Posted on 12/17/2004 11:37:14 AM PST by blam
ARCHAEOLOGISTS EXCITED BY 500,000-YEAR-OLD AXE FIND IN QUARRY
By David Prudames 16/12/2004
This image shows the axe head from different angles. Photo: Graham Norrie, University of Birmingham Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity.
A Stone Age hand axe dating back 500,000 years has been discovered at a quarry in Warwickshire.
The tool was found at the Smiths Concrete Bubbenhall Quarry at Waverley Wood Farm, near Coventry, which has already produced evidence of some of the earliest known human occupants of the UK.
It was uncovered in gravel by quarry manager John Green who took it to be identified by archaeologists at the University of Birmingham.
"We are very excited about this discovery," enthused Professor David Keen of the university's Archaeology Field Unit.
"Lower Palaeolithic artefacts are comparatively rare in the West Midlands compared to the south and east of England so this is a real find for us."
Despite being half and million years old the tool is very well-preserved and will eventually go on show at Warwickshire Museum.
Amongst other things, the hand axe would have been used for butchering animals, but what is perhaps most intriguing about it is that it is made of a type of volcanic rock called andesite.
Photo: Graham Norrie, University of Birmingham Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity.,
Andesite bedrock only occurs in the Lake District or North Wales and this is only the ninth andesite hand axe to be found in the midlands in over a century. Archaeologists are now trying to figure out how the tool might have got there.
Although it is possible the rock was transported to the midlands by glacial ice from the north west there is as yet no evidence for it, which suggests humans might have brought it into the area.
The lack of material for good quality hand axes in the midlands would probably have been known to our ancestors, therefore these tools could have been brought in ready made.
It may also be significant that all previous andesite hand axe finds have been made in deposits of the Bytham River, a now lost river system that crossed England from the Cotswolds via the West Midlands and Leicester to the North Sea.
This valley was destroyed in a later glaciation and seems to have provided a route into the midlands for Palaeolithic hunters.
Half a million years ago the area was at the edge of the human world, linked to Europe along the Bytham valley and across a land-bridge existing before the cutting of the Straits of Dover.
In addition to the hand axe the Smiths Concrete Bubbenhall Quarry has produced 18 other Palaeolithic tools, currently under investigation by the team at Birmingham Archaeology.
Other finds in the area include bones and teeth from a straight-tusked elephant, which are also set to be displayed at Warwickshire Museum.
...and you base this on your expert knowledge of how artifacts are dated right?
Try again when you've learned something about the subject.
The Amazing Randi is amazingly ignorant.
Actually, he's not -- DManA is misapplying what Randi has actually said.
Randi is quite aware that scientists working within their own fields are competent and appropriately skeptical.
What James Randi *actually* said applies to a different context entirely -- scientists often get snookered by charlatans because their training and research experience ill-equips them to deal with a test subject (like a "psychic", etc.) who is intentionally tricking them. Scientists aren't used to that, since nature doesn't lie -- they're too trusting of their observations when dealing with a dishonest subject.
..because we understand the natural processes by which such things arise...
then I think we can start talking about a lot of archaelogical discoveries across the board that may appear to have been of human origin, but were simply of natural origin.
Not if there's no known natural process which could produce such objects, no. But you do accidentally make a good point -- "paleoliths" (stone tools, etc.) usually can not be determined to be actually human-produced tools, unless there is independent evidence pointing towards associated human activity (such as cooking trash, campfires, yadda yadda). The reason is that it *is* actually pretty common for natural action (tumbling rocks, glaciers, etc.) to chip and shape rocks in ways that can closely resemble stone tools. The exception is when the form of the stone object happens to be clearly "worked" by hand or other tools instead of roughly chipped or ground into shape.
Increasing complexity, after all, is the standard earmark of scientific discovery. That is the condeded pattern.
Say what?
So, mark this equation: Any rudimentary object is the potential ancestor/parent of increasingly complex objects. The totally unsophisticated can morph into the sophisticated, as long as your recipe has "enough" time (whatever that is).
You know, you really should try to learn something about evolution before you attempt to ridicule it. Evolutionary processes require, among other things, *reproduction* in order to occur. Unfortunately for your sarcasm, "any rudimentary object", including for example chunks of rock as in the current discussion, don't reproduce. No reproduction, no evolution. So you're not just comparing apples and oranges, you're comparing apples and asteroids.
Nice try.
So, 500,000 years for nature to work on an axe head? Oh, a few scratchings are a piece of cake in comparison to the wonder and awe of the worksmanship of our own bodies!
See above.
What? You don't believe my description about your unsophisticated, multiple great-grandthing as your original ancestor?
I do, actually, because the evidence for it is overwhelming. Not that you'd know anything about that, apparently.
All ya need to do is take a leap of faith like most normal scientific evolutionists,
No, it does not take "faith" to accept evolution, it takes knowledge, evidence, and an understanding of the processes involved. Again, not that you would know -- it's so much easier to make fun of something you *don't* know enough about to appreciate...
preaching at a university pulpit near you!
Evolutionary biology is taught, not preached, and science classrooms are not pulpits. Ever actually been in one?
You've really got a big chip on your shoulder about evolution. Too bad you don't know enough about it to even parody it effectively.
One or more of these, most likely: http://www.origins.tv/darwin/datingmethods.htm. Note that there are many, many types of dating methods, which rely on entirely different methods and procedures and underlying physical processes. Be sure to ask the next young-earth creationist you see how they all manage to be "wrong" or "unreliable", yet produce consistent "incorrect" results with each other...
