Posted on 05/20/2015 8:02:59 PM PDT by OK Sun
Finds Challenge Ideas about Who Were the First Toolmakers
Scientists working in the desert badlands of northwestern Kenya have found stone tools dating back 3.3 million years, long before the advent of modern humans, and by far the oldest such artifacts yet discovered. The tools, whose makers may or may not have been some sort of human ancestor, push the known date of such tools back by 700,000 years; they also may challenge the notion that our own most direct ancestors were the first to bang two rocks together to create a new technology.
The discovery is the first evidence that an even earlier group of proto-humans may have had the thinking abilities needed to figure out how to make sharp-edged tools. The stone tools mark “a new beginning to the known archaeological record,” say the authors of a new paper about the discovery, published today in the leading scientific journal Nature.
“The whole site’s surprising, it just rewrites the book on a lot of things that we thought were true,” said geologist Chris Lepre of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Rutgers University, a co-author of the paper who precisely dated the artifacts.
The tools ”shed light on an unexpected and previously unknown period of hominin behavior and can tell us a lot about cognitive development in our ancestors that we can't understand from fossils alone,” said lead author Sonia Harmand, of the Turkana Basin Institute at Stony Brook University and the Université Paris Ouest Nanterre.
Hominins are a group of species that includes modern humans, Homo sapiens, and our closest evolutionary ancestors. ...
(Excerpt) Read more at earth.columbia.edu ...
The dating accuracy is probably good to within a couple hundred thousand years? Couple of ten thousand maybe? Good enough though to say 3.3 million.
What is the point in taunting people with sincerely held beliefs? You know it's not the first time they've heard that argument, and you also know it is not going to change anyone's mind. I am a devout Bible-believing Christian. However as a scientist and engineer I have long ago reconciled for myself the age of the cosmos that I know and understand, with God's printed word in the Bible. Christianity and science need not be at odds. Those who understand geology and cosmology need not be atheists. Yet every time someone picks at this scab and taunts someone else we are forcing people to choose sides, when that doesn't need to be the case.
From now on, why not read these stories and enjoy the fascinating research and science in God's amazing universe as new findings unfold before us, and let those who see it another way have their own beliefs. They are no threat to you or me.
Look like rocks to me. Someone is reaching.
... ... Yes, He created it all.
No, it wasn’t 6000 years ago.
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That was a great posting based on science! Had me laughing!
ugh!
Just wondering.
With the level of your cognition so low, it is appropriate that your handle is “Teacher.”
The universe was expanded at creation. That expansion obviously had to include “time” since it is a part of the creation of the material universe.
Viewed from Earth, the central point of creation, the age of creation remains 6015 years.
1000 years from now, when the material creation is destroyed, how old will it be?
Zero! - Time is dependent, as space also is, upon the soon to be discarded.
The speed of light is now well known to be variable.
The word used in the ancient Hebrew text is “Raqia.”
“It seems that the article has a very clear and understandable explanation of how the site was dated. Now, unless, of course you reject physics, geology and biology, the article makes a great deal of sense.”
JimSEA, you have been on FR for while... Surely you know that there is a group here that is willfully ignorant, disbelieving, and downright hostile to common physics, geology and biology, if they perceive it conflicts with their interpretation of the Bible; and they will pounce with gusto on any of these sorts of articles. You are wasting your time trying to discuss things rationally with them.
Don’t even bother.
On rare occasion, someone will read the evidence for one or another scientific discovery or explanation, if only to refute it. It’s not so easy to do if you understand the observations, evidence and methodology. Absurd misrepresentations should not be supported by people who know better keeping quiet. They are welcome to their beliefs but not their “facts”.
Some people will become more receptive to objective reasoning and will find they don’t need to abandon their faith. Genesis is remarkable as allegory.
Millions of years ago teenagers were losing their father’s tools. Somethings never change.
When it says discover the "oldest" it is always a lie. There is no way to know if it is the oldest. Next year someone is sure to find an example that is older.
I am commenting on the headline which is repeated for every find that is made that is believed to be older than the last "oldest" artifact. My argument is with the linguistic ignorance of the people who write headlines.
Michael Tellinger in south Africa has located the oldest tools in the world. Check him out on you tube.
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