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Grisly Find Suggests Humans Inhabited Arctic 45,000 Years Ago (sciencemag.org)
sciencehabit points out this story which may rewrite the early history of humans in North America. From the Sciencemag story: "In August of 2012, an 11-year-old boy made a gruesome discovery in a frozen bluff overlooking the Arctic Ocean. While exploring the foggy coast of Yenisei Bay, about 2000 kilometers south of the North Pole, he came upon the leg bones of a woolly mammoth eroding out of frozen sediments. Scientists excavating the well-preserved creature determined that it had been killed by humans: Its eye sockets, ribs, and jaw had been battered, apparently by spears, and one spear-point had left a dent in its cheekbone—perhaps a missed blow aimed at the base of its trunk. When they dated the remains, the researchers got another surprise: The mammoth died 45,000 years ago. That means that humans lived in the Arctic more than 10,000 years earlier than scientists believed, according to a new study. The find suggests that even at this early stage, humans were traversing the most frigid parts of the globe and had the adaptive ability to migrate almost everywhere."
2000km south of the North Pole sounds like you'd be in a fairly warm area....
Around 71 degrees north (latitude).
So... northern alaska, greenland, northern tips of scandinavia, siberia... are all around 2000 km from the pole.
All of Iceland is further south.
The world is a big.
Sounds to me like they found a Mammoth, not a Grisly Bear...
It was warmer back then, so i suppose the hunting was great. We could use some warming other than the hot air we get from Washington.
I am a sys admin and while I love learning about history, I definitely didn't pay much attention to it during my education days, so excuse my ignorance if this is a dumb question. How do they know that humans didn't just find the frozen, preserved carcass later on like this kid did, say 35,000 years ago. They find it and figure it's an easy way to harvest some tools which would explain the tool marks. Any science\archeology nerds care to shed any light on this for me?
These sorts of finds are wonderful (IMHO) and the more we learn about our distant ancestors, the more they turn out to have been resourceful and clever.
The article mentions Siberia. Siberia is roughly 65 degrees north latitude, or 2,700 km from the pole. So they probably DID mean 2,000 km , which would be northern Siberia (not a warm place).
The three countries who claim territory at 2,000 km from the pole Russia, Canada and Greenland.
Is my ham sandwich a "Grisly find?"
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
Yeah, only now we spend 90% of our energy trying to prevent it... Oy, the bureaucrats' burden is a heavy one.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Which is more or less 45,000 in dog years, so there ya go.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Yes, today the earth is quite a bit warmer than 45,000 years ago, considering the ice ago that was going on at the time.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Can the arctic ocean be open during an ice age? It seems that if the arctic ocean stays open during the winter, the polar vortex would seek the path of least resistance and settle over a continent. The jet stream would change also. This could explain why palm pollen from the Caribien was found in core samples in northwestern Canada. It's kinda like what's going on now with our weather.
So all the liberal, alarmist, media that live and work in NYC are waffling? When NBC closes their Rockefeller center studio and moves it to Denver I'll take notice. You know because a lot of New York City is less than 16 feet above mean sea level!
Considering carbon dating has been shown to be about as accurate as a politicians promises, they should have just said they were guessing at how long it had been there.
how frigid was it?
+3 Hillary's?
I could be reading this article wrong - I'm only looking at one of the graphs but I'm reading the temperature as warmer today than 50,000 years ago. By my reading you need to go back about 125,000 years to get a warmer temp. https://www.aip.org/history/cl... - graph link http://www.aip.org/history/cli...
"Humans using primitive tools killed and we assume ate a giant fucking hairy elephant"
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Yes, and AGW people say today is hotter than it was back then, when clearly this indicates otherwise!
Citations? Everyone I know seems to think that there were times when the earth was a lot warmer than it is now, an interesting tidbit since the sun was dimmer. Like the Paleozoic period, when there were no continual glaciers at all.
You might try not getting your science information off of conservative politicians.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I have my suspicions that cavemen didn't suck on the tit of social services when they migrated somewhere, making the situation quite different indeed.
Pedantic point: It's redundant to say "2000 kilometers south of the North Pole". Any point on the Earth's surface that's 2000 kilometers from the North Pole is automatically 2000 km south of the North Pole. There is no way for something to be west or east of the North Pole, and definitely not north, so naming the cardinal direction is pointless. It's south by necessity.
I think you mean it was entering an ice age then. The peak of the previous ice age and glaciation here in North America was ~30k-25k years ago.
Om, nomnomnom...
Thats because it has so much geothermal energy, you don't need to burn any fossil fuels, or nuclear or even wind turbines that might kill birds...
Food supply is a big reason, and infrastructure. Now if you want to completely revert to a hunter-gatherer society, where do you think we're going to find enough food for everyone?
Neither hunting nor scavenging is going to do it. Mass-production is where it's at.
Oh, and shelter? Sorry, but a tarp hanging off a tree probably ain't gonna cut it for most people. Especially if it's cold and winter'ish.
Cities are generally built around resources. This can include minerals, water, food sources, or access. Even the stuff we can make ourselves doesn't spring up overnight, and things like water aren't as readily available everywhere as you seem to think, or at least not in quantities needed for any modern sized civilization.
It is difficult to believe caveman hunted wholly-wooly mammoths with just stone tipped spears. The beast grew larger than modern asian elephants, about as big as the largest african elephant bulls and its body was covered in half a meter thick long, heavy greasy hair, almost like felt that easily stops thrown projectiles. The turnk would catapult people into LEO. More or less the biological equivalent of the AT-AT. Furthermore, it's a mammal with a large brain, not a bug with 2-bit DAC ladder neural system.
