 10:41–42) We can be troubled, and distracted, and overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data available to us. But when you get down to it, only one thing really matters. If all the blogs were gone, and Google went down, and teens suddenly stopped texting, it wouldn’t really matter that much. There’s only one Word that really matters: God ’s Word. We have it. Let’s never let the mass of information available push away from...