Oldest Fossils of Homo Sapiens Found in Morocco, Altering History of Our Species (nytimes.com) 156
Carl Zimmer, writing for The New York Times: Fossils discovered in Morocco are the oldest known remains of Homo sapiens, scientists reported on Wednesday. Dating back roughly 300,000 years, the bones indicate that mankind evolved earlier than had been known, experts say, and open a new window on our origins. The fossils also show that early Homo sapiens had faces much like our own, although their brains differed in fundamental ways (alternative source). Until now, the oldest fossils of our species, found in Ethiopia, dated back just 195,000 years. The new fossils suggest our species evolved across Africa. "We did not evolve from a single cradle of mankind somewhere in East Africa," said Phillipp Gunz, a paleoanthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Liepzig, Germany. Today, the closest living relatives to Homo sapiens are chimpanzees and bonobos, with whom we share a common ancestor that lived over six million years ago. After the lineages split, our ancient relatives evolved into many different species, known as hominins. For millions of years, hominins remained very ape-like. They were short, had small brains, and could fashion only crude stone tools. Original research paper here.
we are (Score:1)
posting on a fossil of a site about fossils found at a sight
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Look outside of Africa, too. (Score:5, Interesting)
http://archaeologyinbulgaria.c... [archaeolog...lgaria.com]
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when the great flood happened in 4004BC many of the order "scientists" use to date things got all messed up
Cautionary tale about peer review? (Score:3)
Peer review is rendered rather pointless and ineffective if every peer considers the inaccurate methodology to be authoritative and fails to question it.
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A peer review can comment on known deficiencies in methodology, but not on unknown ones. Peer review is not the last line of defense against inaccuracy. Everybody in science knows that peer-reviewed papers can be wrong, but that a consensus among peer-reviewed papers for some time is very likely to be reasonably correct.
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Re:Look outside of Africa, too. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, but what about Women?
Women didn't arrive on earth until much later, they stopped off to buy shoes first, and then had to use the restroom, apply sunscreen, return the shoes because of buyer's remorse, and then get an overpriced drink from StarBucks before coming to earth.
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Women didn't arrive on earth until much later, they stopped off to buy shoes first, and then had to use the restroom, apply sunscreen, return the shoes because of buyer's remorse, and then get an overpriced drink from StarBucks before coming to earth.
I think the real revelation from your unbelievable comment is just how fucking many Starbucks there are. I guess we know how there could be days before there was light; God was hanging out at Starbucks in between work sessions. I guess he saw that some burnt-ass coffee is good?
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Yeah, but what about Women?
Women didn't arrive on earth until much later, they stopped off to buy shoes first, and then had to use the restroom, apply sunscreen, return the shoes because of buyer's remorse, and then get an overpriced drink from StarBucks before coming to earth.
"I don't understand why I'm still a virgin".
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Maybe it's because you're ugly af. You will eventually get laid though, don't worry about it for now.
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Yeah, but what about Women?
Women were here first but needed someone to get things from the top shelf and take out the trash, ergo men.
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No, you have that wrong. Christians have only been on Earth for 6000 years. Some of them are still alive today and being elected to Congress. Take a good look at Sen. Richard Shelby from Alabama, definitely 6000 years old. Jeff Sessions, former Senator from Alabama and now patsy at the Justice Dept, isn't 6000 years old, but his ideas are.
The Julian calendar places Jesus' birth in the year 1 AD (aka first year of our Lord). Some Christians took that year and did math (taking the genealogies of Jesus literally) to come up with Adam being created some 4,000 before Jesus was born. This is how supporters of the Young Earth Theory believe the earth is only 6,000 plus change years old. Suggesting that Christians have been on Earth for 6,000 years means Christianity started during the lifetime of Adam.
Re:Look outside of Africa, too. (Score:5, Interesting)
Pak breeders. They are the missing link.
300,000 years ago is the correct time frame for their arrival, new science from Morocco has proven it
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G-d visits Eve in the Garden of Eden:
G-d: Eve, darling, where's my apple? Did you eat it?
Trump: (standing nearby) Hey, how do you know I didn't eat, I love to eat apples.
G-d: It was from the Tree of Knowledge, Einstein!
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Trump: (standing nearby) Hey, how do you know I didn't eat, I love to eat apples.
G-d: Who is this asshat? Cue the flood.
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I would mod you but unfortunately there isn't a '-1 interesting but you ruined it'
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Re:Look outside of Africa, too. (Score:4, Insightful)
So, the Bulgarians think humans were evolved before hominins split from apes. And we are to believe this why? This sounds like something the Greek guy with the electric hair would push, telling us they were really ancient astronauts.
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Oh sure, political incorrectness has to get involved here. You can't just mention alternate theory, you have to play the race card?