Trying to attack elephantoids in the eye is not exactly wise. They have tiny eyes and are almost completely blind by default, relying on smells and sounds for perception. In the antique age, war elephants dispersed armies clad in armour, so let me say I wouldn't bet money on the 45k BC era neanderthals versus Hairy Jumbo. I don't think the small number of humans alive at that time could afford exchanging a dozen or two of their warriors (male posse) for each mammoth felled, because that way homo-allegedly-sapiens would have gone extinct well BEFORE the mammoths.
They didn't even RTFA; they didn't find a grizzly, but a mammoth!
I've read TFS several times and not one mention of an inquisitive bear! Come on, editors; up your game!
Or someone from further south tried and failed to kill a mammoth and mammoths are migratory, as some of the great Pixar documentaries claim.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
The world is a big.
- It's a me, Mario!
Mother Earth 45000 years ago was pissed off because there were all these humans up north, so she turned down the climate a notch and caused all these bitches to move to the middle where they are supposed to be. Then evil white republicans started spewing a lot of C02 into the air to heat things up again so they can build a tropical resort in Nunavut.
Stop anthropogenic climate change now. It will create more useable land for people. We don't want that. We want all our land to be barren, cold, and owned by the federal government.
You might try not getting your science information off of conservative politicians
You might try getting your science information from Science, not "consensus". Science doesn't require consensus. Yet that is the ONLY argument AGW people can actually use. "We believe global warming, because 85% of scientists believe it"
Please remember, Piltdown Man was consensus "science" ;)
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Based on this source, it sounds more like we were right near the middle of the last glacial period: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/pale...
"The most recent glacial period occurred between about 120,000 and 11,500 years ago"
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
That Eric the Red guy was a real estate speculator; yes, it was a lot warmer in the green land 1100 years ago (they had dairy farms on the coast!) but they still needed to convince people from Iceland to come over!
You might try not getting your science information off of conservative politicians
You might try getting your science information from Science, not "consensus". Science doesn't require consensus. Yet that is the ONLY argument AGW people can actually use.
Bullshit. If you actually believe in science you are lying on purpose.
Here we go you are challenged - Let's work through this.
TEll me do you deny the accepted fact (confidence to the exclusion of any other explanation) that the constituent gases of an atmosphere have an effect upon the energy retention of that atmosphere? If yes continue No? Explain the easily reprovable experiments that indicate that this is the case, and why those experiments show incorrect results.
If yes, continue - if No explain the consistent repeatability of experiments that show this to be the case, and why everyone apparently gets the exact incorrect results. You can even do these experiments yourself.
Okay, here we have a very reproducible, no consensus needed very basic physics result, proven by science, and thousands of elementary school science fairs over and over again. This is the bedrock of the Greenhouse effect, without which there would be either no life on earth, or certainly not us, because the greenhouse effect allows our world ot have much more consistent weather.
So now we move on to matters that aren't grade school level matters.
There are, in addition to the earthly examples, Venus and Mars, both in the so called Cinderella zone for life, yet one exceptionally hot, the much colder than expected, and largely based on greenhouse warming.
There is also many issues related to weather, such as volcanic activity. El Niño and La Niña which have effects upon the weather. And of course the longer term effects which are long enough to have effects of long enough scale to actually be called climate changes.
So here we are at the next stage.
What happens to the greenhouse effct that makes it disappear at global scales? Give a good explanation of why the greenhouse effect on Venus and Mars is not real (hint - on Venus it isn't all CO2)
Show why, if you claim that the greenhouse effect fails on global scales, how Earth is warm enough to sustain life.
Either the effect exists, or it does not. Give the proof. Proof, BTW, does not consist of cherry picked anomalies. For just like in the creationists denying evolution, all that does is sic the scientists on finding the answer to that question. It's not an either or issue.
"We believe global warming, because 85% of scientists believe it"
Please remember, Piltdown Man was consensus "science" ;)
Ah yes, Piltdown Man. From the outset, the reconstruction was challenged as unrealistic. Sir Arthur Keith noted that the molars on the reconstruction would not be useable because the canine teeth made side to side chewing impossible. Th/at's pretty damning evidence against it.
G.S. Miller, had also touched upon the reconstructed skull being a hoax in 1915. Even before it was exposed, scientists considered it at best as a complete aberration, as it did not fit any of the other evidence for early humans as found in every orher site.
In 1953, using antropologial and zoological evidence, K. P. Oakley, Sir Wilfrid Edward Le Gros Clark and Joseph Weiner proved by comparative anatomy that Piltdown man was a combination of a Medieval human cranium, a lower jaw of an orangutan, and the teeth of a chimpanzee. A deliberate hoax, very purposely fabricated by one Charles Dawson.
So The hoax was suspected by many from the beginning, and anthropologists had long ignored the Piltdown reconstruction because it made no sense.
Science had found and exposed the fraud. Just like science doing what science does.
But here's the kicker. I believe that your accepta
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I went through the hassle of logging into slashdot (finding my password), just to tell you that while reading your comment, I was brushing my teeth and spit out a large mouthful of water and toothpaste all over the bathroom mirror. Thanks for the laugh.
This is disgusting and anyone who uprates it should have all rating privileges rescinded.
It isn't known when the first humans got to America (nor is it known if they left any descendents), but it was before about 13000 years before present. The record of human fossils in the parts of NE Asia near to North America is very, very sparse. This find shows that humans of about 45000 years ago had the behaviours and technologies necessary to survive at least part of the year at 72 degrees north, and if they could do it at the Yenisei, there's nothing in particular to stop them from doing it further East, towards America.
Oh, it's an AC - they can't comment back. But I hope this clarifies things a bit.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"