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.

Comments

Re:I thought

[apoc.famine]

I half agree with you.

Physics works pretty well for things you can do experiments on. It doesn't work very well for things you can't. But then how could it?

It can because it can draw a pretty tight box around those things.

Your examples, dark matter/energy, are great examples of this. Due to physics, we know with near 100% what these things aren't. And that covers something like 99.99% of the possibilities. We know that dark matter isn't made up of protons, neutrons, electrons, or neutrinos. We know that it's not some sort of weird energy. It's either some sort of matter we aren't familiar with, or something with it's properties represents the error in our understanding of general relativity.

Regardless, it's pretty well boxed in. Sure, we can't do experiments on it, but we've indirectly ruled pretty much everything else that exists in the universe out of a possible candidate. Not bad for not being able to experiments on it.