Living to 900 Years Old

Presentation by Jake Hebert

Jake Hebert: As you are well aware, the theme of this conference is, Where is the Promise of His Coming? And the Apostle Peter told us that in the Last Days, you would have scoffers who would come, claiming that all things continue as they were from the beginning of the Creation, and they would deny Christ’s return, they would deny Creation, and they would deny the reality of God’s judgment of the world with a flood in the days of Noah.

And we as Christians, we know that things do not continue as they were from the beginning of the Creation. There were some big differences in that pre-Flood world. In fact, one of the most obvious differences is that according to Scripture, people routinely lived to be 900 years old. And you know what? A lot of people have trouble with this. Is it like a late night TV infomercial? Is it too good to be true? And, you know, at ICR, we certainly do take it seriously. But I’m sorry to say even some Christian apologists are claiming that these ages should be understood symbolically or metaphorically and not literally.

But the Bible is a history book, and don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t use the Bible as evidence. Its testimony that people once lived to be very old is evidence for that. And since the Bible is God’s Word, we ought to expect there to be some confirmation of that. We might expect that there might be some people groups or historians who recalled this extreme longevity.

And it turns out there are! Josephus, the Jewish historian, affirms that people used to live to be very old, and he cited 11 other ancient historians to corroborate his claim. Augustine of Hippo, he said the same thing. You’ve got a lot of Native American tribes that say this as well, that say their ancestors used to live to be 200 years old. And you’ve got documents like the Sumerians Kings List that affirm that people before the Flood were living to be very old.

But is it possible there might be some scientific confirmation of this? And I think it’s quite possible there is. Now, we have to answer a really important question from the get-go. Do we believe that this longevity was natural or supernatural? Growing up, I always assumed it was natural. I just assumed there was something about the pre-Flood world that enabled people to live to be very old, and I think that’s correct. There’s no hint in Scripture that this longevity was in any way miraculous.

Now, if that’s true, you are almost forced to conclude that the animals would also have experienced much greater longevity. And the reason for that is very simple. Just about any mechanism or mechanisms you can think of to explain that greater longevity in humans is also going to apply to the animals. Some people think, well, Adam and Eve, they had no mistakes in their DNA, and their descendants, their immediate descendants, had just a few mistakes in their DNA, and that could be part of it, but the same thing would’ve been true of the animals. When God made the animals, there were no mistakes in their DNA either.

Maybe it’s environmental, maybe there’s something about that pre-Flood world. Well, the animals are living in the same world that the people are. So you’re pretty much forced to conclude the animals also experienced extreme longevity, and it’s just possible that the fossils might confirm that. And so the first point I want to make here is that these fossils are from the Flood. Now, it’s important to say that because a lot of the examples I’m going to show you, evolutionists will claim that these creatures lived millions of years ago. And we strongly, strongly disagree with that.

The rocks and the fossils are from the Flood. These are water deposited sediments that later hardened into rock, and they cover enormous amounts of surface area on the earth’s land surface. They stretch from continent to continent. I mean, you’ve got these continuous rock units that just cover hundreds and thousands of square miles. And my coworker, Dr. Tim Clarey, has done a book on this. Moreover, these were deposited rapidly.

There was a uniformitarian geologist and paleontologist named Derek Ager, and he wrote a book in 1993 called, The New Catastrophism, and he made it clear in that book he did not think much of creationists, but he acknowledged that there are things in the rock record that look like they formed extremely rapidly. And one of the examples he gives is called Sutton Stone in Wales. And the conventional thinking is that it formed over five million years. And Derek Ager, an evolutionist, said, “I think it was deposited in a matter of hours or minutes.” And we creationists agree, but we think that’s true of the entire rock record. That rock record was deposited during the year of the Flood.

Also, you’ve got soft tissue and dinosaur fossils and other fossils, and we know based on well understood chemistry, those things cannot last for millions of years. So we have very good reason to believe that these rocks and fossils, rather than being evidence of evolution and millions of years, are rather evidence for the Flood. In fact, in some cases, you can still see the material is still soft and stretchy. So when you see these fossils, including dinosaur fossils, you’re not looking at creatures that lived millions of years ago, you are looking at creatures that perished in the Genesis Flood.

