Aielyn on 04 January 2014
| padib said: According to the bible, disease, predation and thorns are part of the curse at the fall of man. You have no way to prove that such things did not exist prior to the fall (say 6k years ago). Also, there are reports of prayer healing people, and there is a lot of work done on the power of the mind over disease. So it still begs the question. |
There's an entire field of scientific study called "Paleopathology", which is the study of ancient diseases. And yes, they study the diseases of dinosaurs, amongst other diseases.
So yes, there is proof (to the extent that one can "prove" something physical) of disease a lot further back than 6k years ago. As already noted by someone else, there is "proof" of predation back then, too. As for "thorns"...
http://joelkontinen.blogspot.com.au/2011/03/fossils-of-thorns-and-thistles.html
"A textbook on the evolution of plants shows that there were thorny plants already in the Devonian Era roughly 345–395 million years ago. It has a picture of Psilophyton crenulatum, a plant that is not very different from the thorny plants we see in our time."
