Thanks sparklite2. As you've noted, these teeth go back millions, not thousands, of years. PIF refers to the Carolina Bays, which are generally (but not by all) considered to have been formed in one event, as ejecta from a distant impact formed them. I first ran across their existence and the idea for their formation in the late Otto Muck's book on Atlantis, which still makes for interesting reading.
The Piri Reis map doesn't antedate Columbus, was done in the 16th century, and *may* show a very distorted idea of some of the coastline of Antarctica; the claim in the text accompanying the map is that the whole thing was based on a number of much earlier sources, going back to the time of Alexander the Great (who lived long after Antarctica got covered with ice, regardless), but that's a pretty lame claim, and a lot of countries were playing catch-up when the news of Columbus' discovery (actually, rediscovery) of the Americas swept across Europe and the Middle East.
Egregiously ad hoc claims about foreknowledge of the existence of the Americas emerged here and there, including in Turkey, and yet the only real ones that have survived in documentation are the Viking settlements in Greenland and North America, and Plato's offhand mention in one of his dialogues of the continent that lay west of Atlantis. Columbus himself researched his voyages years earlier by using Icelandic sources.
OTOH, I'm also in the camp that humans have been capable of high culture and civilization building, and have been knocked back into a primitive state multiple times by natural disaster. There's a pretty strong continuity reaching back to the beginning of ceramics about 7000 years ago (and yes, there are earlier examples, just not of pots, jugs, etc), which mean, so-called anatomically modern humans either spent 43,000 (or 93,000, or more) years not making use of the technology, or the utilitarian use of ceramics was rediscovered perhaps six or seven times over the past 50,000 years (or more than a dozen times over the past 100,000 years, etc).
Gobekli Tepe turns out to not be a smallish "ceremonial" site, and the earlier nutty idea that migratory hunter-gatherers built it, and visited once a year, carefully covering it before they left each time. That was so obviously ridiculous rubbish, I'm surprised it didn't lead to tenure hearings for someone somewhere. It should have. Now the site turns out to be much larger, and the "temple" or whatever it was is just one neighborhood, a set of structures. But again, it isn't 9.7 million years old. There are submerged sites in the northern lower Great Lakes, and by submerged is meant, hundreds of feet under water. There's even some FR topics about 'em.
As PIF pointed out, glaciation lowered worldwide sealevel by hundreds of feet, and I'd add that this happened multiple times over the past two million years; most of the period during which humans are said to have emerged but definitely all of the period during which various forms of humans (and for three or four of those we have DNA showing they're like us, and best of all, parts of their *known* archaic DNA lives on in all or at least in many of us; I have Denisovan, Neandertal, some 45,000 year old Siberians, Paleo-Eskimo which is probably from common Siberian roots, Kennewick Man which is also probably from common Siberian roots, and I have basically zero African DNA) have walked this Earth the continental shelf has been exposed. That's where everything important probably happened, and that's why the most interesting advances to come will probably be in underwater archaeology.
But again, the find is 9.7 million years old, not 2 million.
I'm not going to engage any deeper than this sentence on the usual baseless complaints in a few places in this thread about scientific dating of fossils and artifacts. Years ago, FReeper Doctor Stochastic posted this useful link:Radiometric Dating, A Christian Perspective[snip] Radiometric dating -- the process of determining the age of rocks from the decay of their radioactive elements -- has been in widespread use for over half a century. There are over forty such techniques, each using a different radioactive element or a different way of measuring them. It has become increasingly clear that these radiometric dating techniques agree with each other and as a whole, present a coherent picture in which the Earth was created a very long time ago. Further evidence comes from the complete agreement between radiometric dates and other dating methods such as counting tree rings or glacier ice core layers. Many Christians have been led to distrust radiometric dating and are completely unaware of the great number of laboratory measurements that have shown these methods to be consistent. Many are also unaware that Bible-believing Christians are among those actively involved in radiometric dating. This paper describes in relatively simple terms how a number of the dating techniques work, how accurately the half-lives of the radioactive elements and the rock dates themselves are known, and how dates are checked with one another. In the process the paper refutes a number of misconceptions prevalent among Christians today. This paper is available on the web via the American Scientific Affiliation and related sites to promote greater understanding and wisdom on this issue, particularly within the Christian community. ...differences still occur within the church. A disagreement over the age of the Earth is relatively minor in the whole scope of Christianity; it is more important to agree on the Rock of Ages than on the age of rocks. But because God has also called us to wisdom, this issue is worthy of study. [/snip]
by Dr. Roger C. Wiens
First edition 1994; revised version 2002
I think it was gibsmedat cultures.
Once enough wealth is created by dint of applied intelligence and hard work, it becomes easier to take from the producers and give to the slackers.
'Tax the rich/feed the poor/until there are no rich no more'...
Thank you for a terrific post.
Few have noted that Leakey, in his last years, was digging in the Western US and though it possible the early man existed in the Americas, very early.
I have followed the out of Africa argument for 50 years, I thought it BS then and think that it BS now.