All right. Now, there’s something else I need to mention. We believe that the Flood triggered an Ice Age. In fact, we’ve got a very strong explanation for the Ice Age that is way better than what the evolutionists have. And as those ice sheets melted at the end of the Ice Age, you’re going to have some catastrophic flooding. And there might have even been some catastrophic flooding during the Ice Age itself, because we think there’s a lot of rain at lower latitudes.

But the bottom line is you’re going to get fossils. You’re going to get more fossils. So, you’re going to have fossils from the Flood, but you’re also going to have a few fossils from this post-Flood Ice Age. And we know from Scripture that lifespans were dropping after that, okay? Our best estimate is that the Ice Age lasted 700 years. It started pretty much immediately after the Flood. And the lives of the patriarchs overlap that. Their lives overlap this Ice Age. So, if their lifespans are dropping, it’s a good bet the animal lifespans are dropping too, but we might see evidence of longevity in Ice Age fossils too, not just Flood fossils.

So we want to look at direct fossil evidence and indirect fossil evidence. Now, we’ve got to cover a little background material first. Some creatures have hard body parts and they have growth rings or bands that you can count. There’re these fields out there called sclerochronology and skeletochronology, where you count these growth bands and you try to see how old the organism is. And it’s very similar to tree ring counting. They do it a lot with bivalves, clams and oysters. They do it a lot. But to do it right, you usually have to cut the clam or oyster open. You have to section it.

Now, when you do this, you will often get graphs that look like this. It’s a graph of the creature’s body size versus age. And you probably don’t care, but that’s the equation for that curve, okay? L-nought, okay, that is the size when it hatches or is born and L-max is its final adult body size. Now, truly, you don’t need to worry about the equation, but here’s what you do need to know. You’ve got rapid juvenile growth where it’s increasing very rapidly, the length is increasing rapidly. Then it starts slowing down as it gets closer to adulthood. And a lot of times, it will completely level off and the growth stops. So the organism at that point may get fatter, but it’s not going to get longer or taller, okay?

So, we have these growth curves, and we’re going to be looking at a lot of these curves. Now, there’s two ways you can construct these growth curves. The first and the best way is if you have a population of organisms, and this could be a fossil population or it could be a living population. So let’s say you have a bunch of oysters and you measure their length and you count their growth rings and you make a plot, okay, length versus age. Well, what you can do is, you can construct a best fit average trajectory to show you that organism’s average growth trajectory over time. And they do this a lot.

Now, the best way to do it is with a population, because then you can do rigorous statistical analysis, but a lot of times, you may not have multiple creatures. You might just have one. But you can still do it. You can still construct a growth curve. It’s not the best, but you can still do it. And they do this a lot as well. So, at ICR, we are firmly convinced that pretty much all of these rocks up to what the evolutionists call the Pleistocene are Flood rocks. So, they’re calling them Pliocene, Miocene, Oligocene, Eocene, all that, Cretaceous, Jurassic, Triassic, Permian, whatever, we’re saying all that’s from the Flood.

Now, the Pleistocene, what they call the Pleistocene, okay, that’s basically Ice Age, but even some of these Pleistocene rocks could be from the Flood, and a creationist made a strong argument years ago that that would be the case. So, if you’re looking at what we would call lower Pleistocene, it’s probably also from the Flood. If you’re looking at upper Pleistocene or late Pleistocene, it’s probably from the Ice Age, and the mid Pleistocene could maybe go either way. And this is not an absolute hard, fast rule, it’s a rule of thumb. So just keep that in mind when we’re looking at this.

Now, there are a couple of things we got to worry about. Ideally, we want to do an apples to apples comparison. I would like to look at a growth curve for a single Genesis kind of animal, one for the fossil version and one for the modern version. And does it look like the fossil version lived longer? That’s what we’re hoping to show. Now, most of you are probably aware that ICR, we think the Genesis kind that God created is broader than species. It’s probably at the family or genus level. So if you’re coming from the same genus, they probably belong to the same kind, even if they’ve been assigned different species names.