Meanwhile it seems awfully convenient that your one source not only defies consensus on the subject but also is from a source that actively labels itself along a regional agenda.
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politically incorrect discoveries
Twat
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The familiar narrative is being disturbed by other politically incorrect discoveries, such as 7.2 million year old ancestors in Bulgaria:
7.2 million years ago hominins had not yet split off from the rest of the apes.
Please describe this 'familiar narrative'. Like most people who whinge about 'politically correct' I suspect you're a dickhead with an axe to grind?
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Luckily, you have no funds to fund anything, and your opinion is just as worthless.
Re: Look outside of Africa, too. (Score:4, Insightful)
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You've clearly never lived in Texas or Utah.
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Or India. Or the Middle East.
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Yeh, its Luddite troll. I was wondering when you'd turn up. I was beginning to think you wouldn't make it.
Re:Look outside of Africa, too. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a shame - but there it is. So calling it politically incorrect - well, for some, it is. Just look at the Native American tribes who don't want to hear anything that challenges the established narrative,
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It's politically incorrect if you're worried about offending 0.1%. The other 99.9% just want to see clear evidence before giving up on the best working explanation we've had so far, because it makes a lot of things harder to explain.
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Morocco is in Africa, Adolph.
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The case for some is simply "sub-saharan"; but let's not forget that there have been several findings that indicate that we left Africa far earlier. I'm only vaguely interested in paleo-anthropology so I can't list them.
I also couldn't care less (outside of scientific curiosity) if we all came from a small band of humans in eastern Africa or if Mitochondrial Eve existed or not.
Dude, how did you get to Godwin so quickly? That's sad.
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It's 2017. Godwin is the default state.
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It's 2017. Godwin is the default state.
Fair enough. Things are fairly polarized right now. (An understatement if ever there was one.)
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I have a friend who's referred to himself as African-American, and it's true that his European ancestors had African ancestors.
I have friends who are somewhat involved with what happens on Lakota reservations, and know what many of the off-reservation whites think of the Lakota. I think that challenging the established white narrative might be a good idea.
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There are at least common threads. Narratives will differ. I don't narrate the same things the same way twice.
However, from your "Native American tribes who don't want to hear anything that challenges the established narrative,", I assumed you were referring to some narrative common among the descendants of the people who got here first. The tribes are at least as varied as the dominant US culture, which is one reason I preferred to refer to the Lakota rather than generalized Native American tribes.
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I really have no stake in this outside of scientific curiosity. If that description of our history fits the facts, great. If it doesn't why should anyone be upset about it? And yet
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Mankind is from Africa narrative
Nice that this is the accepted viewpoint. It wasn't so too long ago. I can't remember if it was Richard Pryor or Eddie Murphy, but in one routine he mocks white people contemplating that, in a mock white voice, "That could be true, you know."
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See that's what's funny - you make up my reactions and intentions to make sure it fits your 'political correctness' narrative, no matter what. Its wasn't even an ad hominem as you make no arguments (sorry, apart from 'that nonsense is never simply pointed out for being what it is' which is clearly wrong because apart from anything else, you and others spend a lot of time pointing these things out). You just make vague, half-assed, pointless comments about groups of people so you can then tack on some stupid
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I am sorry, but with language like that, I have to assume you have a political agenda. i.e. I don't take you seriously.
I don't think that is fair. Most any scientist will tell you that the entire process of publication and review is political. Have you ever heard the quote from Max Planck "science advances one funeral at a time"?
green timber (Score:2)
And dinner is mostly made of water. But is that the key thing?
The point here is not that science escaped politics, but that it somehow progresses (over the long run) nevertheless.
This has long been one of my complaints about climate science. The window to fully separate science from politics has historically been 50 to 100 years. As such, the "science" of imminent ruin is not a valid, established tradition.
And
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What science of imminent ruin? The climate change stuff I read talks about very serious consequences by the end of the century. I haven't seen any scientific suggestion of imminent ruin ever, so there's no surprise that it's not a tradition.
The political consensus that climate change is happening and we should do something about it is way over 50%. The US is atypically stupid in this regard.
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I am sorry, but with language like that, I have to assume you have a political agenda. i.e. I don't take you seriously.
That's not the worst of it - the claim about human ancestors in Bulgaria 7.2 MYA is incredibly speculative and based on a single study with very sparse evidence that just got published a few weeks ago. There are many alternative hypotheses, but as tends to be the case, the researchers went with the one that's likely to get them the most citations and media coverage. It's a perfect example
Homo sapien? (Score:2, Interesting)
It's just time travelers who didn't make it back (Score:5, Interesting)
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A group of time travelers missed the return trip, and had to live out their lives lost in the past in Morocco.
Yes but not from our timeline. When they arrived, the universe branched and they were lost because their future was no longer reachable with the technology they were using.
