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.
Perhaps this will refresh your memory:
FIGURE 4. Movement of water producing the seepage
within the Purslane sandstones.
I've posted this before, something to think about:
Imagine an island with plenty of pasture, water, etc., but no animals. Introduce 100 male horses and 100 female donkeys. Come back in 100 years. There will be no equids.:
Now imagine an island with plenty of game, water, etc. Introduce 100 male great Danes and 100 female chihuahuas. Come back in 100 years. There will be no canids.
Conclusion. Great Danes and chihuahuas are different species.
Indeed it is. The earbones shift from the jaw to the ear during mammal gestation. It was predicted that fossils would be found showing the same movement. They have been.
And just how did the human "evolve" with two missing chromosomes?
See Human Chromosome 2 is a fusion of two ancestral chromosomes
Carbon is extremely mobile and C14 and C12 have identical chemistry. The ratio of 14 to 12 just depends on how long the carbon took to get where you found it. It was "modern" going in from the atmosphere, but when was that?
At any rate, there's apparently a fairly even noise floor of .24 or so percent of modern carbon in some old rocks. Evidently, the contamination takes time to get into poorly permeable coals. Above that noise floor, performance is unaffected. So it looks like you can date reliably back to about 50 or 60K and then you're down in the noise no matter how good your instrument is. (That's assuming the same noise floor seen in the coals is present in other materials, but I don't have any actual idea.)
Other elements are less mobile than carbon. There are known problems with K-Ar dating (excess argon, for instance), but there are known work-arounds, such as Ar-Ar. A number of techniques allow Isochron Dating. The point is that there's an array of dating techniques for any suspected age range. Most often they will return the same results for a given sample. (There's no reason why that should be so if creationist criticisms on radiometric techniques are correct, and yet that is so.)
So they are both mobile. And as you pointed out the calibrations of carbon with tree rings have indicated variations of C14 levels in the atmosphere over time.
"There are known problems with K-Ar dating (excess argon, for instance), but there are known work-arounds, such as Ar-Ar. A number of techniques allow Isochron Dating."
Read here for problems with Ar-Ar and Isochron dating methods.
How accurate are radioactive dating methods
Most often they will return the same results for a given sample.
The fact is that we don't know how often the dating methods disagree. To many dating results are ruled out and never published because they disagree with the prevailing world view. In fact the article above talks about how bias is built into the system. The labs even ask for an expected age, before they run the tests. You said there were 40 something methods. Yeah, I bet they do find two or three that will coincide with practically every specimen. But unless they published all results even the ones believed to be errant, there is no way to know how prevalent lack of correlation is among the dating methods.
And by such reason if there were female great danes and male chihuahuas which produced viable offspring on another island, then your conclusion would be proved false.
It would be an interesting situation, all the hybrids having to have one breed for the father and the other for the mother. Never heaard of such a thing in nature.
I don't *know* for a fact that they couldn't mate, but it gives me the willies to think about it (either way; size does matter!).
The point was that, assuming for the sake of argument it's impossible because of the great difference in size rather than gross genetic incompatability, ( which I *think* it is), it's an example of recent genetic isolation.
Truly, if we put males and females of both breeds on the island, I would expect them both to breed true, no mutts.
Get me a grant and an island, maybe we can make science history...
This is from peer reviewed writings?
Cordially
Vasek, Frank C.
1980 Creosote Bush: Long-lived Clones in the Mojave Desert. American Journal of Botany 67(2):246-255.
Cordially,
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