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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."
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!
You know these jokes are getting really tiring. Most Major Religions accept that Evolution is probably how we came to be. There is only a small few religions that take this stance. But there is a general large population of people who Disbelieve in Evolution not because they chosen religion told them so but because they think there religion is against it, and they will rather spend time fighting the issue then actually checking what their religions says about the topic... Sometimes unfortunately this goes up to the clergy of the church and they are preaching information that the general church has no issue on.
Most of the time, this is used to try to get people politically charged. Keeping the Scientist Immoral and wrong, helps prevent social changes, which a lot of people fear.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
wouldn't a more evolved and intelligent species move to a more hospitable environment???
But, this brings up a good point. It was once believed that "God(s)" controlled our health, the weather, our creation, and everything else. With each scientific discovery, "God(s)" role gets smaller and smaller. Really, the "God(s)" job is getting easier and easier every year. The religous community keeps changing what their beliefs are, in order to not conflict with what is found to be true. This is why "God(s)" can't be disproved.....it is a moving target.
So far, the only act-of-god I have seen this year, is helping the Bears beat the Packers. Other than that, I see no proof left.
Yes, this is a mistake of modern religion -- attaching God to the so-far missing bits of science, and turning Him into a "God of the gaps". That's partially because they feel a need to make specific statements about God, like "He did this" or "He said that" or "this is what He wants".
Far better to let God dissolve, like sugar in water, invisible but still there. A sort of carrier signal for reality. But then I guess you wouldn't have much of a foundation for bashing gays.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Just a test to see if your faith is strong enough. You know, all the stuff those people find was placed there by God to test whether such things can sway you.
Though, to be honest, I'd rather think the Bible and all the scriptures are God's test of humanity. Whether we actually accept his idea of free will or whether we're just following some old books like sheep, no matter whether logic and reason tell us that something can't be quite right.
The problem with Gods is that by their very definition it is impossible for mortal man to understand their motivations. IIRC, there is also no part of the Bible telling you that the Bible is by default always correct by the letter and the word. Not to mention that clinging to the letter of a translated version to English is bollocks by the way it came into existance. Claiming that every word should be weighed in a text that's a translation of a translated translation is, to put it mildly, stupid.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I've seen two main arguments for where god fits in a modern, scientific understanding of the universe. The first is "Well, science is just wrong," and the second is much like what you're proposing.
My question is, if god is indistinguishable from natural events, why even assume it exists? It makes it seem like the difference between god existing and god not existing is just a warm fuzzy feeling. And if I want that I can go hold my newborn daughter.
(And please don't come back with that old "God is what you feel when you hold your newborn daughter" crap.)
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
God was, IMO, a control tool. Imagine you're the leader of a tribe. You do, of course, want to make this tribe strong and want it to prosper. How can this be achived? By ensuring that the tribe does not fight amongst itself and only against outsiders. How do you achive that? By laws. How do you enforce them? With 'police'.
You're facing 3 important problems, though. First, due to necessity a good portion of your tribe is armed. Weapons are (remember, we're stone age here, maybe bronze age) not much different from your tools. Bow'n arrow is as much a weapon as a hunting tool. As are spears. Your whole tribe is 'armed'. And how do you keep your police in check? You have to reward them, but this first of all costs your resources (which you probably don't have) and might make the rest of your tribe jealous. And finally, of course, you and your police can't be everywhere, there's always a chance that a clever criminal outsmarts you and can get away with murder.
In comes a god. This god can see everything and will punish and reward you after your death. It's the perfect control tool. First of all, you don't have to prove anything or punish anyone. They will be judged after death. Death by itself is already scary (nobody enjoys dying), and the big question "what happens afterwards" has troubled people since the dawn of time. Here, you offer a solution and explanation, while at the same time offering punishment or reward depending on how you behave during life.
You can of course add onto this depending on what flavor you need in your religion (like, promise extra goodies if someone dies for the Lord (i.e. for your interests)), but when you look closely, pretty much every religion worth its salt incorporates the idea of surveillance during life and judgement after life by God, gods, or some universal force.
Today, we don't need God anymore. We have the technology to replace him.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I disagree with your premise:
"According to a 2007 Gallup poll, about 43% of Americans believe that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so." This is only slightly less than the 46% reported in a 2006 Gallup poll.[64] Only 14% believe that "human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process."