Or about as likely, life here began 'out there' and it's only a matter of time before we dig up a Colonial Raptor and have a true WTF moment as a species. Sometimes I still miss BSG.
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Adama flew Laura Roslin in a Raptor. He parked it near a place where he carried her up a hill then sat with her and told her all about the home he would build for them.
And yes, I know you're joking.
Not a single cradle? (Score:4, Funny)
How does a single species evolve in multiple places?
Re:Not a single cradle? (Score:5, Informative)
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Convergent evolution of particular traits is reasonable. Convergent evolution of DNA seems to me a lot less likely.
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Timeshare Condos. They have been the bane of humanity forever.
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A population is either spread across a wide area or there are semi-isolated pockets of it. The species evolves, and there's enough contact among the geographically distant bits of the population that the useful traits get passed around. The species doesn't evolve in multiple places at once completely independently, but it also doesn't evolve in a single place.
Morocco and Ethiopia are close enough to each other that it's conceivable populations in both places were in semi-frequent contact, so that kind of t
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The Sahara wasn't the Sahara then.
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It wasn't? This paper [nature.com] says the "widely" believed age is 2-3 million years and the paper argues for much older origins, 7-10 million years old. The fossils we are discussing here are on the order of 300,000 years old which is well within both ranges. Yes, there have been some periods where it received more rain than it currently does but it has been a very dry place for a long time.
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I was basing my comment on the Wikipedia entry:
People lived on the edge of the desert thousands of years ago[38] since the last ice age. The Sahara was then a much wetter place than it is today. Over 30,000 petroglyphs of river animals such as crocodiles[39] survive, with half found in the Tassili n'Ajjer in southeast Algeria. Fossils of dinosaurs, including Afrovenator, Jobaria and Ouranosaurus, have also been found here. The modern Sahara, though, is not lush in vegetation, except in the Nile Valley, at a few oases, and in the northern highlands, where Mediterranean plants such as the olive tree are found to grow. It was long believed that the region had been this way since about 1600 BCE, after shifts in the Earth's axis increased temperatures and decreased precipitation, which led to the abrupt desertification of North Africa about 5,400 years ago.[40] However, this theory has recently been called into dispute, when samples taken from several 7 million year old sand deposits led scientists to reconsider the timeline for desertification.[41]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I took it to mean that some areas may have been desert for quite some time, but those were low-precipitation areas in a large region that had adequate rainfall to sustain those plants and creatures. That certainly seems to be what it claims, but I of course can't verify those claims. It's entirely possible the whole region was desert for millions of years, as the last quoted sentence alludes.
Thank you for the link.
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The Sahara didn't exist 300,000 years ago. Instead, it seems it was a fairly lush grassland. You probably wouldn't have one dude walking between the two fathering children as he went, but it's not an unreasonable geography for genes to cross back and forth, over a thousand generations.
Clearly pre-technology hominids COULD cross the barrier because their bones have been found in both places (as have apes, other primates, and lots of other animals). The question is whether their genes could slosh around en
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Edit: it appears more recent evidence makes the Sahara older, although there do seem to have been wet periods in the meantime. Even so, pre-human hominids clearly made it between Ethiopia and Morocco.
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Very long legs. And fast, they were very fast back then.
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This is pre-agriculture, so the simplest explanation is nomadic tribes occasionally running into each other and interbreeding (plenty of ways that could happen, from war prisoners to exchanges to form alliances, which isn't unheard of with chimpanzees, royalty and other lower primates). It wouldn't take many generations for dominant genetic traits to traverse the continent, given a suitable lack of geographic barriers and a few droughts temporarily reducing the range of viably habitable territories.
Think of
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You're funny
Can you blame them? (Score:2)
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I would say Morocco is pretty close to Africa
I find this statement disturbing on at least two levels. One that you don't think Morocco is an African country and two the "I would say" as if it is a matter of opinion or something.
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I would say I'm situated pretty close to me.
That is correct and doesn't imply that the "I" and the "me" doesn't refer to the same thing.
Wow! (Score:2)
These guys lived in Africa 300,000 years ago, 294,000 years before before god made the earth!
Impressive.
Blasphemers (Score:2)
Everyone knows humans were created 5777 years ago ( 3761 BC). What's this world coming to?
Still around (Score:5, Funny)
For millions of years, hominins remained very ape-like. They were short, had small brains, and could fashion only crude stone tools.
They're still here. We just call them politicians now.
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Altering our history? (Score:2)
Unless they discovered some time-travelling relic, our history remains unaltered...
Perhaps what was meant was "oldest fossil of homo sapiens found in morocco suggests an update to our current understanding of the history of our species"...
