Posted on 09/30/2010 4:14:44 PM PDT by decimon
HONG KONG (Reuters) – Archeologists have uncovered evidence suggesting that early humans braved cold temperatures to occupy highlands in Papua New Guinea 50,000 years ago in search of food.
Working on five archeological sites about 2,000 meters above sea level, researchers from Papua New Guinea, Australia and New Zealand found charred nut shells from the pandanus tree and stone tools which carbon dated back to 50,000 years ago.
"This is the first evidence of people at such a high altitude at the earliest of time," said anthropology professor Glenn Summerhayes at the University of Otago in New Zealand.
Experts have long assumed that the earliest humans left Africa and then moved along warmer coastal areas to occupy the rest of the planet, but Summerhayes said their findings showed that wasn't necessarily the case.
"It's testimony to human adaptability. We assumed (before) that the earliest modern people were conservative, adapted to a warmer coastal climate and this allowed them to spread across the planet quite quickly," said Summerhayes, lead author of the paper which was published on Friday in Science.
"Well, here we have evidence that they were really quite adaptable, moving up to a high altitude environment in search of pandanus, which means they had a knowledge of plant use beforehand," he said in a telephone interview.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
High rollers ping.
Soooo
How do you carbon date a rock?
I took my "tools" and carved some initials and....1789...on a huge boulder just off an historic road.....
someday someone will find it....heh, heh, heh...
You buy some candy and flowers with your carbon credits, and take the rock out to a movie.
Wishful thinking. That's basically how everything in the evolutionites' world works.
You seem dismissive of evolution those who believe it explains phenomena obversed in nature.
What is your theory? To thump a Bible at us?
Wadda 'bout JPG or GIF highlands?
Wadda 'bout JPG or GIF highlands?
A TIFF of the hat for BMPing the thread. ;-)
Are you asking what I'd view as a suitable replacement for evolution??
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LOL!
If you look at the distribution of people across the World, how can you be so sure that mankind did not settle Africa last?
My question would be more along the lines of - why are you here? Are you here to discuss science? If so, you’re going about it all wrong.
If you’re here to discuss religion, this is an odd place to do so. If you’re here to proselytize, I suggest you might want to rethink your method.
So, your problem with this article is that... well, what?
You don’t think we can date things to 50K years ago? Why would that be?
No, it’s actually about 60,000 years, and they were dating “charred nut shells from the pandanus tree and stone tools which carbon dated back to 50,000 years ago.”
Obviously, it could be a little bit off, but that’s not really the point of the article.
I tried that...she remained stone cold......
RC dating has no applicability to stones.
Other than that, all of the schemes used to date prehistoric things make assumptions which are basically quasi-religious beliefs. One idea of how far off the mark such calculations can be is had from the recent soft tissue finds in tyrannosaur remains:
Then again, we're talking about humans. Gunnar Heinsohn represents best/brightest category in European academia and you can find out about him easily enough on google. His youth population bulge theories for predicting conflict in the world are generally accepted by NATO. Here's what he has to say ("Wie Alt ist das Menschengeschlect?") about the antiquity of the last three human/hominid types and he's definitely not talking about 50,000 years:
Mueller-Karpe, the first name in continental paleoanthropology, wrote thirty years ago on the two strata of homo erectus at Swanscombe/England: "A difference between the tools in the upper and in the lower stratum is not recognizable. (From a geological point of view it is uncertain if between the two strata there passed decades, centuries or millennia.)" (Handbuch der Vorgeschichte, Vol I, Munich 1966, p. 293).The outstanding scholar never returned to this hint that in reality there may have passed ten years where the textbooks enlist one thousand years. Yet, I tried to follow this thread. I went to the stratigraphies of the Old Stone Age which usually look as follows
modern man (homo sapiens sapiens)
Neanderthal man (homo sapiens neanderthalensis)
Homo erectus (invents fire and is considered the first intelligent man).
In my book "Wie alt ist das Menschengeschlecht?" [How Ancient is Man?], 1996, 2nd edition, I focused for Neanderthal man on his best preserved stratigraphy: Combe Grenal in France. Within 4 m of debris it exhibited 55 strata dated conventionally between -90,000 and -30,000. Roughly one millennium was thus assigned to some 7 cm of debris per stratum. Close scrutiny had revealed that most strata were only used in the summer. Thus, ca. one thousand summers were assigned to each stratum. If, however, the site lay idle in winter and spring one would have expected substratification. Ideally, one would look for one thousand substrata for the one thousand summers. Yet, not even two substrata were discovered in any of the strata. They themselves were the substrata in the 4 m stratigraphy. They, thus, were not good for 60,000 but only for 55 years.
I tested this assumption with the tool count. According to the Binfords' research--done on North American Indians--each tribal adult has at least five tool kits with some eight tools in each of them. At every time 800 tools existed in a band of 20 adults. Assuming that each tool lasted an entire generation (15 female years), Combe Grenals 4,000 generations in 60,000 years should have produced some 3.2 million tools. By going closer to the actual life time of flint tools tens of millions of tools would have to be expected for Combe Grenal. Ony 19,000 (nineteen thousand) remains of tools, however, were found by the excavators.
There seems to be no way out but to cut down the age of Neanderthal man at Combe Grenal from some 60,000 to some 60 years.
I applied the stratigraphical approach to the best caves in Europe for the entire time from Erectus to the Iron Age and reached at the following tentative chronology for intelligent man:
-600 onwards Iron Age
-900 onwards Bronze Age
-1400 beginning of modern man (homo sapiens sapiens)
-1500 beginning of Neanderthal man
between -2000 and -1600 beginning of Erectus.
Since Erectus only left the two poor strata like at Swanscombe or El-Castillo/Spain, he should actually not have lasted longer than Neanderthal-may be one average life expectancy. I will now not go into the mechanism of mutation. All I want to remind you of is the undisputed sequence of interstratification and monostratification in the master stratigraphies. This allows for one solution only: Parents of the former developmental stage of man lived together with their own offspring in the same cave stratum until they died out. They were not massacred as textbooks have it:
monostrat.: only modern man's tools
interstrat.: Neanderthal man's and modern man's tools side by side
monostrat.: only Neanderthal man's tools
interstrat.: Neanderthal man's and Erectus' tools side by side
monotstrat.: only Erectus tools (deepest stratum for intelligent man)
The year figures certainly sound bewildering. Yet, so far nobody came up with any stratigraphy justifiably demanding more time than I tentatively assigned to the age of intelligent man. I always remind my critiques that one millennium is an enormous time span--more than from William the Conqueror to today's Anglo-World. To add a millenium to human history should always go together with sufficient material remains to show for it. I will not even mention the easiness with which scholars add a million years to the history of man until they made Lucy 4 million years old. The time-span-madness is the last residue of Darwinism.
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