A few years ago, as was the custom, I filled in for my receptionist and the front desk of the clinic I managed while she went to lunch. One day in the mid-2000's, we had just received our daily mail, and there was a Time Magazine article detailing recent discoveries which, in time, have rendered the Clovis-first theory obselete, and more recently, downright wrong. I don't feel like getting into an explanation right now, but, long story short - athropologists have discovered and carbon-dated artifacts and bone fragments from numerous settlements in northeast, central, and midwest North America that predate the Clovis settlements (the Asiatic people who came across the Bering Strait when it was an ice bridge and still crossable by foot) by more than ten thousand years - thus devalidating the science of the previously accepted Clovis-first settlers and throwing the careers of many professors, academians, and forensic anthropologists into a deep, dark shadow.
Anyway, I asked Stephanie to put the Time Magazine aside as I planned on reading it during her lunch hour (it's good to be the King). Anyway, when she read the title - "early Americans were here as long as 30,000 years ago" - she said, in the most superfluous southern drawl...and I quote...
"This here article is stupid and wrong. The whole earth ain't but six thousand years old."
She was a Southern Baptist Conventionist and apparently beleived in the Ussher chronology, which I know for a fact is only still taught by the most rigorous and blissfully ignorant ultra-fundamentalist Christian factions.
Anyway, my only response was to sit there like a slack-jawed yokel and eventually walk away without saying a word. Sometimes you just can't win.
SCARY!!
According to a Gallup poll in December 2010, around 40% of Americans believe in YEC, rising to over 50% among Republicans but reducing strongly with level of education (only 22% of respondents with postgraduate degrees compared with 47% of those with high school or less).
http://www.gallup.com/poll/145286/Four-Americans-Believe-Strict-Creationism.aspx
