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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.
It's time to revise the Bible again! Damn science, it makes my work so much harder.
Until Slashdot fixes the funny modifier, use insightful or interesting. The poster knows your intentions.
Strom Thurmond's head?
Not that hominids, though, arrived considerably earlier than this... what's the latest figure? somewhere in the 4 million range? Some of them wren't exactly dumb either; neanderthals, in fact, are supposed to have had more brain mass than humans did/do.
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??
Modern humans. Come on, think before you post.
The Herto skulls were not found with other bones from the rest of the bodies, which is unusual, White said, leading the researchers to infer that the people "were moving the heads around on the landscape. They probably cut the muscles and broke the skull bases of some skulls to extract the brain, but why, whether as part of a cannibalistic ritual, we have no way of knowing."
I was rather surprised by the possibility of ritualistic brain-eating amongst the earliest ancestors of our species. Maybe they were extracting the brains not for appetizers, but for the same reasons Egyptians removed the brains prior to mummification: so that dead would not be encumbered by the useless grey gunk inside their head on the journey to the afterlife.
You think it's confusing now? Wait until we get the postmodern humans. I shiver at the idea of self-referential genetics.
Also found with the body, a rock tablet pecking stone. Scientists will never be sure what the writing on the tablet means, but have surmised that it was either the etchings of a madman, or the first failed attempt at hand writing recognition software, ancient ancestor to the newton. :)
Some even weigh 800 lb. They own insane amounts of cash. These gorillas control millions of supposedly more intelligent sapient humans.
Evidence of evolution is also seen in the computing industry. 30 years ago, smart humans sat in front of dumb terminals. These days dumb bimbos operate smart PCs.
At Slashdot, a few ninja monkeys....
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
i refuse to believe my ancestors were
you know
"black"
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.
Uhh, Homo erectus was not the first hominid. Not by a long shot. Try Ardipithecus ramadis at 5 to 8 million years ago, or arguably something earlier. A. ramadis is most likely bipedal however, which is typically the criteria for early hominids.
If you were refering to the first in the Homo genus, that would be (in my opinion) Homo habilis or possibly Homo heidelburgensis. These were characterized by the earliest confirmed tool use (Homo habilis means "handy man"). These fellas were around for several hundred thousand years before H. erectus and H. ergaster.
Sorry about the lack of italicised names, I'm lazy.
Jeremy
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
IANA geneticist, but I wonder whether some rapid evolution occurred amongst these small subgroups that gave modern humans the advantage over the Neanderthals?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
We just haven't discovered the joy of flinging poo, yet.
obviously missed a few presidential debates.
THE WORLD IS GOING TO END!!!! eventually.
Whoops. Good call. You are absolutely correct. I wasn't thinking. Homo rudolfensis is around then too. I wouldn't consider Homo heidelburgensis to be the first hominid, only because it came about so close to the evolutionary division which eventually resulted in Homo neandethalensis on one end, and Homo sapiens on the other. This subject is somewhat debatable, but the point is that they were after Austrolopithecus Garhi.
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.
The first such major project to act on this took several years and thousands of DNA samples. They determined that Eve was from the Phillippines, and this was announced with quite a bit of publicity, articles in Time magazine, etc. Unfortunately, it was soon found that the analysis had been done with a faulty understanding of how the analysis software worked. Or something like that. Can't remember anymore. Anyway, for whatever reason, the results were not meaningful, and the data they had gathered couldn't be re-used. It was quite a disappointment for all involved. But you still hear references to Eve having lived in the Phillippines because of this.
A witty saying is worth nothing - Voltaire
"Homo sapiens (archaic) Discovered by villagers at Petralona in Greece in 1960. Estimated age is 250,000-500,000 years. It could alternatively be considered to be a late Homo erectus, and also has some Neandertal characteristics. The brain size is 1220 cc, high for erectus but low for sapiens, and the face is large with particularly wide jaws." Actually, the age was originally determined to be much older, 700,000-800,000 years, but there seems to be an organised program to discredit those findings, presumeably because it turns all the established theories on the origins of man on their head. However, even the most conservative estimates are still much older than the ethiopian finds.
