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Oldest Modern Humans Found
DrLudicrous writes "Anthropologists have reconstructed and dated three skulls from Ethiopia that they believe to be the oldest anatomically modern human skulls in existance. They date to 160,000 years ago, in agreement with genetic studies that pin the arrival of modern humans to at least 150,000 years ago. The skulls also demonstrate evidence of ritual burial." UC Berkeley has the original release as well.
Ethiopia? Didn't humans come from the Philippines?
along with the skulls are some tools, and their way of burial is more than a simple "covering up with dirt and let's move on", which sort of indicates these ancestors are pretty smart and know what they were doing.
are we going to discover even earlier "modern" human remains in order to find out how we really came from??
Is that, Okay, Great^n Grandpawas around 160,000 years ago, complete with stone tools and burial practices.
Yet Civilization only 'started 6-10,000 years ago.
Why does this just not quite add up to me. I mean, our ancestors were not stupid, they posessed the same intuition and logic that we do today. Whay did it take so long to get where we are now though?
Just food for thought.
You say you want a revolution....
I think that the most important part of this discovery, though is that it pretty much rules out the descent of homo sapiens from homo neanderathalensis. I know that there was a lot of evidence of that, anyway, but this seems pretty conclusive.
Still, I think that more interesting discoveries would be from 5 million years ogo. In particular, I would like to see remains of the ancestors of Australopithecenes and Ardopithecenes which would support the evolution of modern chimpanzees and modern humans from a common ancestor.
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
So you must be one of those proponents to "God part of the brain" theory, yes? I understand it's purpose is for the cognitive mind to not break down psychologically to the mear thought of death. After all, just seeing something dead will for a moment give us a bit of fear due to self reflection to just how mortal we really are. In the end though, it doesn't matter. I believe there is a God. Something/s had to come from nothing. And that my friend, is a miracle unto itself.
Life is not for the lazy.
Oh, and to answer your half-question. There were also "archaic Homo sapiens" as a sort of intermediate between what we call anatomically modern Homo sapiens and H. erectus. Not a separate species, because they simply transitioned into us.
Jeremy
You would be annoyed if someone digged up your grave. It's disrespectful considering our current social norms.
But imagine a few years into the future, and someone digs up your corpse, and people there think it's ok.
Hmmm.
Pet peeve: Profane people propagating perfunctory pedantry.
In an article in Science this April ("Balancing Selection at the Prion Protein Gene Consistent with Prehistoric Kurulike Epidemics"), British scientists suggest that our ancestor's urge to eat brains may have lead to the modern absence of prion-based diseases (such as mad cow disease) in humans. This suggests that, to some extent, at some point evolution selected for brain eating in humans. The actual article requires a paid subscription, but here's a summary from a newspaper.
"So the earth is flat?"
As another poster here on slashdot (I wish I could remember who, giving him/her the credits..) pointed out about half a year ago in a similiar discussion, there is nothing in the bible saying the earth is flat. The closest thing you can get to this is the mentioning of the sun going up and going down, but then, we all see the mentioning of the sun going up and down in the morning newspaper.
My apologies for going a bit off-topic. This isn't especially related to those corpses, said to have been dead for 150'000 years. Personally I'm a bit sceptic about the estimated age. For instance, living pengiuns have been dated dead since 8'000 years.
I don't know where this comes from. There are many different translations of the Bible. The majority of the differences come from omissions in manuscripts that aren't doctrinally important or from differences in wording the translators used.
The only really popular Bible translation out there that is radically different in content from the rest is the New World Translation by the Jehovah's Witnesses.
And so what if the Dead Sea Scrolls are in Hebrew and Aramaic? You can certanly translate them!
Here
is a list of quotes from the bible regarding the shape of the earth. Admittedly,
it's from infidels.org, but surely the host doesn't matter, since they're
quoting infallible scripture...
It is also my understanding that the reassembly and "translations" of the Dead Sea Scrolls have required a lot of guess work and artistic license.
i t/full-images/enoch-b.gif
Take a look at this image:
http://www.ibiblio.org/expo/deadsea.scrolls.exhib
There are parts that are very faded... and those pieces on the left... how do they know where to put them - they are totally connected.
On a program that might have been Nova, or on Discovery, theyed showed people generating the digital versions. They would take the images and darken and lighten parts with a touch-up brush to make the letters stand out. But, the girl doing the work admitted that you could easily make it say anything you want - even to include putting her own name in there.
Part of their work was based on arranging the pieces to match other documents. So, of course, they match other documents!
I'm not saying what is written on those scrolls is not true, but I don't believe they are conclusive of much.
Actually Moses took a Nigerian woman as a wife and Aaron and his sister got upset. God set them straight about it. : )
I'd like to wait for the full report to be released but I've got some thoughts on this article.
There's too many conclusions drived from too little facts. How can a conclusion be derived about wether they used plants if only the Volcanic Layers and fossils were tested for age? There's no mention of testing or even finding any sort of plant material. Geology researchers (about 98% of them anyways) are not going to know or care about testing for this sort of thing.
Furthermore, there's no mention of attempting to re-create the environment that the fossils were found in based on geological tests, it seems that theories were based only on the fossils found. (At least that's what I get from the wording of the article). For all we know these fossils were moved from a different area/region/continent. The fossils were found bashed in. Was the bashing the result of being prey for a different, un-discovered predator?