Now, another thing you’ve got to worry about is that even today, creatures can experience great longevity if they’re in very cold water. You’ve got this clam right here that can live to be 400 to 500 years old, but it’s the same species, at lower warmer waters, lower latitudes and warmer waters, it doesn’t live that long. You’ve got the Greenland shark. They think it can live to be 400 to 500 years old. Also, if you eat less, there’s thinking that that might increase your longevity, and people have even suggested doing that for humans, right? You eat less, you live longer, okay?

Now, what I want to point out in the examples I show you is that those are not good explanations, because in the examples I’m going to be showing you, evolutionists would agree that these creatures were living in warmer waters. And we’re going to see some examples from Antarctica. But evolutionists believe, at the time, Antarctica was much warmer than it is now. And we’re going see that they had very large body sizes, indicating they were very well fed. So that’s not an explanation either. Something else is going on here, okay?

Now, I know that was a bit of an intro, but let’s go ahead and get into the good stuff. All right, so let’s look at some long-lived, what we call extant, oysters and clams. These are oysters and clams that aren’t extinct. They’re still around today. And one that people love to eat for seafood is called the Crassostrea virginica oyster, or the Eastern oyster. Again, it’s real popular for seafood. But you’ve got fossil versions called Crassostrea titan and Crassostrea gigantissima.

Now, it’s amazing how many of these fossil species names have connotations of giantism, okay? It’s not just the oysters. And here is one of these giant Crassostrea oysters. And you can see there’s a five centimeter mark there, but maybe that doesn’t fully show you the full scale, so here’s a picture of me holding a giant fossil oyster. That gives you a feel for how big these are. Now, even the evolutionists have acknowledged that these modern Crassostrea virginica oysters are almost certainly the direct descendants of this Crassostrea gigantissima. That means it’s the same Genesis kind, okay? That means these are the descendants of these much larger oysters.

And there was a paper published in 2001 where they looked at some modern oysters, some from the Ice Age and some from what the evolutionist called the Miocene, that we think is from the Flood. And so this is a summary of their graphs. Now, the lengths of these graphs are not arbitrary, okay? The graph stops at the maximum age that was in each group of oysters. So if you look at that dark, solid line, that’s the average growth curve for the modern group, none of them lived past six years.

The slightly thinner growth curve there, that’s the Ice Age. Now, one of them at least lived to be nine years old. Now, that’s interesting. It looks like these Ice Age oysters were living maybe 50% longer than the modern ones. And then these from the Miocene, those are from the Flood, and they’re living to be 20 and 23 years old. And I want to emphasize that could easily be an underestimate because they got killed in the Flood, right? We don’t know what the true lifespan potential is, okay? But that’s how old they were when they died. And there’s other examples.

There’re other examples from the Eastern Seaboard where you’ve got these Pleistocene oysters that had much greater lifespans, and it was discussed in this 2018 paper. Here are some maximum lifespans for Maryland oysters, going from the Ice Age to the time of the American Revolution down to modern times. And you can see there’s an obvious drop in lifespan. Same thing in Virginia. North Carolina, it’s not as obvious, but there is a little bit of a drop there. And if you’re interested in all the technical details, this is open access, you can read it at the website of the Creation Research Society.

But that’s not the only example. You’ve got another oyster out there, the American bittersweet, Glycymeris americana. Actually, I think that’s a clam. I think I messed up. But nevertheless, it’s a bivalve. And these are some from North Carolina. We got growth curves from North Carolina. Now, those dark, solid lines, those are the growth curves from modern ones, and you can see that none of them are living past 10 years. But the dashed light blue lines, those are from the early Pleistocene, probably Flood or maybe Ice Age, and you can see they are routinely living to be 30, 40, 50 years old, and there’s one of them that actually made it to 86 years of age.

Now, if you look at the Florida examples, it’s not as obvious, but even evolutionists acknowledge there could be some very long-lived specimens in Florida that we just haven’t found them yet. There’s another kind called the Mercenaria clam, or the hard clam. You see some examples from North Carolina, where the ones before the Flood, they’re living longer. Florida, kind of…the early Pleistocene, it looks like they’re living longer, but it’s not nearly as pronounced.

