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New Study Suggests Humans Lived In North America 130,000 Years Ago (npr.org)
An anonymous reader writes: In 1992, archaeologists working a highway construction site in San Diego County found the partial skeleton of a mastodon, an elephant-like animal now extinct. Mastodon skeletons aren't so unusual, but there was other strange stuff with it. "The remains were in association with a number of sharply broken rocks and broken bones," says Tom Demere, a paleontologist at the San Diego Natural History Museum. He says the rocks showed clear marks of having been used as hammers and an anvil. And some of the mastodon bones as well as a tooth showed fractures characteristic of being whacked, apparently with those stones. It looked like the work of humans. Yet there were no cut marks on the bones showing that the animal was butchered for meat. Demere thinks these people were after something else. "The suggestion is that this site is strictly for breaking bone," Demere says, "to produce blank material, raw material to make bone tools or to extract marrow." Marrow is a rich source of fatty calories. The scientists knew they'd uncovered something rare. But they didn't realize just how rare for years, until they got a reliable date on how old the bones were by using a uranium-thorium dating technology that didn't exist in the 1990s. The bones were 130,000 years old. That's a jaw-dropping date, as other evidence shows that the earliest humans got to the Americas about 15,000 to 20,000 years ago. The study has been published in the journal Nature.
the dating is all but certain... they didn't use carbon dating, they used many more accurate methods, that all came to the same conclusion.
the real question is when were the bones butchered? did the mastadon die 130,000 years ago, freeze whole in a glacier, and then found 100,000 years later during a warming cycle? what about an amateur archaeologist 30,000 years ago found it and wanted to take the bones apart the only way they know how?
what about jesus.
Paper here http://nature.com/articles/doi... also, would not be surprised if humanoids made it to North America several times prior to 130,000 years considering they've been around since about a million years - that's a lot of time to find your way out of Africa to a different continent by one means or another.
Namaste
Don't believe everything you read.
Especially if it is written in a thousands-years-old text of uncertain authorship, and makes important claims about reality without providing evidence.
"Everyone said carbon dating was accurate for decades, but it really wasn't."
Actually it was, just "science" as it were involves a few setbacks, obstacles, mishaps, errors, errata, etc, and you failed to define "accurate" - it's damn accurate! It's way better than your guesswork and 99% of other possible methodologies. Is it perfect? Nope. That doesn't make it useless.
Thank you for your latest submission to the Institute, labeled “211-D, layer seven, next to the clothesline post. Hominid skull.” We have given this specimen a careful and detailed examination, and regret to inform you that we disagree with your theory that it represents “conclusive proof of the presence of Early Man in Charleston County two million years ago.” Rather, it appears that what you have found is the head of a Barbie doll, of the variety one of our staff, who has small children, believes to be the “Malibu Barbie”. It is evident that you have given a great deal of thought to the analysis of this specimen, and you may be quite certain that those of us who are familiar with your prior work in the field were loathe to come to contradiction with your findings. However, we do feel that there are a number of physical attributes of the specimen which might have tipped you off to it’s modern origin:
1. The material is molded plastic. Ancient hominid remains are typically fossilized bone.
2. The cranial capacity of the specimen is approximately 9 cubic centimeters, well below the threshold of even the earliest identified proto-hominids.
3. The dentition pattern evident on the “skull” is more consistent with the common domesticated dog than it is with the “ravenous man-eating Pliocene clams” you speculate roamed the wetlands during that time. This latter finding is certainly one of the most intriguing hypotheses you have submitted in your history with this institution, but the evidence seems to weigh rather heavily against it. Without going into too much detail, let us say that:
A. The specimen looks like the head of a Barbie doll that a dog has chewed on.
B. Clams don’t have teeth.
The stupid humans crossed (what is now) Bering's Straits, started too many fires and melted too much ice. The ocean-levels rose and there was no way for them to walk back... The Shamanry was settled — it was all their fault.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
If human beings, or our earlier ancestors, were killing mastodons 130,000 year ago without eating the meat, then it seems awfully likely that human/hominid hunting was an important factor in the eventual extinction of mastodons and other North American megafauna. Killing a big mammal like that for the bones/marrow implies a very effective predation capability and possible big environmental impact.
Why is Snark Required?
They don't get special privileges for being first. They get it because European Americans more or less stole their land. It's a form of compensation colonial governments such as the US government voluntarily gave them. Also most tribes and the US BIA regulate based on quantum of blood for enrollment, I.e. too little native and you're out of the tribe because morons like you say these things.
The car was co-invented by the German Mr. Daimler and the American Mr. Chrysler.
The light bulb -- that's easy, that was invented by Henry Ford, the founder of the Ford Motor Company, where it was incorporated into their advertising as representative of "Ford has a better idea!", such as their innovative double-clutch transmissions conveying the necessary impression of cheapness for their small cars to encourage the sale of their Lincoln Navigator as being "more solid."
Samsung in Korea invented the phone.
The computer was invented in England by a guy we don't want to talk about.
The steam engine? That's easy -- it was invented by Montgomery Scott, supported by his Irish-Jewish friend Cap'n Kirk.
I think it was Sagan who remarked that astronomers and physicists regarded Velikovsky's theories of recent Solar System catastrophes as pseudoscience but that the man had some interesting insights into the ancient world. Scholars of the antiquities, however, thought that his theories of catastrophes in the recent Solar System made for interesting reading, but that his chronologies and interpretations of ancient writings were stark-raving bonkers.
