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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."
In "Guns, Germs and Steel", Jarod Diamond details how the pacific rim was populated very early on in human history: every single island larger than a beached whale was touched by nomadic seafarers in fishing boats, they even got to Hawaii. So why exactly did we think the population of the new wold required the land bridge to be exposed between Siberia and Alaska? Did we think it too hard to island hop along the Aleutians? Apparently it wasn't... alternatively, as I recently saw on Nova, these first explorers came from France, the same people who painted the fameous Lascaux caves. Go figure, just don't underestimate our ancestors.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
I first read references about a 50,000 year old "New World" culture in a 1999 BBC documentary. They claim that the closest surviving relatives of these original inhabitants are Australian Aborigines.
The dates listed in this documentary match up to the correct dates from the CNN story (as opposed to the incorrect dates in the story summary).
Here is a link a BBC article about the documentary.
Finding new skeletons in older rock can be easy. Finding fossilized skeletons- the same age as the rock- that would be interesting.
For more reading, check out the whole index of standard creationist claims, as well as their good set of FAQS, including How do we know the age of the earth?, and fossil hominids.
As to humans making it out to the New World that much earlier than previously known, I'm not surprised... we're a wandering species (and genus), going way back. Modern Homo sapiens was poking about in odd places by 100k years ago, so there isn't any inherent reason why we shouldn't have been there. However, generally when humans arrive in force we tend to leave evidence (like stone age habitats or megafauna extinctions), so these potential first North Americans were keeping fairly quiet, archeologically-wise.
I don't mean to be inflammatory - I'm part Native American myself - but AFAIK it wasn't the Europeans who invented scalping. Many (though certainly not all) of the Native American tribes were ruthless warriors who did all they could to eradicate each other. War was not unknown to this people; I hesitate to agree that it was their 'niceness' that failed them.
That's not to say that the Europeans (and later the U.S.) did not do some atrocious things. Some of what was done was unforgiveable. Thank goodness we as a society have come a long way since then.
So many people bash Christianity and God based on what crackpots and holly-rollers say.
Perhaps you haven't noticed, but the crackpots and holy-rollers seem to be in charge of christian PR these days. If you want us non-cristians to have more respect for christianity, you'd best clean your own house.
Seldom a day goes by without some christian trying to reform government around his own peculiar ideas, putting ten commandments in courthouses, dropping opening prayers at government meetings as soon as some non-christian signs up to deliver it, dropping even the word evolution from science textbooks, the list goes on and on.
They are winning the PR battle to represent christianity. You need to clean your own house before trying to clean the world.
Infuriate left and right