[Right Wing Professor]

No use casting aside the oldest writings on the planet because of the religious label while ignoring how accurate it is in regards to which species came first, fish, birds, mammals, man.

The Bible is nowhere near the oldest writing on the planet. Chinese and Indus valley writings predate it by at least 1000 years. The Epic of Gilgamesh is probably the oldest still extant written narrative. The Sumerian creation myth, Enuma Elish , is probably older than Genesis.

The bird/fish/mammal sequence is not as close to the palaeontological sequence as you might think; fish appeared far earlier than either birds or mammals, and the latter two are of comparable antiquity. Moreover, whales did not appear before the rest of the mammals; and the creeping things' that were created on the sixth day surely included arthropods and reptiles, both of which actually predated birds.

[CobaltBlue]

The oldest surviving copy of any part of the Old Testament is the Dead Sea Scrolls, circa 1st and 2nd century BC. Prior to the discovery of those in 1947, the next oldest surviving copy was circa 800.

In contrast, Gilgamesh was written on clay tablets circa 2000 BC, and those tablets survive today.

Bible scholars may get snippy about this, but it's true.

[CobaltBlue]

To clarify, by circa 800, I meant circa 800 AD. As I understand it, the Old Testament wasn't reduced to writing for a very long time, similar to the Illiad and the Odyssey.