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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."
Why is there no intelligent life in America today?
Karma: Terrible - and proud of it!
Ahh yes, South Carolina. I remember it well. That's where I buried all those stone tools I bought at the open-air market in Lambeth.
did the submitter RTFA? It clear states that the stones date from 50,000 years ago. 25,000 years earlier than previously thought.
fp?
Those are neolithic tools that were used for voting. Early Americans used them to punch out the chads on the stone tablets used in elections to select their leaders. Of course things have moved on somewhat since then...
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...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.
Old joke, the ./ way:
German scientists dug 50 meters down and discovered small pieces of copper.
After studying these pieces for a long time, Germany announced that the ancient Germans 15,000 years ago had DSL.
Naturally, the Russian government was not that easily impressed. They ordered their own scientists to dig even deeper.
100 meters down they found small pieces of glass and they soon announced that the ancient Russians 20,000 years ago already had a nation-wide fiber net.
American scientists were outraged by this. They dug 200 meters down & found absolutely nothing.
They happily concluded that the ancient Americans 25,000 years ago had wireless network.
Why must I be forced to send my children to schools where the teachers insist that we are descended from apes?
The very idea is utterly ridiculous. A cursory glance at ape anatomy shows that it is impossible for man to have 'evolved' from one. It is just a rubbish idea. Everyone with any education at all knows that man actually comes from australopithecus.
Anyone else suspicious about anything regarding evolution that comes out of South Carolina?
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.
This article contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered....
Most anthropologists I've studied under, worked with, and recently read, will readily agree to a coastal migration route, either concurrent with the recession of the glacial mass (The Ice Free Corridor- Beringia isn't the time limiting factor with the land bridge model, the fact that Beringia ran straight into a glacier that didn't clear up a free corridor till 11,500ya is), or before it.
Most everyone accepts at least the reasonable possibility of a pre-clovis occupation.. I'd say most find it likely, but prefer to withold their theories till more evidence can be discovered.
However- One thing that most of the people I know will agree to: The European route isn't that likely. It's not a matter of denying it because of it's antiquity, nor is it denying that one COULD skirt the ice, had one a significant maritime adaptation- It's the fact that there's no evidence of any Solutrean (European, at this time) maritime adaptation whatsoever. No evidence of reliance on seafood, and very little coastal occupations in the first place.
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
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.
Humans of course are not descended from apes but from a common ancestor ... which was not an ape.
Bitter and proud of it.
Spencer Wells' work on male genetic markers suggests that there were two routes out of Africa - one along the coast of south asia, the other through SW asia (a.k.a., the Midde East) and into Central Asia. The South asian coastal route led to Australia. It is perfectly possible that people first reached both places (Central Asia and Australia) at around the same time. They just moved first along the coastal route probably because they were not slowed by the need to create a whole new set of material adaptations as they went. Lving in Central Asia requires a completely different set of tools, clothing and skills than living in coastal Northeastern Africa (the point of departure). Living in coastal South Asia and Coastal NW Australia does not.
Wells believes that the wave of migration leading to Australia began some 60,000 years ago. The wave leading to Central Asia dates to significantly later, probably 45,000 - 40,000 years ago.
To bring this fully on topic, genetic evidence indicates that people could not have reached North America much earlier than 15,000 - 20,000 years ago, so I'm inclined to believe that the article's suggested 50,000 year date for a hearth is simply wrong. It is probably just a natural feature (remains of a naturally ocurring fire) and the purported "tools" are probably just naturally fractured rocks. You'd be amazed at the broken rocks that some archaeologists (I'm an archaeologist by training) will call "tools." Only microscopic wear pattern analysis of sample edges can begin to establish that some randomly fractured hunk of rock is really a tool. I didn't see any mention that this has been done in the article. Another possibility is stratigraphic mixing (different levels of the site have been disturbed or moved by the activities of burrowing animals).