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."

Comments

Are they really looking at the right places?

[aadvancedGIR]

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.

Re:Are they really looking at the right places?

[kestasjk]

You're right that this finding does contradict the traditional savannah theory of human evolution, as do many other findings, but it fits right in with the ever increasingly popular aquatic ape theory of human evolution.

The idea is basically that as the climate dried up human ancestors stuck closer to rivers and oceans, where the trees and water were, and ate shellfish and other seafood. (It doesn't mean we became fully aquatic, like mermaids. Just that we became as aquatic as we are now.)

The rich seafood diet has plenty of all the stuff needed to fuel a large brain. It also explains why we can hold our breath and babies can instinctively hold their breath underwater, and why we have no body hair, downward pointing nostrils, webbed fingers, dilute urine, and why we find homo fossils in sediment but not chimpanzee fossils, and why baboons, which came down from the trees and onto the savannah, didn't become human-like, etc, etc.

The savannah theory says that as the climate dried up human ancestors that had previously lived in trees started to move out into the savannah.

Re:Modern Anatomy vs Behavior

[Khomar]

The "acts human" date still remains circa 40,000 to 60,000 B.C.

This actually brings up one of my serious hangups with the currently accepted view of history. Forty thousand years is an incredibly long amount of time. Consider that the ancient civilization of Sumeria (Epic of Gilgamesh) is only dated at 3100 BC with the first evidence of civilization in Egypt also around that time. How much has happened in the last 5000 years? Consider that we even consider the Dark Ages as ancient history and that was only 1000 years ago. We know very little about the history of that time.

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.

The picture gets even more murky when you consider population growth. Population only really stagnates in a primitive society based on limited resources. Even with the worst estimates of the extent of impact from the last ice age, there would be plenty of land mass available for very habitable land for man to expand into. If mankind had been reproducing for 35,000 to 200,000 years, would we not have many, many more people today? Something is just not adding up here.

Hold off with the tinfoil, just hear me out

[jollyreaper]

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?

Re:but... but...

[hey!]

There was a 19th century minister who thought he'd found the way to reconcile Wilberforce and Huxley.

His reasoning went like this. When Adam was created, what kept him from immediately fainting away with hunger? Obviously his bloodstream and digestive tract contained food and its metabolites - remnants of meals he never ate. A human body isn't just a machine, it's an ongoing process. The muscles and skeleton are not just the products of inheritance, but of years of growth and exercise that in Adam's case never happened.

Therefore, to create a human, God had to create a body that perfectly bore the marks of a history it did not, in fact have. What if God made the entire world that way? If natural selection is a fundamental to the operation of the world as metabolism is fundamental to the operation of the body, then certainly the world would bear the signs of evolution in the same way Adam's body bore the signs of having had breakfast that morning (note also this argues for Adam having a belly button). There would be no point in arguing over whether human precursors disproved creation, because the logic of creation requires them to be there. There would be no point in arguing over whether those precursors ever, in fact, existed, beause there would be no empirical observation or theological argument that could sway the question one way or another.

The minister was thrilled. Surely people would live and let live, go back to the things they knew best and leave others to do what they do best, unmolested. Unfortunately, this shows that while he was a clever man, he didn't understand human nature very well.

Re:Modern human BEHAVIOR, not modern humans!

[Vadim Grinshpun]

Quite plausible. Australian and Tasmanian aborigines, and other cultures in the area, have survived for thousands of years (on the order of 40,000+) without getting past stone-age hunter-gatherer culture. Technological innovation is not inevitable--conditions must be right for it. If people are stuck in a certain area, don't get exposed to new environments, etc, they might not progress very much.

Agriculture IS a stretch.

[Dr. Manhattan]

See here. Development of agriculture is a stretch - it requires the right environment, the right stock to start from, and a long period of 'unconscious breeding' (by picking the best/tastiest/largest examples and, like birds, spreading the seeds around, etc.) to turn that wild stock into something that can actually be planted and managed to support a population.

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.

That Tears it . . .

[Dausha]

"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.

Oh stop it...

[ColdWetDog]

Tiger got to hunt,
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.