Last night, I rewatched the 2008 movie 10,000 BC. It a schlocky flic, but I have a soft spot for it. Not the least because of the consternation that it seems to engender in scientific-academic circles. Most of these complaints seem to revolve around the way that the movie plays fast and loose with the homo sapiens timeline. As the title suggests, this film purports to portray human life in the year 10,000 BC. However, it introduces numerous inventions, such as the pyramids, sailing ships, and iron tools that would not exist for thousands of years. Then there are the wooly mammoths employed to build said pyramids, saber tooth tigers as big as a pickup truck and terror birds (Phorusrhacids) that were long since extinct by 10,000 BC.
But you know who has relatively few complaints about these aspects of the movie? Creationists. They still want to quibble about the timeline. According to their calendar the earth was created in 4,000 BC. But they are willing to overlook the tacking on of over 6,000 years of prehistory because the movie doesn’t blaspheme and there is no swearing. “I mean evolution is not the gospel. It is only a theory after all. Right?”—As overheard at the Smithsonian in the David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins.
