Slashdot Mirror
Evidence Found for Earliest Modern Humans
Hugh Pickens writes "Researchers at Arizona State University report that they have pushed back the date for the earliest modern humans to 164,000 years ago, far earlier than previously documented. Paleoanthropologists now say that genetic and fossil evidence suggests that modern human species — Homo sapiens — evolved in Africa between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago and in seeking the "perfect site" to explore for remains of the earliest populations, researchers analyzed ocean currents, climate data, geological formations and other data to pin down a location. "The world was in a glacial stage 125,000 to 195,000 years ago, and much of Africa was dry to mostly desert; in many areas food would have been difficult to acquire. The paleoenvironmental data indicate there are only five or six places in all of Africa where humans could have survived these harsh conditions," said Curtis Marean, a professor in ASU's School of Human Evolution and Social Change. Photos from the cave at Pinnacle Point in South Africa show where the team found ochre, bladelets and evidence of shellfish — findings that reveal the earliest dated evidence of modern humans."
Arent we supposed to be homo sapien sapiens?
Free yourself use open source.
Well hopefully the 160,000 year old cavemen lasted longer than ABC's Cavemen...
Sig Registration Form 34c_766(a) submitted to Ministry of Signature Management. Approval pending.
Richard Stallman's been sleeping in the genetics lab again.
that's long before god created everything?
My mom says there's a lot of black people in Africa!
Yes, the evidence is compelling and interesting, but isn't it simply correlational? Aren't they merely drawing conclusions based on bits and pieces of evidence? I see no hard "proof".
I long ago read that the Homo Sapiens arised in an extremely harsh environment that created a strong selective pressure in favor of intelligence and advanced social interactions. But the article says that the researchers focussed on the area where the less evolved pre-humans could have survived easier.
Only if you followed the calculations of the Bishop of Ussher, who came up with that date. Many evangelicals who are not fundamentalists don't accept a young earth theory, and even among fundamentalists, there are many who believe in an old earth. Some of the debates on fundamentalist boards like Rapture Ready become heated.
I can respect their desire to conform to the Word of God, for they feel if the Creation story is an allegory, what else is an allegory? However, the physical evidence is there, and many of us belive God does not lie in either nature or in scripture. For us, the answer is "We don't have enough evidence yet to understand the whole picture." There really are no such things as paradoxes, merely incomplete models. We'll find out soon enough.
Nyekulturniy... Proudly confusing readers and editors since 1981!
This can't be true! The earth isn't even over 9,000 years old!!! Hello!?!?!? http://www.answersingenesis.org/
So Alec Baldwin likes shellfish...
It should be pointed out that there is a difference between something that looks human, and something that acts human and is described as. The "looks human" date has been pushed out and has always been further out than the "acts human" date. The "acts human" date still remains circa 40,000 to 60,000 B.C. (at least last time I heard).
And all the photos are of a golf course in South Africa. Is this really how our ancestors developed their intelligence? Chasing little white balls around a field? I wonder what animal fur they wore that could possibly inspire plaid golf pants. :)
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Might be a little too hot for you if was created 6000 years ago - http://gondwanaresearch.com/hp/adam.htm
Now I'm a troll as is the post I responded to while the first post is still funny. The only funny thing here is the moderation of this article.
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
The cave at Pinnacle Point was featured in a 2003 episode of Horizon titled The Day We Learned to Think .
The original poster's write-up misses the point. It's NOT news that both fossil and genetic evidence points to the development of anatomically modern humans in Africa somewhere in the 100,000 to 200,000 year range, with several important apparently anatomically modern human fossils at the older end of that range.
What is new in this article is the early date for the use of ochre dye, small "complex" tools, and shellfish in the diet which are all taken as evidence for modern-like human cultural behavior at 165,000 years ago.
To date, the most incontrovertible evidence for modern-like cultural behavior dates back to around 45,000 years ago, with some more ambiguous evidence (similar to that presented in the article in question) dating to around 100,000 years ago.
...a Starbucks, a Wal-Mart, a psychiatric bill, and a dogeared copy of "Being and Nothingness."
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
Disclaimer: I'm not advocating anything here, just asking from the point of speculation...
