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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!
did the submitter RTFA? It clear states that the stones date from 50,000 years ago. 25,000 years earlier than previously thought.
fp?
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.
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.
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).
Even though male gorillas outweigh the average man by over 200 pounds, we have bigger weiners. Now THAT'S an advancement.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.