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Pass the Sorghum, Caveman
ScienceNOW Daily News ^
| Thursday, December 17, 2009
| Cassandra Willyard
Posted on 12/19/2009 6:50:32 PM PST by SunkenCiv
Credit: Daniel Georg Döhne/Wikimedia
|
Conventional wisdom holds that early humans survived on a diet of meat, fruits, vegetables, nuts, and the occasional tuber. Our love affair with cereals supposedly came later, about 20,000 years ago. But a new study hints that wild cereals were part of the human diet more than 100,000 years ago.
Making cereals palatable is hard work. They have to be roasted in a fire or pounded into flour and cooked. Because the process is energy-intensive and requires specialized tools, many archeologists assumed that humans didn't begin consuming mass quantities of cereal until the advent of farming about 10,000 years ago. Then in 2004, researchers reported finding a residue of barley and wheat on a 23,000-year-old grinding stone in Israel. The new study indicates that cereal consumption is "a lot older than that," says author Julio Mercader, an archeologist at the University of Calgary in Canada.
Two years ago, Mercader and colleagues excavated a cave in Mozambique called Ngalue. They uncovered an assortment of stone tools in a layer of sediment deposited on the cave floor 42,000 to 105,000 years ago. |
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencenow.sciencemag.org ...
TOPICS: History; Science; Travel
KEYWORDS: godsgravesglyphs
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To: Tainan
21
posted on
12/20/2009 9:22:56 AM PST
by
SunkenCiv
(My Sunday Feeling is that Nothing is easy. Goes for the rest of the week too.)
To: ApplegateRanch; Red_Devil 232
Thanks! Now we need to ping the gardening pingmeister...
22
posted on
12/20/2009 9:28:17 AM PST
by
SunkenCiv
(My Sunday Feeling is that Nothing is easy. Goes for the rest of the week too.)
To: wendy1946
A global flood would not do any such thing.
23
posted on
12/20/2009 9:29:09 AM PST
by
SunkenCiv
(My Sunday Feeling is that Nothing is easy. Goes for the rest of the week too.)
To: wendy1946
Neanderthal DNA is now described as about halfway between ours and that of a chimpanzee.
No, it is not. That has appeared on FR in the past, and is just plain B.S.
24
posted on
12/20/2009 9:31:24 AM PST
by
SunkenCiv
(My Sunday Feeling is that Nothing is easy. Goes for the rest of the week too.)
To: SunkenCiv
To: wendy1946
Express India isn’t a scientific source.
The Noonan paper doesn’t say that Neandertals are halfway between modern humans and chimps.
The third source doesn’t say that Neandertals are halfway between modern humans and chimps.
26
posted on
12/21/2009 8:12:38 PM PST
by
SunkenCiv
(My Sunday Feeling is that Nothing is easy. Goes for the rest of the week too.)
To: SunkenCiv
What do you call 25.6 out of 55??
To: wendy1946
..The comparison to chimpanzees with modern humans is 55.0 ±3.0, compared to the average between humans and Neanderthals of 25.6 ±2.2. ...
What do you call 25.6 out of 55??
It means that modern living humans are three quarters of the way between Neandertals and chimps.
28
posted on
12/23/2009 5:03:13 PM PST
by
SunkenCiv
(My Sunday Feeling is that Nothing is easy. Goes for the rest of the week too.)
To: SunkenCiv
I’d call it about half but I’d settle for 2/3; either way there’s zero possibility of our being descended from neanderthals or anything more remote from us than neanderthals, and that includes all other hominids. Basic reality, there’s nothing on this planet we could plausibly be descended from via any evolutionary process.
To: wendy1946
Wrong. The study doesn’t do anything at all, except show that some fragments of DNA, supposedly from some very old remains of a single individual, show some supposed variation. The morphological evidence is that Neandertal is the ancestor of modern Europeans. It hasn’t anything to do with evolution, it has to do with breeding, something humans do with alacrity.
30
posted on
12/23/2009 7:32:48 PM PST
by
SunkenCiv
(My Sunday Feeling is that Nothing is easy. Goes for the rest of the week too.)
To: SunkenCiv
The morphological evidence is that Neandertal is the ancestor of modern Europeans. It hasnt anything to do with evolution, it has to do with breeding, something humans do with alacrity. Sorry, but that's dead wrong. With other humans yes, but not with apes or any hominid. That's what that big article of James Shreeve's in Discover was all about, i.e. the anomalous total lack of evidence of crossbreeding under conditions where much would be expected and also the gist of those articles on PlosBiology which note that the neanderthal made no contribution to the present gene pool. The DNA evidence resolves the mystery.
Any two modern humans can breed together because the only differences in the picture are racial or subspecies difference. The neanderthal is not another race of modern man, but a separate species.
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