The old accepted model of human development is that man in his modern form, homo sapiens sapiens, appeared 30k years ago with recorded history marking the rise of civilization some 6000 years ago. The theory is that humans lived in nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes until the end of the last ice age. With the warming of the climate, agriculture became possible and with it the surplus of food that allows for civilization.
Ok, that's the accepted model. But I've always wondered about the likelihood of human civilizations from before accepted recorded history. As I understand it, the science points against it because if there were such civilizations, we should see some proof of it. But what sort of proofs would civilization leave behind and how long would they last with the passage of time? Most human populations like along coastlines and we've seen historic records of cities lost to rising waters. There are many underwater archaeological sites being explored along the English Channel. And when one considers the destructive power of a 2 mile tall wall of ice rolling over a city, what would even be left for us to see? If there were a Hyperboria, a Lemuria, a Mu, what remnants should we expect to see of them, if any?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
What did they find? Some SUVs? How else could the world have warmed?
The GP said it's "widely accepted", which might be true in the sense of breadth (atheists can be found in ever corner of the world), but not in depth. Also, I'd argue that although the percentage of atheists increase in proportion to education level, there's no objective education level where they form a majority. Sure, if you want to look at subgroups (e.g., members of the US National Academy of Sciences), you'll find majorities that are atheists, but it's hard to argue that it's "widely accepted".
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Evolutionists will continue to push back the date for the earliest modern humans (both anatomically and behaviorally).
Superyooser's Law of Evolutionary Dating of Humans: As scientific research continues, the probability of the date of "modern humans" equaling the date of the beginning of the Earth approaches one.
Then the only thing left to be corrected would be the time scale, but that knowledge would be accepted in the process of "approaching one."
Superyooser's Law of Evolutionary Dating of Humans: As scientific research continues, the evolutionists' estimate of the date of "modern humans" equaling the date of the beginning of the Earth approaches one.
Also, less evolved. Look at the typical hockey game for evidence of that! (I know, I know, at least they didn't elect someone like [name removed in an attempt not to be flamebait]...)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Kurzweil addresses an idea similar to this by taking Moore's law backwards. Basically, once you have some form of technology, it becomes easier to develop better forms of technology. This leads to an acceleration of growth in technology and not just a linear trend. The same logic can be applied to ideas and language, as well (up to a point).
As for population growth, plagues have often drastically reduced the number of humans on the planet at any one time. Without the previously mentioned technology/knowledge, the environment would only support so many humans.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
please learn this simple thing: their there.
It is a pain to comprehend crappy text for non-natives, who apparently write english better.
Otherwise i agree with you.
People who feel like bashing their newborn children to a rock instead of having a warm fuzzy feeling are unsuccessful in reproduction.
There is no God in this.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
I'll not address your other silliness, but as for your sig, I'd rather see Walter Koenig be president than that William fellow.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Now, to be fair, the first spoke of "religions". I think most people would define this as the set of beliefs intended to be propagated by an identifiable, organized religion. On the other hand, your quote asks what "Americans believe". If you took a poll asking all Roman Catholics whether they believed in evolution, what percentage would reply in the negative, despite officials at the vatican stating that evolution and creation were "perfectly compatible"?
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
How does the shellfish relate to the Aquatic ape hypothesis which is thought by many to be crackpot?
That's lunacy! I can offer alternate descriptions of every one of those articles which is just as ingenious as theirs!
You look at, say, modern wheat and thing, "sure, any idiot can see how useful it is". But it only became that after a long period of development from wild stock. Try to live off the wild stuff and you'll either switch to hunter-gatherer or starve.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Well, obviously the present creation is a derivative of a much older creation. The 'who created God' ur question, So to satisfy modern creationists, these old fossils must have been created by a different God. Though, according to Christians, all Gods are one. So there is always a simple Godly explanation for everything...
Obviously the earth is supported by a giant turtle and therefore it is turtles all the way down!
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
So, it appears God is in trouble. He is claiming to have invented Man 6000 years ago. (Al Gore made a speech earlier in which he claimed to have invented man and that certain parts of the Bible were based on his and Tipper's love affair.)