Velikovsky's bizarre account of the planet Venus ejected from Jupiter, whizzing around for some time as a comet, and then settling down as the Second Planet gets the most press, but his equally bizarre pronouncements about the ancient world are "inside baseball", accessible to only a select few who even care when the Egyptian Dynasties started and ended.
The 12'th century BCE, give or take, collapse of Mediterranean civilization, the start of the "Greek Dark Ages" separating the events of the Trojan War from the retelling by Homer hundreds of years later, is both kind of cool as well as sobering. There is a Web site "The Greek Dark Ages Never Happened" that takes inspiration from Velikovsky's claim that every other scholar apart from he has the ancient-world chronology all wrong as a consequence of double-counting Egyptian Pharohs or some such thing. This blends with the (mainly) Russians claiming that the chronology of the 2000+ years CE is all messed up and that all of the big historical events in the textbooks happened in a more recent past.
Haven't you been following the news? "Totally fucking bonkers" IS the new reality.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
There is no way humans were living in California 130,000 years ago without draconian intellectual property laws and copyright. They would never have survived.
It's actually old and pirated off the internet.Funny the original author was making fun of himself. http://emganin.tripod.com/home...
"Another problem is that due to interbreeding between "Native Americans" and Europeans who arrived within the past 500 or so years, many of today's "Native Americans" actually have significant European ancestry. "
But just try to find a Native American who brags about being one-sixteenth Belgian.
It's obvious they aren't because the Earth is only 6,000 years old.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
This is near San Diego, California, and well south of the glaciers' maximum extent.
Furthermore, 130,000 years ago was around the beginning of the Eemian interglacial period, so they would not have been frozen around San Diego, and if it had been frozen sometime earlier, then it would have unfrozen 130,000 years ago.
Note: the starting dates of the Eemian vary depending upon who the author is, but in any case it happened around or after when these bones were broken.
Where are you getting this guff from? Carbon dating is precisely as reliable as it always has been, within one standard deviation. We've always known that, and the accuracy can be derived a-priori from fundamental physics.
There are more accurate methods, but all are basically derived from the fundamental determinism that radioactive decay occurs at a predictable rate.
Source: I dont read creationist propaganda.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
We've always known that, and the accuracy can be derived a-priori from fundamental physics
No, for example for carbon dating the accuracy comes from careful examination of variations in C14/C12 ratios relative to other dating sources. If you just use first principles, you would be off by 20% easily. This accuracy has improved with time, so that now dating in many ranges with C14 can give you errors on the order of a couple percent, while other improvements in techniques can push the maximum date back by several times the halflife. The accuracy of other isotope dating methods have also improved, as often they depend on some knowledge of chemistry of the parent isotopes and daughter isotopes in different situations.
The GP is an idiot, as these errors are still relatively small. But it is still wrong to say the accuracy is the same as it has always been and derivable from fundamental physics.
They're at least 1,500 years old, that is, we have complete manuscripts that old. We have manuscripts of some parts (like the Isaiah scroll) that date to ~400 BCE.
That's kind of topic, but now you can get your dates right.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
There is a heretical idea that people might like to WRITE THINGS down in a PAPER, which reasonable people (your question is perfectly reasonable) might want to know, BEFORE the question is asked. This idea has only been in common use for 350 years, so should be considered provisional, though it has actually proved useful in some cases.
You might care to look at the dates there too. They completed their attempts at carbon dating in 1995, but waited until now to publish this analysis, because without the dating, it isn't particularly interesting. The technique they eventually got a date from (uranium-thorium disequilibrium diffusion-adsorbtion dating) is new enough that I am going to have to, uh, read the fucking paper's dozen pages of Supplementary Information to form a worthwhile opinion on it's validity. Though it is, of course, the obvious point of uncertainty.
There was also some damned fine trowel-work in the original excavation. I take my handlens and knee-pads off to the archaeologist who did that salvage excavation and recording.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
The site was destroyed in some construction project. Before 1995.
There will be no new samples from this site ever. The site does not exist any more. That is why the field is called "salvage" archaeology. Whatever you get (including records) is all there will ever be.
I have to read the paper's dozen pages of SI (supplementary information), tonight, and follow those references, but since I know of U-Th series dating going back decades, I suspect that the technique of looking at diffusion profiles of U and the Th products of those is the new bit here. The last U-Th paper I read closely was about 5 years ago, so I'm guessing that this technique has been developed in about the last 5 years, and then applied to the 20-year old salvaged samples and records. And now published.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Far more than there should be.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
IF you accept the dating (see my posts up-thread - I'm by no means convinced by the dating, but need to read the other dozen pages of published material as well as the main paper), then this puts ONE or more H.sapiens (or close relative) in California 130kyr ago. That does not mean a breeding population. That could be one ship-wrecked (is "raft-wrecked" a word?) storm-tossed East Asian who arrived with a fish hook and is starting to re-build his tool kit. This could have happened thousands of times without a breeding population being established.
Off to the Real World.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
There was also some damned fine trowel-work in the original excavation. I take my handlens and knee-pads off to the archaeologist who did that salvage excavation and recording.
Part of the criticism of the paper is that the excavation was time-pressured, impossible to reconstruct and also had to leave out a few things that would have helped answer some questions.
Like: is there no possibility at all that the mammoth died in an accident? What was the exact geology of the area? And other questions raised in the comments above. As one scientist replied: "extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence, and we don't see that here."
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)