Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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
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?)
..strangely enough a small 'CE' inscription was found and the tablet immediately lept from their hands and 'crashed' to the floor. The shards however did turn completely blue.
THE WORLD IS GOING TO END!!!! eventually.
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.
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.
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!
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 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.
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.
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