However, it now appears that there is prior art, far predating God's claims. While no suit has been filed, experts believe God would lose handily if the originator of the earlier design can be found. God did not return any calls when a message was left with his representatives, the Vatican Cathedral and Boys Ranch (Rome), Beth-Bagel Temple (NYC), LDS Church and Wife Emporium (Salt Lake City).
Noted patent and copyright critic, Richard Stallman, stated that this is exactly why copyright and patent laws are bad, "It is clear that God is in the same group as all other profit hungry capitalist swine, like Bill Gates and that smelly Steve Jobs. Really, man is just an idea, and believe me, I have a few ideas about a few men. Which is why I don't use Google because then most of you would know the sites I'm going to, and that would be embarrassing. But...Where was I? Oh, yeah, God is evil. I'm hearby demanding that the new discoveries be called GNU/Homos. Heh, heh, I said, 'Homo.' But, enough of that, if God thinks he can control me..." We were unable to contact Stallman after the line went dead.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Psalms 14:1a The fool has said in his heart, "There is no God."
When I was an anthropology undergrad student I remember thinking the aquatic ape theory sounded like just the type of crazy fringe theory I could latch onto. At least it's entertaining, and the earlier evidence we find of people using marine resources the more feasible it's starting to sound. Probably need to push back a lot further than this to really match that theory though.
If one was to define modern man, would it not be today, as today is modern?
-- I am the NRA, enough said...
Think of it this way: in the beginning code was new, and like any program written in the last 7 days before the deadline (ok, only 6 'cause on Sunday He rested), not exactly tested. Weird bugs happened all the time, and God had to really use His imagination to explain them all as miracles, or to fix them.
;)
Sometimes things got so far out of whack, that He had to do a player-wipe and start anew. (See, the flood.)
I don't envy his job there, really. I mean, you have an obscure race condition and just _one_ virgin girl gets pregnant out of nowhere, and people still talk about that after 2000 years. Like noone else ever had a race condition in their code.
And that's not even talking about the kind of players he had. The very first two, you tell them to stay away from that tree 'cause it's still buggy and does crazy stuff to your int stat, and what do they do? Right. Anyone who's ever been a coder/wizard/builder/whatever on a MUD is probably with me when I say I really feel His pain there.
Or you have just one loophole in the physics code, and a whole freakin' nation starts building a tower to abuse that loophole.
But as time went by, the thing got better and better debugged, and you can let the physics engine run everything for years without a glitch. None of that having to intervene personally to fix things, or explain creatively why some guy got 100 times as many bread and fish out of a basket as he put in.
So nowadays God can relax and play a bit of WoW instead. Yeah, it's an easier job, but I think he earned a break fair and square
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
> If God is indistinguishable from natural events why even assume it exists?
/.) responses I can think of that might go a little way toward answering this question.
There are two short-ish (b'cos its
1. If God is just the creator-sustainer then true, in day-to-day existence it would be indistinguishable to believe that or not believe that. However, if the creation had a purpose, then understanding that purpose might make living in and understanding our world easier.
However, whats to say that any specific religious group has properly understood that purpose? Especially if God is indistinguishable from nature - since there'd be no evidence of that purpose beyond what we could glean ourselves (though we might glean it a bit better by believing there was a purpose).
2. It may be that God sometimes acts. Specifically these acts might take the form of inspiring prophets who can, amidst their ravings (a natural consequence of being touched by God, I would assume) reveal something of the purpose of God.
Unfortunately, if this is indeed the case, it seems a lot of opportunists have noticed that there's no Turing test for prophethood and have taken it upon themselves to declare God's purpose as they see fit.
This is a good reason to be suspicious of any prophet/religion. But the existence of frauds does not per se deny the potential existence of the real thing. And if the real thing does exist, it may reveal more about the nature of the world than we can glean by observing from within (since various thinkers have shown that hard limits exist on what can be known of a system from within that system itself)
Sorry, that wasn't as short as I hoped. I hope it at least made sense
"And that solves the mystery of the missing ring" - Bender
When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.
... I was just going to congratulate you, but then I did some googling and found that the author is Stephen F. Roberts. An attribution might be nice, but it's easy enough to google.