Also, did anyone catch, near the end of the article, the following quote:
In this single study area, the team has found fossils dating from the present to more than 6 million years ago, painting a clear picture of human evolution from ape-like ancestors to present-day humans.
Is it me or is there something REALLY wrong in the fact that such a wide age range of fossils were found IN ONE STUDY AREA? I refuse to accept the fact that ALL of the fossils came from ONE area without some sort of assistance in reaching their final destination.
I did my U-Grad work in Archaeology and didn't pursue it because of these 'play in my sandbox or else' reserchers and their theories that never hold water.
Archeaologists/anthropologists seem to make their fame on either discoveries and their theories with the connection to human evolution or disproving said theories in research journals.
Dolemite
________________________
Save the World! Use a Quote!
That's really going to irritate everyone in Kansas that fought to have evolutionary theories suppressed...
The case for evolution is already overwhelming to anyone who cares about evidence. The others consider it a virtue to believe what they believe in spite of the evidence. These discoveries probably won't change anybody's mind.While I am a Christian, I must say that the Bible has certainly changed over
time. It has changed in regard to its content, for there were multiple canons
competing one against the other before the Jews and Christians each agreed on
their respective canons, and it took until the late fourth and early fifth
centuries for the Christian church to finally say, "Ok, so this is the NT and
the common man will regard these books as Scripture and not others." It didn't
drop down out of the sky.
The LXX represents the oldest readings of the Hebrew Bible, and it diverges
from the Masoretic Text, Hebrew text of today, in a large number of ways.
There are additions to biblical books found only in Greek. The book of Jeremiah
is in a different order than in the MT, and I would think the order of a book
has an impact on interpretation. In many places, there are variations
resulting from its translation and the MT of today, which cannot be assumed to
just be in translation.
The Dead Sea Scrolls, as constructed (it has been noted this is iffy),
challenge the current Hebrew text as much as they support it. Yes, the DSS
Isaiah is very close to the MT of today. Jeremiah (again), though, is much
different. It is much shorter, and again, is in a different order. The
Penteteuch of the DSS is more favorable to the LXX and Samaritan Penteteuch
than it is to the MT.
The above are observations. There are still others which are made about the OT
and show that it must have been composed in an extended editorial process (the
Documentary Hypothesis on the Penteteuch, for example). There are places where
it is clear that something has been omitted. In Numbers, God sends Balaam, and
then sends an angel to kill him in the way because he went. I can postulate
that God, as presented in the text, is fickle and kills people for obedience,
that there was a story in between God's sending him and the ass speaking which
was omitted and would have explained why he was being punished, or I can see it
as an oversite in editing together several stories (the Documentary Hypothesis).
I don't see many other rational arguments for it in the text.
I could mention more differences and alterations over time in the Hebrew Bible,
but I don't see a need to. Likewise, I think that my point is made and I do
not need to proceed into the New Testament to show the great number of changes
over time in it. That the texts of the books of the Bible has changed is an
observation. To deny it is either to not look at the evidence or to be wholly
irrational.
The artist's illustration in the Berkeley article (also used on the cover of the current edition of Nature) is misleading, in as much as it gives the figure kinky hair and thick lips, making for a more "African" look than is likely to have been the case.
The truth of the matter is that the earliest men almost certainly would have had straight hair, not curly or kinky but straight, and thin lips, just like most Europeans and Asians today. The wild-type for hair in primates is straight, and all of the great apes conform to that type. Similarly, no ape has thick lips, and our closest living relatives are pretty much lipless. Given these facts, why would any reasonable person expect the "first" men to look like modern day Africans?
Of course, it is logically impossible to rule out that our species evolved to gain the features of modern-day Africans only to lose them once again, but this flies in the face of both probability and Occam's razor - it is extremely unlikely that a feature, once lost, can then be regained down the line, simultaneously around all of the world outside Africa.
One mistake people tend to make is to assume that because our species originated in Africa, modern day Africans are somehow "closer" to what we must have originally been like, but this is nonsense. Africans are just as far removed from the original homo sapiens populations as any other population groups, so they've had just as much time to diverge from the original type. Africans, like any other populations, haven't stood still in evolutionary terms, contrary to the misleading notion that this article illustration propagates.
Well, Um didn't need to spend all that money, could have just asked a chicken farmer. Newly hatched chicks have from 1-3 teeth. they use them to help break through the shell.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
Christianity is not racist, no matter what some stupid misinformed dolt says.
Oh yeah?! Then why is Jesus white in almost every painting?
> The fact is that people in the Middle Ages believed in Christianity. Thousands of people devoted their lives to it, including rulers, which according to your theory should have known better.
Yes, just as these and these should have known better.
You can't justify religion by appeals to human rationality
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
brain size apparently does not matter ad evidenced above...j/k
anyway...the large brain size was due to the larger body mass.
the truth is that Neanderthal did not have the ability to for large social structures and were confined to small family groups.
most anthropologists belive that it was due to their peaceful nature (no evidence of wars or murder until humans come along) that contributed greatly to their extinction....humans are more opertunistic and manipulative than Neanderthal I guess.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3