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Humans in America 25,000 Years Ago?
Ephboy writes "A researcher in South Carolina has found stones that appear to be man-made stone tools that date from 25,000 years ago, about twice as old as the best documented evidence of human settlement in North America."
...that the loudest arguments will not be over how old these remains are, but there they came from, and if they are indian (native american) or not in origin...
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
The science may not be settled yet, but the burden of proof here still lies on the researcher.
Whenever a scientist gets experimental results that are far outside what was previously known and expected, the proper response is to either wait for independent verification (in this case, similar dating results from digs elsewhere in North America at the same depth) or subject the experimental procedure to intense scrutiny. Here, I would expect him to be able to justify
1) That the artifacts really came from the time he claims them to be from (probably easily doable via an independent dating test)
2) That the artifacts really came from the place he claims them to be from
3) That the artifacts are manmade.
Until each of these points is well supported, and barring the independent verification mentioned above, I'd hold out on adjusting the history textbooks.
More data is needed, no matter who is right. I do believe American civilization is a lot older than the previously-accepted figure, but 25,000 years means people discovered America about the same time they discovered northern Europe. Assuming that date is accurate, and there are some good reasons for questioning that, too.
Part of the problem is that archaeology is seriously underfunded. Where I grew up, they are currently conducting an excavation of a large Iron Age settlement (4000+ inhabitants) with evidence it was first built 12,000 years ago. The site seems to have been the center of commerce for the whole of the North of Britain from the end of the Ice Age through to the Roman Occupation. That's one big, important site. Total funding: $44,000 a year, to cover site surveying equiptment, excavation equiptment, preservation efforts, education of the locals, pay for the full-time archaeologists on-site, paying the farmers whose fields are getting dug up...
In South Carolina (where I lived for a while), things are a whole lot worse. The self-proclaimed "Holy City" of Charleston is definitely unlikely to fund work that contradicts the idea the world was created in 4004 BC. And that's one of the more liberal areas!
Nor is South Carolina a place filled with philanthopists. Charleston, Mount Pleasent and West Ashley are all fighting bitterly over who gets to keep the Civil War submarine "The Hunley". None of them want to pay for it, they just want to have it.
If they're not willing to pay for a serious conservation + museum for a part of history they are tightly intertwined with, they're certainly not going to pay some archaeologist to traipse across the countryside digging up fossil remains that largely serve to remind them that they are just a bunch of tourists in comparison to the settlers who were there first.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
My guess would be that they're performing the dating on once-living objects found in the same strata as the "tools". Since objects in the same strata are approximately the same age, carbon-dating those objects would provide an estimate to when the tools were first in existence.
Many of the monotheistic sects like mormons, jehovas witnesses and others of the evangelical (in the menaing of "interpreting the bible literally") persuasion claim that the earth is only a few thousand years old and "prove" this by tracing the genealogy of the bible from a person that can be more or less accurately placed on the timeline and all the way to Adam&Eve. 6000 years is a number that keeps turning up.
Discoveries like this and others facts that disprove their theories are not going to change their views, as they claim that god created the world at $time with everything, including fossils, geological features and other dateable items intact.
I can however assure you that they are NOT correct, as I know that the giant creator-wombat created the world out of a can of spam and some duct tape, with people, rocks, birds, the thoughts in your head, absolutely everything intact only 5 minutes ago. Go on, try to disprove it.
-- Buzh
Humans of course are not descended from apes but from a common ancestor ... which was not an ape.
Bitter and proud of it.
Anyone who thinks the American Indians were a universally "nice" people living in some sort of "one with nature" utopia needs to lay off the kool-aid.
They were and are humans just like everyone else and suffered from the same vices, power struggles, warfare and savagery as every other example of humanity throughout history.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.