I guess, given the content of this thread, it's not entirely off-topic... Anyhow. I just wanted to say that your sig is one of the most succinct explanations of Atheism that I've ever seen.
A host is a host from coast to coast...
Unless it's down, or slow, or fails to POST!
What they actually believe is that a cosmic Jewish zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and drink his blood and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in all humans because a woman made from a rib was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree and thereby pissing off an invisible wizard
who lives in the sky. Makes perfect sense really.
"Paleoanthropologists now say that genetic and fossil evidence suggests that modern human species -- Homo sapiens -- evolved in Africa between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago...The world was in a glacial stage 125,000 to 195,000 years ago..."
This proves conclusively that modern humans are responsible for global warming. As soon as we developed, the Earth started warming up. We did not even need SUVs to cause global climate change.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
The concept of God (and the soul) exists because of the inherent paradox of the existence of evil. The existence of evil derives from dualistic thinking. Dualistic thinking comes from symbolic thinking. When we ate the fruit of knowledge of good and evil, we created God.
Symbolic thinking provides a huge survival advantage. Instead of using built-in or evolved categories of abstraction, we developed the ability to abstract the process of abstraction. This produced a plethora of mental symbols, but they all have to refer back to the individual top be of use, so a symbol of the individual was created. Eventually, people forgot that this was a just symbol, and started to see themselves as separate from then universe, creating the dualistic world-view.
This creates a problem. If 'it's all one' then there is no problem of evil. Shit happens, that's that. If people are separate, how is balance maintained? One must hypothesize a balancing force, in the form of either a God, or karma. This is why Buddha rejected the traditional Hindu concept of Karma and created a non-dualistic replacement.
God exists to balance the scales unbalanced by our separating ourselves from the universe. His role as enforcer for the ruling clique is a more recent development brought about by the development of mass human on human violence. But that's another story.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The oldest anatomically modern fossils were found in South African caves. But no evidence of mesolithic culture was found with that. Its thought you need language to make clothes, use boats, and art. The oldest hints of those are about 60k, but controversial.
From the very beginning they would have found ways to communicate, but they would not necessarily have had the advanced language skills to preserve a robust set of technologies. It's possible that of those 160,000 years, 100,000 of them passed before such a skill was sufficiently developed to begin maintaining a larger set of technologies, including the ability to pass them from one culture to another. Also keep in mind that many ancient humans died before being able to pass many skills on to their offspring! There's no doubt that by 60,000 years ago we were already beginning to accumulate technologies, and it's not that hard to imagine that it took another 50,000 years before those technologies has accumulated enough to leave an indelible mark that we could easily witness today! (Not including the odd cave painting and primitive tools that we've recovered from much further back in time.)
Keep in mind that I'm extremely ignorant in this particular field and am arguing completely extemporaneously!
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
I'm guessing you don't want to stand in one place for too long?
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
If the human species didn't come along, the Neanderthals may have been the space-age ape. They had brains as large as ours, used fire, and had hints of cerimonies. They seemed well on their way to the next level. Bad luck and competition with southern humans seemed to have doomed them. The NFL would have been even more interesting because they had bulkier bodies (although an agrigarian shift would probably change that).
Table-ized A.I.
The pagan gods were real; they actually walked the earth.
The gods were prehistoric nerds! A likely misquote (I think it was Heinlein who said it): "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".
Thor was the inventor of the hammer. He was the first guy to pick up a branch and beat the shit out of the bigger cave man (if indeed he lived in a cave, man) who he caught fucking his woman. Imagine the awe and surprise of the jock cave men who had been picking on him and laughing at him! Go, Thor!
Promitheus was the guy who got curious (true nerd, he) who walked up to the forest fire while the rest of the tribe was running away in terror, went "wow, man, cool!", picked up a burning branch and started playing with it. Again, imagine the awe of his fellow tribesmen.
Zeus threw his burning branch (remember, fire came from lightning back then) at the jock who was bullying HIM.
And so on. The gods were real; they lived. They were homo nerdus sapiens, not unlike you or me.
