{"id":7287,"date":"2019-09-30T04:19:20","date_gmt":"2019-09-30T04:19:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/churchedge.com\/illustrations\/index.php\/2019\/09\/30\/the-earliest-sign-of-civilization\/"},"modified":"2019-09-30T04:19:20","modified_gmt":"2019-09-30T04:19:20","slug":"the-earliest-sign-of-civilization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/the-earliest-sign-of-civilization\/","title":{"rendered":"The Earliest Sign of Civilization"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The famous anthropologist Margaret Mead was once asked this question: What was the earliest sign of civilization in any given culture?  The questioner expected the answer to be a clay pot or perhaps a fish hook or grinding stone.  Her answer was &#8220;a healed femur.&#8221;  The femur, of course, is the leg bone above the knee.[*]  Mead explained that no healed femurs are found where the law of the jungle, survival of the fittest, reigns.  A healed femur shows that someone cared.  Someone had to do that injured person&#8217;s hunting and gathering until the leg healed.  The evidence of compassion, she said, is the first sign of civilization.  I would contend that it is also the first sign of the work of Christ in the life of a Christian.<\/p>\n<p>_______________<\/p>\n<p>Brett Blair,  www.eSermons.com , June 2002<\/p>\n<p>[*] The original illustration said it was the bone below the knee, which is incorrect.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The famous anthropologist Margaret Mead was once asked this question: What was the earliest sign of civilization in any given culture? The questioner expected the answer to be a clay pot or perhaps a fish hook or grinding stone. Her answer was &#8220;a healed femur.&#8221; The femur, of course, is the leg bone above the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2510,1758,1514,747],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7287"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7287"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7287\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}