New Study Suggests Humans Lived In North America 130,000 Years Ago (npr.org) 239
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.
source (Score:5, Informative)
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here [sci-hub.io], if you don't have access to Nature (which I don't).
Re: Political implications for "Native Americans" (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Many of the treaties basically say forever (as long as the Sun shines kind of time frames) and the American Constitution puts treaties pretty high in the law. A deal is a deal and the people who traded a few beads for most of the natives land have done pretty good.
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Hear Hear!
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A deal is a deal and the people who traded a few beads for most of the natives land have done pretty good.
That's nice for the guys who profited but lame for the vast majority of the US which pays for this ... forever while receiving none of the benefit. This is one of the earliest cases of privatise the gains socialise the losses.
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Some of the Alaskan and Canadian native groups had taken their large land holdings from others so recently when Europeans arrived that there were still small refugee camps of people who had escaped the slaughter.
I've yet to see the observation benefit any of the related policy discussions, though.
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Re:Political implications for "Native Americans" (Score:4, Funny)
"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.
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"But just try to find a Native American who brags about being one-sixteenth Belgian."
Ha!
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Here, in Eurasia, there is no "native population", there are just descendants of previous conquerors.
It seems that it is the same in New World.
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We are all descendants of conquerors and slaves.
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Politics start to get involved because so-called "Native Americans" receive preferential treatment
Why are you disparaging Elizabeth Warren?
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I'll give her the benefit of the doubt, that it is just a poorly written sentence. But it did make my jaw drop at first.
Either that or "she" caught a few.
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It's ironic that the last part of his post is "make any sense regardless".
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+1 funny because its true
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When I was in Okinawa I was told that humans originated in Okinawa.
Fingerprints of the Gods (Score:2)
I'm about a quarter of the way through the book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Interesting in the same way as Worlds in Collision (Velikovsky): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Maybe history isn't what we think it is.
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Interesting like a thoroughly terrible [wikipedia.org]
Hollywood summer blockbuster, completely devoid of any connection to real-world physics, mathematics, history, or even simple logic and basic causality?
Sure, why not? I mean, the Da Vinci Code was also pretty popular.
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completely devoid of any connection to real-world physics, mathematics, history, or even simple logic and basic causality?
That would depend on if you know how old the human race actually is instead of assuming you do.
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And by interesting, you mean, "totally fucking bonkers".
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Sagan on Velikovsky (Score:3)
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 f
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One thing that I got out of WIC was the imagining of how major celestial events would appear to ancient people. How they might look and be interpreted.
FWIW it might be that kind of thinking was more common in the appropriate circles back then, but, in my case, reading the book is when I first started wondering about it. And then I started seeing more and more hypotheses and theories on how the Earth-Moon system was formed, f'rinstance, and used for other catastrophic and/or chaotic events.
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And Carl Sagan didn't have much positive to say about the second one
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Nice to see somebody got what I was trying to say.
"...this site is strictly for breaking bone." (Score:2)
Smithsonian Barbie (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Funniest comment (Score:2)
I have read after many years on Slashdot.
Re:Funniest comment (Score:4, Informative)
It's actually old and pirated off the internet.Funny the original author was making fun of himself. http://emganin.tripod.com/home... [tripod.com]
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What? You didn't read about the Hippo Butt Leeches [slashdot.org]?
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Funny, this weekend I'm going out foraging for the recently-named Boletus rex-veris.
Seas were much lower (Score:3, Informative)
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.
This is why we can't have nice things (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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it seems awfully likely that human/hominid hunting was an important factor in the eventual extinction of mastodons and other North American megafauna
I think the comet impact theory [wikipedia.org] is more likely than nomadic tribes of ancient humans causing mass extinctions.
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The bones did not show butchery marks (RTFP, read my link up-thread), so most likely were defleshed by non-humans before the humans "processed" the bones (for marrow, or tool-making material?). That could have been just a few days after the mammoth was killed.
Are you going to try to chase a pack of sabre-tooth tigers away from their kill?
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The evidence is that they don't appear to have been cutting the meat from the bones with sharp tools.
That's not the same thing as "killed a mastadon" or even "didn't eat any of the meat".
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In the last 6,000 years (Score:2)
It is amazing that a whole class of humanoids came to America from the middle east and became extinct as the article suggest, then the Natives came and colonized. Amazing how fast things change
I don't believe it (Score:4, Interesting)
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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.
They did, and they didn't.
Clearly the mastodon skeleton (Score:2)
was contemporaneous with this ancient race [theonion.com].
Show me the human bones (Score:2)
I'll believe this when I see the human bones...
Bigfoot (Score:2)
Nuff Said
Of course, of course... (Score:2)
Of course:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
One very quick thought ... (Score:3)
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.
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130000 years is a long time ago... (Score:2)
We've developed electronics in a relatively short time.