-mcgrew
Now I know my grad school advisor must be at least 164,000 years old, because he sure isn't a modern human.
You lost me with that bit about abstracting the process of abstraction.
So is symbolic thinking an automatic gearbox, or is it more like traction control?
At the bottom of the
164,000 years ought to be enough for anybody.
More like variable valve timing as opposed to a fixed camshaft.
I'll explain. Other species besides humans use abstraction. Parrots, for instance, understand the abstractions of color, shape, and number. The categories and levels of abstraction seem to be genetic, though. Parrots do not seem to create the abstractions of love, freedom, or justice, for instance.
Other species can't build abstractions out of abstractions. We can. We've abstracted the process of creating arbitrary abstractions out of lower level genetic abstractions already present. There is evidence of an explosion of symbolic thinking (symbolic burial, cave art, faster and faster advances in technology) that marks the advent of modern humans.
In computer terms, it's the difference between creating a fixed table and loading it with a fixed set of data, and creating an object factory that creates objects dynamically.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The "standing on the shoulders of giants" phrase comes to mind.
Humans did use their intelligence to try to live better, but each step had to solve certain problems before they could move on to the next step.
E.g., before you can have agriculture, you needed to have (A) the right conditions, which is why it evolved in Egypt and Mesopotamia, and (B) a calendar.
Being able to just flood a plot of land, or have it naturally flooded for you, is godsend at that point in time. For starters it allows you to live on far less "modern" plants, and with less work. To put things in perspective, even as late as European middle ages, you'd harvest 2 to 7 grains of grain for each grain planted. (By comparison, nowadays you'd get several hundred grains per grain planted.) Now move backward a bit more, and griculture evolved on really really shitty plants. So the fertility boost of irrigation may have been not just an extra, but actually _needed_ to be able to subsist on agriculture at all. You _had_ to have that to get agriculture "bootstrapped".
The type of soil is important too. A plough usable on northern european soil, for example, wasn't even invented until AD times. (That and the invention of the horseshoe by Germans was one of the factors that suddenly allowed them to challenge the Romans.) So having a bunch of earth turned into mud regularly may have been the _only_ way to start planting anything at all.
A calendar is also more important than it sounds, because the seasons go on whether you like it or not. If you don't start, say, harvesting at the right point of time, the next flood of the Nile comes and destroys your whole crop right there. So someone has to figure out how to count the days right, and/or how to build a stick in the ground and some markers that tell him when to start doing this or that.
That's just one example of a problem which looks trivial in retrospect, but it was the culmination of a whole chain on non-trivial discoveries.
To make things worse, now picture that:
A) You have a chicken-and-egg problem: before you have agriculture, the pressure is a heck of a lot lesser to figure out the calendar. You don't have a tech tree, like in Civilization games, to look ahead at and see "oh, now we have to work on inventing the calendar, or we'll never get agriculture in time."
As a hunter-gatherer, you just go hunting and gathering daily, and live off whatever you find. There's no use even trying to plan ahead, until you can actually store stuff for the winter, and that won't happen with berries and hunted meat. (Until you can cure meat somehow, there's no way to keep it around in a useful form anyway, so you have to go hunt your dinner daily regardless of whether you figured out the seasons or not. And to give you a timeline, AFAIK, it wasnt until the Roman empire that someone finally figured out how to, essentially, ferment meat and make a sausage out of it.)
B) You have small isolated populations, and everyone has to spend most of their day either hunting/gathering their dinner, so there aren't that many people to stay around and think up new stuff and experiment with new stuff.
For contrast sake: we all know how many great things the Greeks invented or thought up, but the thing is: the Greeks could afford to have as much as 1/3 of the population (the free males) sitting around playing philosopher in between wars. Because the other 2/3 of the population (the women and slaves) supported them. That was a _lot_ of manpower dedicated to figuring out how the world works in ancieng Greece.
