The Khmer Empire-era Cambodian city of Mahendraparvata has recently been mapped with the aid of a technology known as “lidar” – effectively radar with lasers, hence the name. Today Brian Thomas has an article on the discovery called Jungle-Covered Ruins May Hold Surprising Hints. “Why?” you could reasonably ask, “and hints of what exactly?”
So far as I can tell, young Earth creationists care about the Khmer Empire for one reason and one reason only: the temple of Ta Prohm, located near the more famous Angkor Wat and constructed several hundred years after Mahendraparvata, contains on its walls a carving of what they claim is a stegosaurus, supposedly drawn from life. Mr Thomas says:
Dinosaur carvings, sculptures, and paintings within ancient ruins confront the view that dinosaurs lived and died millions of years before man. But they are just what one would expect within the context of biblical history. Genesis says that God created man and animals, including dinosaurs, on the same day of creation week.
His article boils down to suggesting that there might be – might be – similar carvings waiting to be uncovered at Mahendraparvata. This seems to me to be unlikely, to say the least. Probably the best resource on this subject is Glen Kuban’s article, Stegosaurus Carving on a Cambodian Temple?, and I direct you there for more general information. With that in mind, let’s look at some of the holes in Brian’s story specifically. First, the context of the carving:
Parrot, swan, water buffalo, and monkey carvings adorn the same structure, showing the ancient artist’s expertise at reproducing known animals.
On the other hand, two images down we have something that does not seem to be a real animal at all: it does not seem unreasonable to infer that the artist was perfectly capable using his imagination to make things up also. One criticism of the idea that the stegosaurus, if that is truly what it is, was drawn from life is that it could also have been based off of fossils. Thomas claims:
The nearest stegosaur fossils come from faraway China. It is therefore very unlikely that the ancients carved a stegosaur likeness based on fossils.
Brian seems unaware that during the height of the Khmer Empire China was not so much a “faraway” land as a neighbouring country, and he also severely underestimates the ability of pre-modern people to move around, explore, and share cultural knowledge.
Thomas also claims that the carving is an “anatomically-correct rendering” – not in the euphemistic sense, I must add. This is brazenly ignores the striking differences between the image and an actual stegosaurus. The sole feature that invites the dinosaur conclusion is the presence of what appears to be the distinctive plates of the stegosaurus running down its back, but they could also be a floral background – if they were removed the animal would not look dinosaurian in the slightest. If they are stegosaurus plates, however, then they are highly stylised and not at all accurate (there should be more of them, for one).
The biggest omission from the depiction, meanwhile, is the spiked tail – the thagomizer (“named for the late Thag Simmons”). For an artist that is supposedly an expert “at reproducing known animals” drawing an “anatomically-correct rendering” this is quite odd. Those tails are almost as recognisable as the plates and if present would go a long way to showing that this wasn’t supposed to be another spiny-backed animal. A number of other anatomical discrepancies also exist, such as the horns on the back of the animals head, the size and shape of the head, and the relative lengths of the legs.
More sceptical articles on this carving often conclude by trotting out the line that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” or similar. Personally I think this goes too far: extraordinary claims require evidence, and this one doesn’t even have much of the non-extraordinary kind – there are just too many other plausible explanations even if precisely which is correct is not certain. Thomas concludes:
The next task for archaeologists will involve carefully removing the covering jungle from Mahendraparvata’s ancient stone walls. Erected centuries before Angkor Wat, will its temple carvings reveal more dinosaur-looking creatures? And if so, will secular researchers choose to show findings that challenge their basic beliefs, or will they suppress evidence as they cling to secularized history?
Once again, Brian equates the sceptical evaluation of a dubious claim with the suppression of evidence, which naturally leads me to wondering what science would look like in a creationist-dominated world – but that’s a (hopefully speculative) topic for another day.