Actually, the term hominid has become somewhat broader in recent years. Hominid is a derivative of Hominidae, the family once used to describe humans and their extinct relatives but now inclusive to the non-human great apes as well--both gorilla species, both orang-utan species, chimpanzees, and bonobos.
Humans and their relatives tend to be grouped in the subfamily Homininae these days. Thats where the term "hominin" comes in to play.
"The Herto skulls were not found with other bones from the rest of the bodies"
Too bad they can't count the ribs.
- "They misunderestimated me."
Over the years those who had the power (kings and churches) sought to enhance and secure their position by keeping the people dumb and manipulating them by altering passages from the bible in their favour.
[9F18] "... and the Lord said, Whack ye all the serpents which crawl on their bellies and thy town will be a beacon unto others. So you see Lisa, even God himself endorses whacking day."
Saw a show on something related to this, "The Journey of Man", difference was using mutations on X chromosomes, which are passed unchanged from father to son, aside from random mutations. Anyways, a researcher (Spencer Wells) analysed the mutations in the X chromosomes from people all over the world, and came up with a map of sorts on the way people branched out.
. html
In summary, we're all descendant of a man who lived in Africa about 50,00 years ago (~2000 generations), with genes basically the same as bushmen.
The researcher laid it out quite clearly and convincingly, so it's worth a watch/read:
http://pup.princeton.edu/titles/7442
It really made me realize how related we all are, and silences the idiots who think blacks are closer to the apes, and whites are more advanced, etc.
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
Just a small nit-pick: I believe you mean Y chromosome, not X. All men get their X chromosome from their mother, and can only pass it on to their daughters. Y chromosome inheritance works as you described, though.
"Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it."
--Henry David Thoreau
... that we're really the VHS of evolution, and killed out Betamax while it was still young? :)
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
Most certainly.
You can most vividly see the changes and omissions made by comparing several translations of the bible. Some will have extra verses and some verses will be missing. Some are obvious and reasonable, others are disputable. But certainly there have been made other changes over the course of history, for which you will have to do some deeper research. If you'd like, I can dig it up.
And don't get me started on the inconsistencies that are evident in the bible, neither. They are numerous as are the various explanations possible to harmonize these discrepancies.
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.Or is this more of the overly simplistic logic that starts by assuming the Bible is false and then proceeds to construct some alternative scenario?
How do we know anything is true, we must and do on a daily basis make assumptions about the world around us from what we observe. I see a table, i walk up to it, touch it, i know it's a table. We use simple logic to assume things are right or wrong, true or false. If i am told something is true i do not believe it unless i can verify it for myself.
As such, i believe there is a book called the bible with many secular variations. Having read some of it, I know it contains some fascinating insights into human nature and accounts of historic events. But my wider knowledge allows me to put it in picture with the history of the roman occupation of the area, simultaneous Chinese philosophy, Mayan empires, etc. And my knowledge of human nature, culture, behaviour; to come to the simple logical conclusion that it is most likely that Jesus existed and was immensely insightful into human nature and further evolved a system of living by which humanity and all it's individuals could prosper. However i see no good evidence for divine intervention.
What your parents tell you to believe in ... isn't always right
My spelling isn't bad, I'm evolving the language
The Bible says God created Man first, then took out one of his ribs to make Woman. Jehovah's Witnesses and probably some other groups still claim this as evidence for the biblical creation myth, even though there have been found enough women with 12 ribs and men with 14 to dilute the gender - rib count correlation.
What's to say that God didn't actually create Woman first, then cut off her willy to make Man?
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
> If they "don't even know anymore what parts were actually in the original scripture" they how do they know they have changed?
History.
> Do you have any proof of your assertion that people changed the Scriptures to fit their needs, and those changes have not been caught and reversed?
How about the fact that even today not all sects agree on the same canon, let alone on the translation and interpretation of its contents?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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
Well, or you could read the bible.
Gen 5:3 And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and begat [a son] in his own likeness, after his image; and called his name Seth:
Gen 5:4 And the days of Adam after he had begotten Seth were eight hundred years: and he begat sons and daughters:
Gen 5:5 And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years: and he died.
Now In answer to the GP question, what about genetic diseases and mutations
Given:
God Created Adam and Eve.