And remember that as late as the ancient Egyptian Old Kingdom era, if you plotted a Gauss curve with the age at which people died, the peak would be in the 30's. (Plus a spike in the first 3 years of life.) In caveman times, I wouldn't be too surprised if it was even less. You just didn't have the time to learn a lot, think a lot about the world, make great discoveries, etc. You'd marry at 12, make a bunch of kids in a hurry, and die, and work the whole
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
...the team found ochre, bladelets and evidence of shellfish -- findings that reveal the earliest dated evidence of modern humans. There is no such thing as "too much ochre and shellfish" in an interior design scheme. It is comforting to know there is at least one common theme running through humanity transcending the ages.i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
Bird got to fly.
Man got to sit and wonder. Why? Why? Why?
Tiger got to sleep,
Bird got to land.
Man got to tell himself - He understand.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
While I agree with the part about abstraction, I think we simply applied it to our existing apelike power structure. God is the ultimate Alpha Male.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
That's it? This is modern homo sapiens? No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
yes. that's all I'm going to say in all comments from now on.
(rugbyworldcup.com)
even among fundamentalists, there are many who believe in an old earth.
I believe in an old earth. I think that 6,000 years is really, really old!
Six million is contemporary fantasy.
If I understand correctly, the ancient rabbis regarded 2,000 years (sh'not alpayim) as like eternity.
So basically you almost answered your own answer there: if in the short term it didn't look better than hunting/gathering, then why bother with it?
They weren't clairvoyant, you know. They didn't _know_ that if they started doing agriculture, some 100,000 years later they'll have all this wonderful stuff.
Humans do decisions based on short-term rewards all the time. Heck, you'd think we're smarter than them, but 21'st century corporations still take decisions based on what's the reward in 1 quarter. If switching to agriculture isn't better for feeding your family _right_ _now_, you don't get started on it. And until the right conditions and pre-existing inventions were in place, agriculture might have been so piss-poor as to not even keep you fed until next year.
Well, that's just one factor, but I see no point in repeating the previous message again.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
To clarify, I meant that the idea of even six million years is fantasy; I know that that is not nearly as great as the evolutionist-purported age of the Earth.
And that causes me to think of a huge hole in my "law." (see my first post to this story) The supposed age of the Earth is being pushed back at a much faster rate than the date of modern humans is being pushed back.
God is what I felt when I held my newborn daughter, you insensitive clod!
I lost my sig.
Different hominids approach power differently. There are many different and successful strategies, and 'alpha male' is only one of many. Bonobos, pygmy chimps of South America, for instance, are lead by females, have little or no heirarchy, and use frequent and creative sex acts to mediate when tensions arise in the group.
Why, oh why can we not be more like the Bonobos?
We really don't know for sure if humans were naturally violent and hierarchal, or naturally egalitarian. We do know that before 4500 BC, one does not find fortifications, armor, or weapons that have a purely warlike purpose. One also finds no mass graves or evidence of wholesale slaughter.
One theory is that we were mostly peaceful and egalitarian at first especially in times of plenty. Then we developed agriculture and settled down. The first big drought and famine to occur after that, and we had forgotten how to just move on. We also initially had a surplus and more complex social organization that let us wage actual war for the first time. The combination of a generation of PTSD parents raising a generation of brain damaged (famine will do that) and PTSD children locked in the violent, famine oriented mode of behavior.
I've found that this theory pisses off people who are wedded to the idea of the necessity of heirarchy and social control. They want to think of humans as inherently 'bad,' and only the taming power of civilization can force us to be good. Of course, they get to be the ones who decide what good is. Because they see themselves as good and the rest of us as little better than crazy, violent animals, any amount of force is justified.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Has anyone read more about this to see if their dating techniques make any sense at all? I went to the ASU site and read the blurb, but I'm too lazy to search further (for a possible journal article, for instance). Seriously, though... it looks to me like they dated the age of the _cave_ and then declared that the hominids that had visited it must also be that old. Uh huh. That puts an upper bound on the age of humanity... it doesn't place a particular age. One dating technique talked about stalagmites, and the other talked about how long since sand had seen daylight. What do either of these have to do with the people in the cave?
I very interested in where you draw the line of allegory - This is something that I have been thinking about a lot. If the first two chapters of Genesis are not literal, are Adam and Eve literal? At what point does an evolving ape evolve/get made into a human, with a soul? Are the genealogies from Adam to Noah literal, are the people mentioned in them literal, and is the flood story literal? Well, I could go on, but I've very curious to where you draw the line and why.
