Building the Ark with Technology and Animal Power?

A spell back, we examined characteristics of Noah's Ark and saw that the entire process was not just an series of miracles (see "Noah's Ark and the Miraculous" for those article links). Answers in Genesis has spent considerable time on the logistics of the Ark. Here are two more articles of interest.

It has been a dogma of Darwinism that early humans swung down from the trees but had not yet evolved intelligence. Numerous examples of their genius ruins evolutionary presuppositions. That is because humans were created with intelligence from the beginning.

Grinding peanuts with ox power, Wikimedia Commons / Michael Gunther (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Indeed, the Bible mentions skills of people before the Genesis Flood which included metalworking and the like. (Some people speculate that Noah and family could have hired people to help build the Ark, even though they would have thought it was foolishness.) They lived a mighty long time, and after the Flood, Noah reached a total of 950 years (Gen. 9:29), his son Shem lived about 600 years (Gen. 11:10), and it can be inferred that Ham and Japheth also had long lifespans. This undoubtedly would have impressed people living much shorter amounts of time. Also, they had time to learn antediluvian skills and then pass them along later.

By combining the know-how of the early Egyptian, Chinese, etc., we should have a representation of Babel technology. The Babel event occurred within a few generations after the flood, so the technology used by the earliest post-flood cultures should give us a baseline for Noah’s capabilities. Of course, it is possible that the world before Noah’s day surpassed these technological abilities and that there was a loss of technology when the world was destroyed during the flood, and then further loss when humanity was fragmented at Babel. But building the ark would not require technology beyond what is attested in the earliest cultures post-Babel.

Read the article in its entirety at "What Technology Was Available to Build the Ark?" Be sure to come back for the second part.

Cutting and sawing, pulley systems, hinges, transporting lumber, and all that good stuff is importabnt, but remember that early man also used draft animals for labor. While we can imagine horses, camels, oxen, and other things, they would have looked different than their modern counterparts. That's because of genetic variation, speciation, natural selection, and so on. They may have been stronger and more intelligent back then, so it would have been wise to put them to work.

Genesis 4 tells us that Abel was a shepherd, which indicates at least some level of animal domestication pre-flood. While we are not told specifically which animals were domesticated, we know that modern varieties of draft animals are the product of human selection post-flood. However, it is possible that at least some varieties of animals existed that were domesticated enough to be suitable for some of the uses below, and the use of draft animal power is attested to in the earliest civilizations post-flood.

The article has examples of draft animal power (plus some charts for those interested in those details) and how they could have been used by Noah and company. To read it, see "Could Animal Power Have Helped Noah Build the Ark?"