God Created them Perfect
Minor Conclusion
Mutations came later.
Conclusion:
Interbreeding wasn't harmful until mutations came along.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
Yes and no... there are some ambiguities about translation of the bible. Some words only appear a few times, or even once, making their meaning impossible to know for sure. The meanings of words also change over time, so a word that meant something when the bible was translated into greek, say, might have been given a different meaning than when it was first written down.
This is not to say that translation is impossible or a useless effort. It's just to say that the exact meaning of a given word is often ambigous. Often, these (in my view, somewhat silly) arguments about what the bible says center around individual words.
For example, does "four corners" mean four geometric corners? Does it mean "prominent places", or was it a colloquial expression?
(My favorite one is when the Israelites were building the Tabernacle in the desert, and they used "Dolphin Skins". Where did they get Dolphin skins from? It's a funny little thing, and you wonder if the text is really refering to the skins of animals we call dolphins, or something else. But dolphin skins? From Egypt?)
The whole topic of translating ancient texts (not just the bible) is a facinating one. If you're interested in an alternate english translation of the bible, the Jewish Publication society put one out under the name "Tanakh" (the Jewish word for the bible). Every page there are footnotes with the comment "meaning of original hebrew uncertain" , or providing an alternate translation.
DISCLAIMER - I am not a linguist or biblical scholar. (IANALOBS)
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
> We seem to be referring to do different things.
Yes, to a big extent we are talking past each other.
> There's no question that the arrangement of the Bible has changed. It's well documented and most certainly admitted by any reputable biblical scholar. In fact, anyone suggesting otherwise is flat wrong, without question, and should be removed from your list of critical thinkers.
> However, the contents of the scripture, the individual lines of scripture and the message that the scripture conveys, is remarkably true to the original. You should check out Geisler's book "Christian Apologetics" for some interesting information on the reliability of scripture and for a comparison of how well the original manuscripts stack up against the commonly accepted translations of today.
I don't have any problem with that; I just think it's odd that you're focusing on the fact that the sentences haven't changed within such-and-such a book, but whole books have been swapped in and out of the canon.
What ultimately matters is that the canon was established by men by a combination of formal and informal negotiations that lasted over centuries. Is it really so hard to see that the end result represents "a change", and that the process was subject to the pressures of special interest groups?
E.g., some wanted to exclude St. John's Revelation, not because they didn't think it was inspired, but because they observed that it was a keystone of competing traditions.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The concept to stop chasing wildlife, and to settle down and grow crops is revolutionary, and would be a scary step
What's worse, there seems to be evidence that growing crops put individuals at a short-term disadvantage over hunter-gatherers, giving them a poorer diet for more work! The primary advantage of crop growing, though, is that it supports a higher population density, so even if your hunter-gatherer tribe may be living better than the nearby village growing crops, the village can feed ten times as many people and so they can expand faster than you and win any conflict between you.
There is also a good deal of information on using mitochondrial DNA to track this information, which comes down through the women only (the men pass mitochondria along with sperm, but it gets left behind with the "shell" and only the regular DNA is used for fertilization). This mitochondrial DNA is very stable and you can track human spread over very long periods of time. The Y-chromosome, which isn't quite as stable and mutates, can be used to track migrations over a shorter span of time.
For those interested in really seeing what the Bible teaches and how science the Bible compliment one another nicely, please visit Reasons To Believe
You will never "find" time for anything. You must "make" it.
When I die, I want someone find my skull 160 millenia from now and gape in awe and wonder. In fact, I'm going to put a big sign on my grave that says, "Do not open until Christmas, 162,052 A.D."
Puny humans.
Visit me on the web at Permanent4.com.
I would like to see some credible evidence before I'll believe that contradictions exist in the Bible.
Perhaps you haven't investigated this too deeply. I would suggest taking a look at this enumeration of "apparent" contradictions.
I am not attempting to discredit the Bible or the religion it supports. I am simply pointing out there's a lot to analyse and contemplate on this particular subject.
Go read for yourself.
Join Tor today!
For those interested in seeing how uninsightful, superstitious, and self-contradicting the works of one of the dozens of ancient civilizations can be, feel free to check The Skeptic's Annotated Bible
Especially if you are a woman, just, or tolerant.