Science is of course never settled...
the pitch that restores (Score:2)
So one individual decides to make a long, solo trek to toss an alien, divisive artefact off the edge of the world, and now our entire "cradle" theory is shot, all because some magnetically addled frigatebird dropped a clam shell of rancor right down the maw of some inland rift valley.
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That movie is called "The Gods Must be Crazy".
And it wasn't a "clam shell of rancor", it was just a Coke bottle that fell from an airplane.
Impossible to watch as an adult, loved it when I was a kid.
Re:It's not mentioned in $holybook (Score:4, Funny)
Your $goodGod and $evilGod variables need to be able to handle arrays.
Re:Simple question (Score:5, Insightful)
This is pretty far down on my outrage scale. State schools have entire departments dedicated to studying classic literature. People are actually getting subsidized degrees in it. Sometimes learning can be for learning's sake - and I'm pretty sure "where did we come from" has very broad appeal.
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Still at it I see ;). Remember, ignorance is power!
Re: Simple question (Score:2)
Are you kidding me? Have you not seen some of the comments on astro or quantum physics?
We will redefine it, call it wrong, and use piss poor understanding of the scientific process to support or mistakes. We can't even spell standard model, but we will tell you why it's wrong.
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Any time a Slashdot poster predicts that his or her post will be modded down, I automatically discount whatever else they had to say, because it's almost guaranteed that none of it will be especially insightful or original.
Re: Simple question (Score:2, Funny)
You're too kind. I print their post out and then I wipe my ass with it.
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I have not found that to be the case at all. Usually it just means they have a minority view and since the majority is often wrong that can be a good thing.
Re: Simple question (Score:2)
I'll probably be modded down for this, but you're right.
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You don't know what you'll find out if you don't look. You may as well discount all of astronomy because we're not likely to end up visiting any but perhaps the closest of stars.
Well, you can try wielding that as a shield but we also have a huge history of recording things that serve very little purpose other than entertainment and trivia. Some are essentially pack rats for knowledge, collecting it for no particular end other than knowing what 16th century English cuisine was like or the mating habits of the spotted hummingbird. If we were compiling a treatise of useful information for a post-apocalyptic society I'd gladly let 90%+ be STEM and give most other subjects a cursory sum
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Re:Simple question (Score:4, Interesting)
"paleontology research is utterly useless"
Without palaeontology, oil would be much harder to find. Is that useful enough for you?
Re: As far as we know (Score:2)
I'm a mathematician. I point that out, just so I can point out how much I agree with your statement. I don't mind and I am inclined to believe the current science is a pretty good guess, for most subjects. I don't dislike science. I love it.
Somehow, it has turned into a belief system. It's as if some folks have adopted science as the new religion, including thinking that it can't be questioned. The whole point of the scientific method is that it can be questioned. I have no idea how this happened.
Basically,
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I have a belief in science. The scientific method that is. In that belief is also the core of adapting in the face of new data. That makes my belief completely different than the belief in gods or other religious ideas. Other core assumptions are that the world is real, that one can collect data about the world and that one can use that data combined with logic to describe the real world.
A scientific fact is _in_itself_ something that could adapt to fit new data but is unlikely to do so given the data that
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That's funny.
However, I could have expressed myself better. You aren't an example of the type of person that I'm referring to. No, from reading your post, you seem to have a good understanding.
I'll try to explain a little bit.
Not long ago, someone made the claim that the oceans were going to rise 27', by the year 2050. I pointed out that I was not a climate scientist and then linked them to a number of sources that showed the real predictions, as opposed to his one cite of a journalist who appears to be cit
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Is it supposed to work some other way? Scientists are going to interpret consensus as "almost certainly true to within appropriate limits". For practical purposes, when non-scientists work with sciency stuff, scientific consensus is fact (again within appropriate limits). There's no other way to do it.
Pretty much yo
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I just typed and deleted a whole, very silly, reply.
David... I'm just gonna say it like this. I've seen your name before. I haven't been on Slashdot in a while. I've interacted with you. I know you're not dumb. I know better.
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Okay, here's what I'm saying.
Scientific consensus means that pretty much all scientists in a field agree on something. They've been convinced by the evidence. They're usually in a much better position than I am to judge that. If the evidence isn't convincing, there will almost certainly be scientists who aren't convinced.
We pretty much have to take scientific consensus as scientific fact when we're doing things. In the case of climate science, we have a consensus is that global warming is happening
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I don't want to type, "you should." I try to avoid that. So...
I accept consensus as being, "correct given the information that we have at hand." I am also intimately aware that we've been wrong, pretty much always. To assume that we're no longer wrong is hubris. In fact, I assume we are wrong.
Now, we're often right enough. We can still use Newton's figures and be 'close enough.' However, they're still wrong. Special Relativity? Just last year, yet another paper was released that insists it's wrong.
This is o