And if you think those polls are unreliable, then why is there been such a recent increase in school boards trying to push creationism into the public school curriculum?
You know these jokes are getting really tiring.
You know what's tiring? That in the year 2007, grown adults are still arguing whether an all-knowing (yet inconsistent) invisible man exists. They literally believe in an invisible man. And it's not a simple argument of "well, we had to have come from somewhere!". They believe in a very specific invisible man, with very specific rules of conduct, with one of those rules being that other (i.e.: "false") invisible men are forbidden to be considered by the human mind.
A jealous god - seriously, who comes up with this shit?
God's role has always been understood as sustaining the existence of Creation.
Understood by whom? By theologists or regular believers? Which timeframe covers "always"?
That God ultimately controls health, weather, and so forth followed from that and still does, and there's no moving target here.
There's a large spectrum of interpretations between "God ultimately controls X" and "God directly and personally controls X". If someone becomes ill or recovers, should they take it personally or not? A lot of people do and a lot of people don't. They most likely didn't read your books, but that doesn't change that they hold those interpretations.
The irony is that you're underlining what the OP is saying: the role of God is pushed back further and further, until it only covers the areas that are theoretically impossible to answer by science. It is commendable that you're already at the target endpoint, but a lot of people aren't there yet.
see a Text Widget
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
>there is a difference between something that looks human, and something that acts human
Suddenly Paris & Britney et al make sense.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
That's because you're using a modern human brain to think things through. Try using a much more primitive, almost animal-like brain, and you'll see why your questions make no sense.
To us, having farms seems like a simple idea. Instead of running around finding fruit/nuts/whatever, just plant the stuff and have them in one location. That makes sense to us today. However, to early man, his sole goal was to survive. That meant going out every day to find something to eat. He didn't have time (nor the intellect) to understand that planting the pit from a cherry (or whatever fruit existed back then) in a specific location was preferable than having to go out and find it.
Further, when you consider the small population of near-humans that existed and how spread out they were, what one group may have found to make their lives easier probably did not transfer to another group. Why would the first group give up an advantage they had?
You can't use what we consider to be self-evident and try to apply it to someone living 100,000+ years ago. The conditions were completely different than what they are now.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I am never ever going to be convinced of anything other than the ignorance of the average person when presented with poll results. Here is a relatively good example. In a recent geography poll of adults ages 18-24 (fresh out of school, that means many of them spend a large portion of their time learning) 1/3 could not find Louisiana on a map, nearly half could not find Mississippi, 6 in 10 could not find Iraq. You can't counter a statement of There is only a small few religions that take this stance with polls of average Americans. I wouldn't even except a poll of average members of a religion that take this stance. What the average American believes has nothing at all to do with what the religion believes much like the fact that the average American doesn't think Louisiana or Iraq are important enough to be able to point out on a map doesn't mean that our government doesn't think they are important.
> 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
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.
You're working on the assumption that the moment agriculture became feasible, humanity said "Well, it's about bloody time" and immediately started farming. Remember agriculture had to be INVENTED first- People were almost certainly living nomadic, hunter gatherer lifestyles quite happily for a long long time before anyone had the means, motive and opportunity to actually sit down and invent farming. For example, how many thousands of years did the peoples of north america live their nomadic, non-agricultural lifestyles before the europeans turned up? Their land and climate were well-suited to agriculture (as the millions of square miles of farmland in the US today demonstrate), so why didn't they? Why didn't they settle down the moment they crossed over from Asia, inventing agriculture on the shores of the great lakes and enjoying longer lifespans and greater comfort and technology andgadgets and industry so that they could cross the Atlantic first in giant totem-pole-toting steampunk airships so that we'd be having this conversation in Navaho, but that didn't happen: They had everything they needed to support their population growth and life was good enough, so they never felt the pressure to invent farming, and it was only with the arrival of the white guys that their way of life changed.
Also, the world was a lot wilder in prehistoric times than it is now. You can go out into what you think of as "nature" - a national park for instance- and think you're roughing it. However, unless you go somewhere incredibly remote, like the arctic circle or the middle of a rainforest, the chances are the landscape around you has been moulded to human comfort, probably thousands of years before you ever got there. Most parts of the world with dense populations of humans today would, 50,000 years ago, have been completely covered in dense, nigh-impenetrable forest with all kinds of dangerous beasties wandering about in it. Humans have been changing the world and the ecosystem to suit them since way before recorded history; introducing useful species and extincting the nasty ones; clearing forests, tidying up the rocks and boulders left by ice-age glaciers, redirecting rivers and draining swamps, and it's easy to forget what a debt we owe them for doing all the hard work. Hell, we're lucky they survived at all.