Thanks in advance!
Just because I doubt myself does not mean I find your position compelling.
...You're not the only one confused about dating.
However, the physical evidence is there, and many of us belive God does not lie in either nature or in scripture.
Then the other question you have to ask yourself is, "what makes scripture the word of God?" Ultimately, the only answer is faith, and if you choose to believe something with no evidence, I don't see how you can ever hope to reconcile this with a philosophy that requires evidence before belief. All you end up doing is fitting facts to your interpretation.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
"Only if you followed the calculations of the Bishop of Ussher, who came up with that date. Many evangelicals who are not fundamentalists don't accept a young earth theory, and even among fundamentalists, there are many who believe in an old earth. Some of the debates on fundamentalist boards like Rapture Ready become heated."
Then again, there is a good chance God has a sense of humor. He wants people to accept him on faith. He created the cosmos. Isn't it entirely possible that he, being the Creator, could have monkeyed with the record to make the Cosmos/Earth look older than it is? I mean, if all signs pointed to 5000 BC, then wouldn't that sort of make the existence of God blatantly obvious?
I suppose this makes me neither Old or New Earth, but rather So What Earth. Knowing that Modern Man came about 150K years ago is not relevant to today's issues. Knowing that does not change the need to care for our neighbor or love our family. Nor does it make it easier to do either.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
First, I'm amazed that my tongue-in-cheek post caused so much controversy. It does point out a few things though, that most Bible Thumpers, as a class, have no sense of humor. Christians are a different matter.
Also, one modded "overrated". I'm trying to figure out if it was an RMS, Gore, or God fan that didn't like it. I do know that RMS acolytes have no sense of humor when it comes to their smelly prophet. And the OBFG, Order of the Blind Followers of Gore (this is a Jesuit-like sect of the Holy Church of Global Warming who lead the Inquisition), have absolutely no sense of humor, and for some reason, the God Fans don't have a bit of the humor that their Creator, Who Created Them In His Own Image, has an abundance of. Who else would have had the sense of humor to create the Bible Thumpers?
I doubt you grok "Grok". Thou Art God.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
I for one welcome our new Snake charming Jewish Cosmic Zombie overlords!
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Piltdown man
A tooth of a pig drawn into an apeman!
A lie and a fake 5 years by 1927.
Nebraska man
A lie and a fake for 40 years.
By then everyone in the world thought they were from apes.
How did it take 40 years for the scientific community to find it was a clumsy fake?
Javaman (homo erectus)
Discovered by Dr Dubois and he himself declared in 1938 that it was just a monkey (gibbon).
He had found human skulls in the same stratum did not tell anyone for 30 years!
A lie and a fake. He eventually renounced the javaman as a fraud himself.
Peking man
Dr. black discovered it, a tooth and some ashes.
Soon after human remains were found mixed with animal remains. The animal remains were the food of the humans.
Hey but they wanted an apeman! so they grabbed bits of both and made Peking Man!
1972
Richard Leaky
Found a skull that supposedly blew evolution out of the water by 2.5 million years. The only thing left was
Ramapithecus. Just some fragments of jaw bones and some teeth. The same size and shape as a babboon in Ethiopia.
It never has been found and it never will be found a creature that is more than brute and less than human.
Also there is such little evidence for apemen that the amount would not be accepted in any other field of science.
And there's plenty more scientific evidence for the non-existenance of evolution!
(I know this is not what you like to hear, so just score me nothing as usual. Thanks)
At least one point of the Aquatic Ape has no counter claims.
That we get healthy eating fish meat and fat, while getting sick eating pork and cow meat and fat. Other terrestrial mammals get no harm from pork and cow meat.
So, while it's nonsense that all the evolutionary traits that makes us humans come from having to swim and fish, at least in a long part of our evolution we ate proteins only from fish, and perhaps most humans from that time where very good swimmers.
I even have a recipient full of Omega-3 pills in my room right now.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
"they feel if the Creation story is an allegory, what else is an allegory?"
Interesting argument, but a logical fallacy.