And to be fair, there is some contrary data here. I want to be upfront with you. There’s some data that are kind of contrary, not so much on the lifespan per se, but on the body size. We were seeing that these other oysters were really big. If you look at these clams from the Pleistocene and recent ones from the Gulf of Mexico, you can’t really see an obvious body size difference. I’m sorry, I meant to say Gulf of America. Sorry about that. And there are a few that are still around today that live to be very old, okay? So there is some contrary data there, and I want to be upfront with you about that.

But we’ve also got some examples from Japan. This shell creature is still around. And if you look here, you can see that as you go forward in time, their lifespans drop and they actually get smaller over time. So we’ve got some evidence from clams and oysters that are still alive today. We’ve got a lot of evidence from clams and oysters that are now extinct.

There’s a little island at the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula called Seymour Island, and they found all kind of fossil creatures there. And so here are from what they call the Cretaceous. For us, that’s from the Flood. And you can see that some of these are living to be over 100 years old, maybe even 130 years old. Very long lifespans. And they’re not even that big. They’re like maybe eight centimeters across.

You’ve got some from the Eocene. That would also be from the Flood. And they’re, again, living to be very, very old. Now, some of the scientists who looked at them described this as extreme longevity, but they said it’s very likely that there’s even older fossil specimens out there that we just haven’t found them yet.

You’ve got one that was just enormous. There was one called the Platyceramus platinus, that some people might think is a subgenus of this, and we got a growth curve for it. Now, to be fair, some of this is extrapolated, but it’s a reasonable extrapolation. And you can see this thing might have still been growing at 120 years of age. You’ve got some from the Jurassic, okay? They’re living to be 150 years old or more. Just very, very long lifespans.

And on that same island, they found an ammonite that they think was over 200 years old when it died. Now, it’s a kind of weird looking ammonite, it doesn’t look like the chambered nautilus, but it’s got a shell that looks like a giant paperclip, but they believe it was more than 200 years old, and the scientists even commented and said, “We’ve got to find ways to accept the reality of this extreme longevity in this enigmatic animal.”

We’ve also got some very long-lived small mammals from what they call the Jurassic. And this is an open access paper, you probably don’t want to bore yourself with the details, but if you do, you can read this online. But they found these cute little critters like this guy right here, little, bitty things, like the size of a shrew, little, bitty. I don’t think any of them had a mass greater than, like, 130 grams, little, bitty things. But they realized there are growth bands in their teeth, and the root of their teeth, that they can count. And these are little, bitty fossil teeth. And when you do that and you compare that to lifespans of similar size mammals today, they are way above the trend line, okay?

You see those little black dots? Those are the lifespans of living mammals today in the wild. None of them have a mass of more than 140 grams. Those colored blue colored squares are all those fossil creatures. They were living much, much longer. And one science news article said, “Recent work has shown that the first mammals in the late Triassic and early Jurassic lived much longer than similar size mammals today, up to 14 years old. If you compare that with today’s shrews of similar body mass, some of which lived just over a year, this is a huge difference in lifespan.”

All right, now we’re going to come back to indirect fossil evidence, but we’re going to take a little detour here. I don’t want to overwhelm you with too much information. So you might wonder, how on earth did I end up doing this research in the first place? I mean, I’m not a biologist. Am I out of my lane here? Well, maybe, okay? But there was a physicist named Geoffrey West, and he and two biologists came up with what they called a metabolic scaling theory to explain why animals are the sizes that they are and why different body parts are the sizes that they are.

And they were able to show that the mammal cardiovascular and respiratory systems are designed, they’re optimized, to be energy efficient. And there was some fairly complicated math. Now, sadly, they did not give the Lord Jesus credit for that. They credited natural selection. Basically, they credited the “nature god” for this. And at ICR, we are strongly pushing back on this, okay? We think natural selection is a totally erroneous paradigm.

Even some Christians who don’t accept evolution might accept this idea of natural selection, but we think even natural selection is a bad paradigm. And so we’re working on all this evidence that these animals have innate features that enable them to adapt to different environments. It’s engineering, but it’s engineering on an even greater level.

