Posted on 03/12/2009 9:16:42 AM PDT by BGHater
Iconic ancient human fossils from China are 200,000 years older than had previously been thought, a study shows.
The new dating analysis suggests the "Peking Man" fossils, unearthed in the caves of Zhoukoudian are some 750,000 years old.
The discovery should help define a more accurate timeline for early humans arriving in North-East Asia.
A US-Chinese team of researchers has published its findings in the prestigious journal Nature.
The cave system of Zhoukoudian, near Beijing, is one of the most important Palaeolithic sites in the world.
Between 1921 and 1966, archaeologists working at the site unearthed tens of thousands of stone tools and hundreds of fragmentary remains from about 40 early humans.
Palaeontologists later assigned these members of the human lineage to the species Homo erectus.
The pre-war Peking Man fossils vanished in 1941 whilst being transported to the US for safekeeping. Luckily, the palaeontologist Franz Weidenreich had made casts for researchers to study.
Experts have tried various methods over the years to determine the age of the remains. But they have been hampered by the lack of suitable techniques for dating cave deposits such as those at Zhoukoudian.
Open habitats
Now, Guanjun Shen, from Nanjing Normal University in China, and colleagues have applied a relatively new method to the problem.
This method is based on the radioactive decay of unstable forms, or isotopes, of the elements aluminium and beryllium in quartz grains. This enabled them to get a more precise age for the fossils.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.bbc.co.uk ...
ping. Only 200K year revision.
Well, I say they are 10 Million years old.
Can anyone prove me right or wrong?
an interesting article. Thanks.
The dating is kind of difficult given that the fossils were destroyed in World War II in 1941.
hoax
Prove? No. But we can supply considerable evidence to show that you're way off. Again, the estimate is difficult to make here because the fossils were destroyed 68 years ago.
Huh?
While Milton Wolpoff at UMich and other regionalists maintain that these pre-humans DID contribute, the OOA ideologues think Peking Man was a dead end (even though they have some anatomical traits shared by modern Asians).
Am I missing something here?
peking man
hoax
Great! Has he applied for Medicare yet? He’d better hurry!
I think you're confusing it with Piltdown Man. Peking Man definitely isn't a hoax. I've never even heard creationists make that claim.
SNIP
This method is based on the radioactive decay of unstable forms, or isotopes, of the elements aluminium and beryllium in quartz grains. This enabled them to get a more precise age for the fossils.
I imagine this is mostly an example of a writing problem by a journalist, but ... wouldn't dating via radioactive decay show these items to date from shortly before 1941?
The dating was on similar strata from the cave. Obviously not on the fossils themselves.
Worth a look.
This would probably be a dead end for Peking Man. He's probably closer to a 800k age.
oh, ok
It is a fake...and that has been known for years!
But, but, but... I thought the Earth was only 6 thousand years old, and Dinosaurs and Man co-existed?
/sarc
“Out of Africa” is an invention of the black lunatic Left in the 1970s and 1980s, which seeks to delegitimize ANY influence from Europe or Asia (which ever increasing evidence shows really happened to populate the Americas). After my alma mater formally changed the Anthropology Department to the Department of Feminist Anthropology, fired all the male professors, and replaced them with nasty, hairy, badly dressed, radical fems, I stopped giving to the alumni fund.
Thanks...
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