Posted on 03/10/2004 6:10:11 AM PST by vannrox
Anthropologists Hail Romania Fossil Find
Sat Mar 6,11:27 AM ET
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By ALISON MUTLER, Associated Press Writer
BUCHAREST, Romania - Experts analyzing remains of a man, woman and teenage boy unearthed in Romania last year are convinced that the 35,000 year-old fossils are the most complete ever of modern humans of that era, a U.S. scientist said Saturday.
International scientists have been carrying out further analysis to get a clearer picture on the find, said anthropologist Erik Trinkaus, of Washington University in St. Louis. But it's already clear that, "this is the most complete collection of modern humans in Europe older than 28,000 years," he told The Associated Press.
"We are very excited about it," said Trinkaus on the telephone, adding that the discovery of in a cave in southwestern Romania "is already changing perceptions about modern humans."
Romanian recreational cavers unearthed the remains of three facial bones last year, and gave them to Romanian scientists.
Romanian scientists asked Trinkaus to analyze the fossils, and he traveled to the Romanian city of Cluj this week with Portuguese scientist Joao Zilhao, a fossil specialist.
Trinkaus said a jawbone belonged to a man aged about 35. He said part of a skull and remains of a face including teeth belonged to a 14- to 15-year-old male and a temporal bone to a woman of unspecified age.
"This was 25,000 years before agriculture. Certainly they were hunters," said Trinkaus. He said the bones were discovered in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains.
Trinkaus said the humans would have had religious beliefs, used stone tools, and a well-defined social system and lived in a period in during which early modern humans overlapped with late surviving Neanderthals in Europe, Trinkaus said.
Scientists will not give the exact location for the cave, but Trinkaus said it the humans survived because the area was "ecologically variable."
"It was close to the Banat plain and close to the mountains. They didn't have to travel more than 50 kilometers (30 miles)," to hunt, he said.
A team of international scientists from the United States, Norway, Portugal and Britain will carry out more field work in the summer in the cave and surrounding area this summer, Trinkaus said.
They found the man holding a remote?
They found a jaw, part of another skull, and one other bone?? A whole new meaning to the idea of "complete" for me.
Time machine accident?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Sorry, it was just an assumption. I guess that could be a particularly ugly monkey.
Also note that based on these fragments, they "know" that these people had a religion, a well-defined social structure, and (perhaps) a real love of hopscotch.
Unless they also found some fossilized "beliefs" this is pure speculation.
How long ago did humans develop the abstract thinking ability which led
to supernatural beliefs, then to one of it's subsets "religion?"
In other words, 35000 years ago, Homo Sapiens lived in the Balkans while Neanderthals ruled the rest of Europe.
This may be one of the explanations why the history of the Balkans is so distorted and why the word itself has derogatory overtone in the rest of Europe.
Radio Carbon dating is notoriously inaccurate, so most scientists use nearby fossils. The fossils dates are changed to fit evolutionary thinking. So the dates of this find will vary widely over time.
I would be interested in the skull shape if these were found in rock as they would be from pre-flood time. It would be very interesting to know their age upon death by growth rings. But I doubt they will be interested in that.
I don't know where you get this from. I've always thought that carbon dating, calibrated in recent years using dendrochronology, is the standard for dating organic remains less than 40,000 to 50,000 YBP. Other index fossils are important, but how do you suppose those were dated to begin with? Carbon, of course.
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