Who's to say they didn't develop space-or interdimensional travel and went somewhere else? (And neatly cleaned up after themselves, for the most part).
It's not like sci-fi hasn't dealt with this concept before.
It must have been Texans (Score:2)
Since this was obviously a BBQ site.
Re:Unlikely (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Unlikely (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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That's kind of topic, but now you can get your dates right.
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Re:Unlikely (Score:4, Informative)
"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.
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"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.
qft
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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 pr
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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
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Re:Unlikely (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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."
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You should watch the anime Date A Live, you'll learn all about how to date them.
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Grapes actually have the required yeast on their skins, so essentially all you need is sunshine and some catalysts like grape seed...
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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.
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Anthropic climate change is very much "settled", except
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It's obvious they aren't because the Earth is only 6,000 years old.
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Needing samples from other dates is unnecessary. A quick search of the journals will show thousands of samples from various time periods tested with the method. Its a solved problem.
More samples from the *same* source however will reduc
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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,
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Definitely not Homo Sapien. They only arrived in E Asia 40k years ago. Unless they managed to cross the Atlantic!
But it seems too long ago to be homo Erectus, as they disappeared from Asia long before this time.
What makes them so sure the bones were broken by Homo? Any signs of fire being used? No, or they'd be able to date the coals.
Maybe some prehistoric monkeys had a taste for marrow.
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That's a good point, too.......something picked up a rock and broke bones with it, but other than that, we don't know what something is.
I'm not saying it was aliens ...
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Another person who hasn't read the fucking paper. Hint : before typing, read the fucking paper and see if they have answered your questions before you asked them. It's not difficult.
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Another person who hasn't read the fucking paper.
You must be new here. Welcome to slashdot.
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40k and 90k would be in the middle of a glaciation stage. 130k however seems to be within the Eemian, the warmer interglacial before ours. Humanoids would likely have been expanding their reach during that time.
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Who cares about the fact that Americans invented flight first?
I think we are most concerned about who who invented the radio first? Oh yeah, it was the pre-cursor to the modern transceiver and the modem which makes digital life possible.
Also, I went to American school and my textbooks told me America invented everything first:
The Car
The Lightbulb
The Phone
The Computer
The Steam Engine
and of course, Al Gore got us the Internet
America first in everything. Also, is the best country to play in CIV 5, you invent
Everyone knows . . . (Score:4, Funny)
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.
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There's a Cornishman, Mr Trevithick, waiting for you with his steam-powered road vehicle and a large spanner in about 1802.
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The car was co-invented by the German Mr. Daimler and the American Mr. Chrysler.
Co-invented? Who cares about invention? Another German, Karl Benz, was the first to patent the automobile, and thus is revered by Slashdot folks for giving us the topic of IP to squawk about incessantly.
The light bulb -- that's easy, that was invented by Henry Ford
Unfortunately, Mr. Ford's light bulb never gained any traction with consumers, because electricity had not been invented yet, and thus, the light bulb remained a "dark" bulb. However, astrophysicists honored Mr. Ford's "dark" bulb by naming wacky inexplicable outer space shenanigans after his invention: "
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The steam engine? That's easy -- it was invented by Montgomery Scott, supported by his Irish-Jewish friend Cap'n Kirk.
This sir, deserves +Hilarous Mod-Points.
And let us not forget that same brilliant engineer invented transparent aluminium.
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The steam engine? That's easy -- it was invented by Montgomery Scott, supported by his Irish-Jewish friend Cap'n Kirk.
This sir, deserves +Hilarous Mod-Points.
Your sense of humor is so low, it was probably excavated together with that poor mammoth...
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Why are you so insecure?
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I went to American public school and I was taught about Icarus in 4th grade, and the Wright Brothers in 5th grade. We were not taught about Montgolfier or other balloons; we had units on ancient mythology, and useful inventions. The discovery of how to harness lift and create functional artificial wings sufficient to loft a human was taught; other forms of flight were only covered in blooper reels.
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YAY, PISSING CONTEST!
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"Not comparable to this situation per sister message, but as far as the first manned plane flight, the definition matters because it was relatively trivial to attach a motor to a propeller and then to a thing with wings and lunge sky-ward for a short period of time. "
What everybody else at the time kept missing is that wing dihedral, angling the wings into the slipstream, was inadequate to attain level powered flight. What made heavier-than-air flight possible was curving the upper wing surface, exploiting
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Wait until he finds out these first humans in North America probably weren't white Europeans.
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In other news, water is wet. Cue the right wing religious lunatics who insist Earth is 3,000 years old ...
Cue them? Seeing a lot of these posts here on Slashdot, are you?
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As a co-worker once explained to me, it isn't that the scientists are lying about the fossils. It is that Satan planted them there with misleading amounts of carbon, and the scientists just credulously believe whatever Satan wants them to. Because they're naive, and trusting.