Scientists Discover the Oldest Human Fossils Outside Africa (npr.org) 107
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.
Obviously (Score:3)
"...were hunter-gatherers. "They were hunting animals.."
Yes, that's how it works. You hunt animals, you gather plants. Not the other way around.
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Long after you did, you trend-setter you.
Re:Obviously (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe these people really did do it the other way round.
Do you have a more plausible explanation for why they're all dead?
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Maybe these people really did do it the other way round.
Do you have a more plausible explanation for why they're all dead?
Old Age, perhaps?
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Explain "herding".
You're not wrong about hunting plants though.
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You're not wrong about hunting plants though.
Kudzu can outrun many Americans.
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As long as it can't outrun an armed American driving a pickup truck, they'll still hunt it.
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Yes, that's how it works. You hunt animals, you gather plants. Not the other way around.
You never read or saw the documentary "The Day of the Triffids"?
And don't eat gathered eggs, for that matter?
No we didn't (Score:3, Funny)
Humans migrated out of the content fairly recently. In fact before Google it was all content. Now it's all ads.
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Good spot. I consider myself to be a pedant of the first order but I missed that one.
Oh, and fuck the mods with a broken bottle.
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Oh, and fuck the mods with a broken bottle.
I guess we all have our kinks, but being attracted to mods with a broken bottle is likely an uncommon one.
Were they migrating into or out of Africa (Score:1)
Any proof which way they were heading?
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No, just shedloads on the subject that you've obviously never bothered to read.
Here are a couple of places to start:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Were they migrating into or out of Africa (Score:5, Informative)
Besides that, there is a lot of evidence that early humans migrated back and forth from Africa, multiple times.
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Why the "ahem"? I wrote nothing that implied one direction or the other.
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Indeed, that's exactly what I said. A gold star for the AC that can actually read.
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Same way they always do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Re: found the fossil (Score:1)
If they had been food then there would have been traces of yeeth marks on the bones. There wasnt.
Should read (Score:2)
Levant is quite close to Africa (Score:2)
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 b
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Humanity tends to the coast and river mouths because of the blending of resources types. Repeated ice ages have totally destroyed that history, going through the surf zone does not exactly preserve the coastal habitation record. Likely more advanced humans with timber based infrastructure were completely wiped from the record so far investigated. Possibly more could be found at ice age river mouth locations if silt build up as a result of major flooding was fast enough but you have to find them first.
Did they find a human doll... that talks? (Score:2)
Here's a charming thought (Score:2)
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.
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We already have dates for modern humans of about that age from mitochondrial DNA analysis. The matrilineal most recent common ancestor (MRCA), known as "Mitochondrial Eve" dates to 150,000 to 200,000 years ago. This won't be the true origin of modern humans, which will be older, since MtDNA lineages go extinct in small populations periodically, this is only the oldest lineage they avoided extinction.
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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.
The fossils you find (Score:1)
Cave dwelling air pollution problems? (Score:2)
"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
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And it's a problem even today. One of the projects of several NGOs has been to teach people in third world countries to use indoor cooking/heating stoves with chimneys and dampers. Better air quality and much less fuel consumed. The collection of which is a major task for the communities.
This record will not stand (Score:2)
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.
Wave Misconception (Score:2)
Re:Wave Misconception (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:I thought (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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*cough* dark matter *cough*.
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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
Re:I thought (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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 [wikipedia.org] you get to unknown unknowns i.e. 'the ones we don't
Re:I thought (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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Say hi to your flat-earther, chem trailing and anti-vaxxer friends on your way out the door.
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"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.
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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!
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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
Re: I thought (Score:3, Funny)
"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.
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That "dating" is via match.com.
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You believe in witchcraft, by your own admission ...
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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? [wikipedia.org]
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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
Re:I thought (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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