Finally, population increases exponentially, which means that a small number can become a large number very quickly. The flipside of that is that when tracking population backwards in time, today's large numbers get small just as quickly. Consider how much shorter lifespans were in prehistoric times, how much higher infant mortality must have been and the general toughness of life back then and the aforementioned exponential growth probably looked a lot flatter. The world's population was probably very small, and probably only increasing incredibly slowly for a long long time. That scarcity of people reduces not only the pressure to invent agriculture and settled civilisation, but also the number of potential inventors.
Just a few thoughts.
To all the atheists out there (and I don't know if the poster I'm replying to is an atheist or not): If we religious people are just sheep blindly following what we've been taught, I really think you have to forgive us. Because if there is no spiritual world, then "belief" and "knowledge" really must boil down to chemical reactions in animal brain tissue - which makes all of our reasoning very limited and potentially very error-prone. We are all then "just sheep". We are cells reacting to stimuli, and what we believe is not really belief and we don't have any choice anyway, so don't be angry about it. (Oh, that's right, you can't help being angry about it because that's just your cells reacting to your environment)
Now if you believe (as I do), that what I described above is contrary to your experience and your nature, then believing in a "soul" or some other agent of "free will" isn't a big leap. Think about it - if you really have free will, science can never address the mechanism by which you make choices. If your choices are predicable by formula, then I don't think you can call it free will. And why should we discount the possibility of such things existing? It seems to me to be circular reasoning to discount them: "We only believe in what science can prove, because if science can't prove it we can't know it exists". Science becomes the sole source of knowledge. It becomes God. Well, there's a big difference between "we can't know it exists" and "we know it can't exist"
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
One doesn't need to be trained in mythology to know it's it's not reality.
I say there is a lot of black people in YOUR MOM.
Now if you believe (as I do), that what I described above is contrary to your experience and your nature, then believing in a "soul" or some other agent of "free will" isn't a big leap. Think about it - if you really have free will, science can never address the mechanism by which you make choices.
True, but your premise is wrong. Free will *is* an illusion. We *are* just cells reacting to stimuli. It's just that the decision tree is so complex that it's not easily understood.
We are cells reacting to stimuli, and what we believe is not really belief and we don't have any choice anyway, so don't be angry about it.
This is just silly. Free will is an illusion, but macroscopic choices are not. Telling me "not to be angry about it" is external stimuli, which I can balance with my internal desires of whether to be angry or not, combined with my motivations for being angry. Depending on how all the variables balance, I am angry or I am not angry. I made a choice based on all the competing factors. No actual free will involved, yet I have the illusion that I made a choice, because I'm not conscious of all the factors and the weighting.
"We only believe in what science can prove, because if science can't prove it we can't know it exists". Science becomes the sole source of knowledge. It becomes God.
I believe in what can be measured and observed. I can *speculate* about things that can't be measured and observed. Science is not a "source" of knowledge, it's a methodology for falsifying theories. The source of all knowledge is the world around us and attempting to fit theories to the facts.
God, on the other hand, is a theory of what underpins the universe. It came from the lack of explanation for the world around us. A tribal leader needed something to tell his flock about why the storms came, or why someone's child died, etc. It's a lot easier to point to the Sun God. It's a great explanation for things, because it explains everything -- except for one thing. God cannot tell us whether it doesn't exist or not.
For that, we have to use logic and experience. Our experience tells us that nearly everything that used to be chalked up to God can be explained using natural processes. Logic tells us that intelligence required mechanisms to host it. What are the mechanisms that allow God to think? Somehow, those mechanisms must have arisen either through a super-God, or through an evolutionary process. If it's a super God, then we can a "creation loop" of super-Gods, leading to a logical contradiction. If it's evolution, then it's a simpler explanation to simply eliminate God and apply evolution to humanity.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
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.
Yay science!
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
Basically what you describe is pretty much what I see as free will. A human being, reacting to his environment, based on his capabilities, experiences and knowledges. Yes, knowledge and experience is some electrochemical process happening in the brain. Or something like that. Afaik, we don't know exactly how the brain works yet.