On this basis we should reject the "Good Samaritan" as a parable (i.e. a fictitious story): "If the 'Good Samaritan' is a parable, what else is a parable?"
The obvious reply is: "Whatever else has the characteristics of a parable."
The very early stories in the Bible have a few features in common with figurative stories - e.g. the story of the Garden of Eden has a talking snake (and explains how he begins to crawl); an idyllic garden; an infinite and invisible God who goes for walks in the garden and acts as though he cannot see Adam hiding behind a bush; one or two "magic" fruit trees that give you either all knowledge, or immortal life; a man called "Man" (="Adam" in Hebrew) and a woman called "Life" (="Eve" in Hebrew) - i.e. in the literary context, these characters are very plausible representatives of the whole human race, rather than actual historical people; etc. If you insist that the story "must" be historically accurate narrative, then you will dismiss all these literary characteristics. But if you start from the position of "I don't know beforehand what kind of genre ytis passage is", then the signs are all there.
In other words, the Bible is certainly a mixture of literary genres, and you have to work out what kind of genre any passage is by considering its literary qualities. Fundamentalists try to dictate what the genre is. They build a castle of faith based on their *fallible* claims about what a passage "must" means, and then call it *infallible* because "they are just believing what the Bible says". No they are not. They are believing a very fallible human interpretation of the Bible, and then calling *their interpretation* "the Word of God". This is self-delusion.
I am anarch of all I survey.
Rabbi Yossi ben Halafta in the 2nd century made the calculation (perhaps more accurately).
Biblically, you can go from Adam to the destruction of the 2nd Temple with "begats" and the length of rule of the kings. So you can figure out when Adam was born, since we know the Temple was destroyed in 70 CE.
It is possible that Bishop Ussher's date does not agree because the Christian bibles included a serious abridgement of Torah.
The Neandertals had their chance. They blew it. We invented culture, then metaphor and then real minds. And then we ate every Neandertal. End of story.
p.s. tastes like chicken!
Da Blog
Satan's greatest accomplishment is to have convinced people he does not exist. I have raised children. Just as releasing a hammer and watching it fall confirms the invisible thing that is gravity watching children get grown will leave you with no doubt that there is an evil out to get souls.
You can hope God exist, you can pray he does not. You can rely on this squabble going on for as long as there are people.
If you have the reasoning ability to deduce gravity you can have no doubt about Satan.
Well, our knowledge is limited, and we are error-prone. Believing in God (or not) doesn't change that. The scientific method is an attempt to minimize the effects of our own hubris, fallibility, limitations, and so on. The alternative, religion, is a collection of stories meant to make us feel better. I'll take science, because it acknowleges our limitations and still attemps to learn.
To clarify, I meant that the idea of even six million years is fantasy;
That you are unable to comprehend the concept does not falsify it. That you appeal to your inability to comprehend the timespan as evidence that the timespan could not have occured suggests that you are irrational.
I know that that is not nearly as great as the evolutionist-purported age of the Earth.
The age of the earth was revised to well beyond six thousand years before Darwin was even born, much less before his theory was published.
And that causes me to think of a huge hole in my "law." (see my first post to this story) The supposed age of the Earth is being pushed back at a much faster rate than the date of modern humans is being pushed back.
Please provide evidence to support this assertion. Note that the currently accepted age of the earth was derived in 1956 and has not been revised since. Also explain the intended implication of your statement.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
That's just not true. People spread all over the world and developed all kinds of advancements. Take a dedicated team of thousands of educated city dwellers and try to come up with what the Eskimo's had. Their kayaks were a marvel of technology to europeans and that is just one example. Many arctic explorers died before realizing the natives really did have better technology for most things in that environment. Stone age technology is really quite advance and difficult to master. Now try going to the Kalahari desert and living like a bushman. Or sail between islands (and apparently all the way to South America according to native chicken DNA) like Polynesians. Try to remember all the stuff you can and can't eat. Basket weaving is easy, right? Try to figure it out yourself. Or make shoes. You can spend a lifetime trying to master the technology from just one of these groups.Just try something really, really simple. Try to make fire from scratch.
They did all this with total world populations smaller than one large city today.