Jawbone and teeth reveal humans living at the edge of what was then the habitable world. Photograph: Chris Collins/Natural History Museum, London/Torquay Museum
Posted on 11/06/2011 4:23:51 PM PST by SunkenCiv
A fragment of human jaw unearthed in a prehistoric cave in Torquay is the earliest evidence of modern humans in north-west Europe, scientists say.
The tiny piece of upper jaw was excavated from Kents Cave on the town's border in the 1920s but its significance was not fully realised until scientists checked its age with advanced techniques that have only now become available.
The fresh analysis at Oxford University dated the bone and three teeth to a period between 44,200 and 41,500 years ago, when a temporary warm spell lasting perhaps only a thousand years, made Britain habitable.
The age of the remains puts modern humans at the edge of the habitable world at the time and increases the period over which they shared the land with Neanderthals, our close relatives who evolved in Europe and Asia.
Modern humans are known to have interbred with Neanderthals, leaving their mark in the genomes of many people alive today, and are implicated in their demise 30,000 years ago, perhaps by outcompeting them for food and other crucial resources.
The remains are close in age to the first examples of Aurignacian culture, exemplified by a range of artefacts from flint and bone tools to figurines and cave paintings that date from 45,000 to 35,000 years ago.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
Jawbone and teeth reveal humans living at the edge of what was then the habitable world. Photograph: Chris Collins/Natural History Museum, London/Torquay Museum
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| GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
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Thanks Renfield, good update. |
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I’m not the smartest guy in the room. I had one Anthropolgy 101 course and Geology 101/102 in college MANY years ago, and nobody ever explained to me how radio carbon dating can pinpoint a date to within 500 years 40,000 years ago. Can anyone explain it to me?
You can’t...after 4,000 years the returns become very random.
I can’t improve on Wiki’s opening sentence: Radiometric dating (often called radioactive dating) is a technique used to date materials such as rocks, usually based on a comparison between the observed abundance of a naturally occurring radioactive isotope and its decay products, using known decay rates.[1]. It is way beyond C14 today and is constantly refined and expanded.
Carbon dating is considered useful out to about 60,000 years. I have my doubts on the accuracy this long ago because of uncertainty over the isotope distributions long ago, but the method is recognized as appropriate for dates in that range.
Thanks, guys. I don’t remember a whole lot from my Geology classes, but I think the scientists reckon that the earliest forms of life on the planet go back to the Pre-Cambrian Era, around four billion years ago. I’m thinking that’s a WAG.
First, the obligatory comment regarding Climate Change: anyone who wants to reverse "Global Warming" is an uneducated idiot, ot a diehard, elitist Communist/Socialist, who believes they will be among, and at the top of, the U.N.'s "ideal world population" of 500,000,000.
Looking at those teeth, after 40,000 years, I want that guy's dentist's number. Unbelievable a Brit had such good teeth, so that proves it had to be a tourist.
Very interesting. Before this, the oldest human remains in Britain dated back about 30,000 years or so (the Red Lady of Paviland), so this is a major find.
I know a few things about all of this!
The remains found in Torquay are actually less than 1,500 years old. Science has become a fallacy!
Citation, please?
There’s a range of error that increases based on the remaining quantity of C14. There’s been an improvement in the detection and measurement such that the limit has increased from about 45K to about 60K and the range of error has improved. A 500 year range for 40K years is 1.25 percent.
You are talking out of your ass.
You are talking out of your ass.
LOL!
Thanks!
Thanks Explorer89, but Torquay doesn’t have any citation, he or she is just another troll and would be topic hijacker, as is struggle.
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