And even the blind cavefish, which is like a poster child for evolution and natural selection, the story is, you know, the fish swims into a dark cave, eyes are useless in the cave, and some of them have a mutation where they don’t have eyes, and it’s a slight advantage. And the ones that do have eyes, they bump into twigs underwater, scratch their eyes, get infections and die, something like that. The story’s a little fuzzy, actually.

But we’re saying, no, this is deliberate. This is happening rapidly. They’re making targeted, predictable changes, and they’re doing so rapidly, sometimes within a single generation. And that just gives the Lord Jesus an even greater amount of glory, because this is designed on an even greater level. Now, because of this theory, okay, they were able to show that bigger animals take a longer time to reach adulthood. In fact, there was actually a mathematical relationship. And biologists had known about this for a long time. Bigger animals, they take longer to reach adulthood.

But people who’ve done studies of longevity in living animals have shown that animals that take longer to reach adulthood live longer. That is a strong, consistent trend, okay? If you take longer to reach adulthood, you live longer. And of course, even from just general observations, we know that bigger animals live longer, right? A flea has a very short lifespan, a dog has a longer lifespan, and so on and so forth. And there’s exceptions, but that’s the general rule.

So, what does this mean, okay? It means that we might have indirect fossil evidence, okay? If we can show evidence that fossil creatures were very large compared to today, show evidence of giantism, and also that they were taking a very long time to mature, much longer than animals today, that’s indirect fossil evidence that they were living longer. And we’ve got even more indirect fossil evidence than we do direct fossil evidence.

And I want to give a shout out to some creationists of the past, Donald W. Patten, Dr. Jack Cuozzo, and Greg Beasley. I couldn’t find Greg Beasley’s picture, but I want to honor these men because they realized this as far back as 1982, and maybe even before, that creatures that take a long time to mature, they ought to live longer, and they might have larger body sizes.

Closing

Nathan Jones: We wish we had time to show you Jake’s full presentation. He exhibited giant kangaroos, sharks, shellfish, birds, and even dinosaurs whose sizes are just mind-blowing. The fossil record leaves no doubt there was indeed a Flood and that the lifespans of both humans and animals were in the hundreds of years.

Tim Moore: And they will be so again! Isaiah prophesied that once Jesus Christ returns to set up His earthly kingdom, “No longer will there be in it an infant who lives but a few days, or an old man who does not fulfill his days; but the youth will die at the age of 100, and the one who does not reach the age of 100 will be thought accursed.

Nathan Jones: Amen. I simply cannot wait!

Tim Moore: To watch all of the Where is the Promise of His Coming? 2026 Bible Conference presentations in their entirety, we are offering them on DVD or flash drive. Along with the four presentations, two question and answer sessions are included. So order your copy today! You can also visit our Christ in Prophecy YouTube channel to watch the conference’s live stream in its entirety.

Nathan Jones: And if the Lord tarries, we hope you’ll make plans to attend our 2027 Annual Bible Prophecy Conference also here in McKinney, Texas. But regardless, Tim and I would be glad to come to YOUR area and preach God’s prophetic Word. You only have to ask, and we’ll help you coordinate a local or regional conference. Help us bring the joy of the Good News of the return of our Lord to your church family and friends.

And remember, folks, that God’s patience is mercy, His timing is perfect, and His return is certain. These are the days to stay anchored, awake, and faithful, stirred to live with hope in a world that desperately needs it.

Tim Moore: Well said, Nathan! Let’s conclude this episode with Jake’s final word of encouragement, and a look at where you can get more of those mind-blowing ICR resources. Godspeed!

Conclusion of Jake Hebert’s Presentation

Jake Hebert: Our former president, Dr. John Morris, you know, we lost him a few years ago, but he loved to say, “It’s a great time to be a Bible-believing Christian,” and he’s right. And sometimes it’s kind of like A Tale of Two Cities, “It’s the best of times, it’s the worst of times.” In some ways, it seems like it’s a very bad time to be a Christian. Apostasy and heresy, people falling away from the faith left and right, it’s all over the place, and yet we’ve never had more evidence confirming what the Bible says than we have now.

End of Program