Maybe that really means that our will isn't so free as it seems, and that our future actions can be determined by examining our past. Though maybe the Heisenberg phenomenon kicks in on a macroscopic way and the system changes as soon as you start observing it. I guess someone will do some research about it sooner or later.
But I guess that's not even the point now. What this is about is the simple question whether God (provided he exists) really wants us to cling to a book and ignore everything that contradicts it, or whether he would rather want us to use the gift we have to grow beyond and above it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Insert Dawkins quote here: "There's an infinite number of things that we can't disprove. You might say that because science can explain just about everything but not quite, it's wrong to say therefore we don't need God. It is also, I suppose, wrong to say we don't need the Flying Spaghetti Monster, unicorns, Thor, Wotan, Jupiter, or fairies at the bottom of the garden. There's an infinite number of things that some people at one time or another have believed in, and an infinite number of things that nobody has believed in. If there's not the slightest reason to believe in any of those things, why bother? The onus is on somebody who says, I want to believe in God, Flying Spaghetti Monster, fairies, or whatever it is. It is not up to us to disprove it." (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/atheism.html)
This space up for sale.
My own signature makes me remember why I totally disagree with you.
In a closed system, you can make deterministic predictions about the behaviour of any part of the system as long as its own parts are deterministic, and they are for the most part unless they rely on quantum physics.
But we are not a closed system. We constantly react with the world and in fact, the continuous interaction with the world not only help us to have free will, but in fact is a fundamental part of the free will. In other words, take away the random interactions we have with the world around us and you take away our free will. It will in fact take away more than free will, as a significant part of the computations our brains can do and computers can't is because of this same random interactions with the world.
If we where as deterministic as you assume we are in case no soul exist, then it would be far easier to simulate us with computers than it actually is. And the difficulty of this simulation is not one of scale, simply adding raw computation power will never make some machine as smart as a human.
It is a difficulty of the very premises that people assume makes us smart. A significant part of our own intelligence comes from the outside and how we interact with it. Just isolate someone from any visual, auditive and tactile stimulus to see that he/she becomes insane in a very short time.
We are Turing O-Machines: We are Oracle machines as defined in the very same paper by Turing that started all the artificial intelligence theory. An Oracle Machine is just a machine that can complete some computations impossible to do by any normal Turing Machine using an Oracle that tells it the answer of the computation. The Oracle is out there. We use everything we perceive of the world as an Oracle for the purposes of this theory.
This argument mimics the very same technique that great genius use to achieve their discoveries. They get their inspiration from many many different ideas and perceptions from the world.
A computer (simple Turing machine equivalent) will never be able to do that (unless it reacts with its environment and thus became a O-Machine).
We are not deterministic and we will never be, no matter if there's a soul or not.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
Hmmm. I have to disagree.
"...Population only really stagnates in a primitive society based on limited resources..."
A culture of hunters-gatherers finds many obstacles for population growth. Colonizing a new area is not just moving there. People has to learn the 'tricks' that allow them to survive and prosper in that area, which plants are edible, which plants have medical uses, which animals are dangerous and how to hunt them, where can habitation be built without fear of landslides or floods. This is usually a long process. When that culture finally adapts, other factors like tribal wars, famines, droughts, epidemic and endemic diseases, pests and such keep the population low. As an example, consider New Guinea, where tribal wars -among other factors- have kept population low for thousands of years.
Or consider North American natives, who have populated that part of the world for a long long time, but were relatively scarce when the Europeans came (and then, sadly, were made much more scarce).
"When you consider the advances that mankind has made in technology over the past 5000 years, it is astounding. It is even more astounding to think that for the preceding 35,000 years, there was virtually no technological advancement at all! Now we hear that the date may be pushed back even further, and my incredulity grows"
It's part of the same process we are living nowadays. There have been more advances and inventions in the 20th century than in the rest of History. Same thing about books written, philosophical systems developed, and so on. Primitive societies aren't prone to innovate, cause tradition is almost the only education their young receive. Usually they innovate only when they have to adapt to new circumstances. Information flow was also stopped by all kind of barriers (linguistic, religious, lack of writing, isolation...). Those cultures could learn new 'tricks' but those tricks weren't likely to spread.
Improvements in communication, transport and writing, spread the knowledge, the materials and tools, the ideas... . Consider this progression: Language, commerce, writing, education, the printing press, radio and TV, Internet...