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
This is the result of a misunderstanding of creationism.
And I wouldn't worry about you being marked as a troll. Evolutionists are almost never marked troll. I find however, no matter how rational or kind/non confrontational I make my pro-creationist posts they get modded troll. But I don't mind, people like my other posts enough that my karma will be impervious to their attacks!
Here is what happened. Adam and Eve were created man and woman, the first two humans. They had many children, sons and daughters. These sons and daughters married each other (if there was an official ceremony) and had children. These children were safe from the dangers of mutations since they were the offspring of flawless parents. That means there were no common recessive harmful mutations to share amongst each other. Incest was only outlawed much later (around 2000 years later I think) when mutations had become rife and the dangers were stronger. Then it wasn't restricted to cousins - in fact, amongst cousins I believe the danger is ~2% or something, but that could be wrong.
As for going over the hill, that is a load of crock - and the result of a misreading of the Bible (or perhaps imagining verses that aren't there), and a misunderstanding of genetics.
But specifically, in reference to your listing of Piltdown, Nebraska man, and Java man, read the extensive talk.origins FAQs on these very items: (emphasis added by me)
Nor is it true, as is often claimed, that Dubois kept the existence of the Wadjak skulls secret because knowledge of them would have discredited Java Man. Dubois briefly reported the Wadjak skulls in three separate publications in 1890 and 1892. Despite being corrected on this in a debate in 1982 and in print (Brace 1986), Gish has continued to make this claim, even stating, despite not having apparently read Dubois' reports, that they did not mention the Wadjak skulls (Fezer 1993)."
In the 90 years since then have we developed better and more rigorous testing methods? Yes. But even during those 40 years it took for the full hoax to be revealed, faults with Piltdown were found, long before testing showed that they were recent skulls: "...It should be remembered that, at the time of Piltdown finds, there were very few early hominid fossils; Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens were clearly fairly late. It was expected that there was a "missing link" between ape and man ... Piltdown man had the expected mix of features, which lent it plausibility as a human precursor.
This plausibility did not hold up. During the next two decades there were a number of finds of ancient hominids and near hominids, e.g. Dart's discovery of Australopith
"Mitochondrial Eve has been shown in secular literature (ever heard of the magazine "Science") to have lived ~6000 years ago. Evidence of the flood here."
.
What's going on?! I used the exact same message (below) already once this week for the exact same argument. Fortunately somebody else already took care of the rest of your message so I don't have to.
One nit to pick. Going back to the original "Research News" article in Science (vol 279 issue 5347 pg 28-29), we see that instead of this being evidence for a ~6000 year old mitochondrial eve, we have to reconsider some of our beliefs about mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), or more specifically a region of mtDNA called the D-loop, which comprises only 7% of mtDNA and which most mtDNA studies have used. One of the biggies is that most mtDNA studies use "so-called "noncoding" sequences of the control region of mtDNA, which do not code for gene products and therefore are thought to be free from natural selection." to quote the article. Another is to check and see if we are instead hitting "hotspots," regions with above-average mutation rates; hotspots will have more back- and parallel-mutations which will cloud the picture. A third is that the mutation rate may vary over time. A fourth is to investigate the issue of heteroplasmy--having multiple mtDNA sequences, even though for a given region there should be only one. For a while it was thought to be rare, now 10-20% of the population could be heteroplasmic. All of these issues would need to be addressed by the creationists before it could be considered evidence of a ~6,000 year old mitochondrial eve rather than a problem with the underlying assumptions of the technique. Indeed, with the advancement of our ability to manipulate and sequence DNA, we no longer have to utilize only 7% of the mtDNA--we can sequence the whole thing--all 16,000 or so base pairs of it. A recent study published in Nature (vol 408 pg 708-713, Dec. 2000) using mtDNA--all of it--found that the D-loop (used in most mtDNA studies) does not have a constant mutation rate. The study goes on to show (again using the whole mtDNA sequence) that the date of "mitochondrial eve" is about 170,000 years ago. A more reader-friendly report by the author of the Nature paper can be found here
Say, you ever get a chance to actually read that Dalrymple article you so badly mangled? Here's a refresher. Just go up the thread.