Unfortunately, yes.
On the crevo threads it is easy to understand that attitude, because evolution hits so hard inside one's soul. But here? Could this "disbelief" be from the same source (religious, strict interpretation of the bible)?
I think there are many root causes for such reactions:
1. Active disinformation by creationists, trying to undermine confidence in the science which seems to contradict some of their beliefs. This causes distrust of all scientific results, not just the "hot-button" ones.
2. Resentment of the "know-it-all" scientists by people insecure in their own mental abilities or knowledge.
3. Anyone can toss on a labcoat and call themselves a "scientist" and make idiotic announcements of their "discoveries". After seeing enough stupid pseudoscience, people can be forgiven for thinking that such stuff is representative of the field of science as a whole.
4. Bad science reporting for the public, which often leaves out key information, misstates results or methods, or "dumbs down" things to the point where the original research ends up looking simplistic, idiotic, or wrong.
5. Bad science education in schools, which often just tells students to memorize findings, instead of giving them an understanding of how science is actually done, how results are vetted, how errors are rooted out, why scientific disputes or revisions don't mean that earlier knowledge was "wrong", and so on. Most people actually have a very poor idea about how science is done, and why it's done that way.
And so on.
By using science.
Depends on how you choose to define "how old", of course...
Different dating methods can measure different aspects, so by choosing accordingly you could find the answers to such questions as a) how long ago was it chipped into an axe, b) how long ago did it last see the light of day, c) how long ago did the rock it's made from solidify, d) how long ago did it get buried, etc.
Clarify, please -- what *kind* of humans?
Because...?
(Yeah, I *know* I'll be sorry I asked...)
Real simple, none of the dating methods in use doesn't rely on guessing or assumptions that cannot be verified in anyway or falsified. IE, it isn't science, it's a belief system. Just like Core sampling of the ice packs. Science can't determine with any reliability how any given artifact arrived where it was found or what conditions led to it. The most they can do is try to look smart when pontificating about how it props up their belief system.
When you date freshly formed lava flows to anywhere from 10s of thousands to millions of years old, one can say with authority that the technology is nothing but highly sophisticated manuer. It's better to say "I don't know it's age" than to lie or bs people that you do when you have no basis for making claim.
A few hours, give or take several years.
Wow, you're remarkably ignorant of dating methods, I see. For just one example of dating method verification, here's an exerpt from an earlier post of mine:
There are many, many samples of known age (e.g. tree rings, arctic ice layers, lake bottom layers, etc.) which can be used to multiply and independently determine how much carbon-14 was in the atmosphere in any given year, and thus be used to calibrate Carbon-14 dating methods.
For a quick article on one such study, see http://more.abcnews.go.com/sections/science/dailynews/carbon0220.html
A much more technical treatment: Atmospheric Radiocarbon Calibration to 45,000 yr B.P.: Late Glacial Fluctuations and Cosmogenic Isotope Production
Such studies produce calibration results such as the following:
If the amount of Carbon-14 in the atmosphere had been exactly constant throughout time (and no one expects that it has been), then the results would fall on the straight diagonal line. Instead, the wiggly line indicates how much the actual amount of C-14 in the atmosphere deviated from the "base" amount, and from this we can know how much C-14 was actually present in any given year in the past 50,000 years.
Note that the above graph includes C-14 data from *two* completely independent sources (Lake Suigetsu varves, and ocean corals), and yet the results overlap beautifully, confirming each other. There is similar match from C-14 studies based on tree-ring data and other sources.
From this, we can build a Carbon-14 dating calibration or "correction" curve which can be used to confidently produce an accurate date from a given Carbon-14 measurement. These calibration curves look like this:
There are many databases available which are used to compile massive amounts of data to ensure the proper calibration of carbon-dating. For just one example, Marine Reservoir Correction Database.
Other methods are used to cross-check and calibrate other dating methods to ensure accuracy.
Science can't determine with any reliability how any given artifact arrived where it was found or what conditions led to it. The most they can do is try to look smart when pontificating about how it props up their belief system.
Actually, they just apply all the highly technical methods that you know so little about.
When you date freshly formed lava flows to anywhere from 10s of thousands to millions of years old, one can say with authority that the technology is nothing but highly sophisticated manuer.
No, actually, what it means is that the creationist (Steven Austin) who improperly prepared that sample was incredibly dishonest when he presented the *correct* results for the inclusion-laden sample as some sort of "error" in radiometric dating.
It's better to say "I don't know it's age" than to lie or bs people that you do when you have no basis for making claim.
Actually, it's better to learn something about a subject before you attempt to critique it. Your own post is a better example of trying to "lie or bs people" when you make up stuff about dating methods without any real knowledge of them.
which science? That's a rather answer
You don't have to rely on it for aging, but it's a good indicator that something isn't a newly manufactured hoax.
Actually, I'm pretty well acquainted with the concepts and have debated them here on FR a number of times. The only thing you've really shown is that you can cut, paste and use ad-hominem. You cite arctic ice layers as a sample of known age. Care to explain how that method places the lost squadron hundreds of years prior to WWII? No, you can't. It makes you look bad. Nor can you account for how the sking of a beast could be dated 20k years apart from it's bones. Nor, can you explain how two mammoths laying side by side could be dated 30k years apart. It's called shining people on. I'm aware your information is highly technical. So were the aircraft designs of many a man that was injured and or killed before the wright brothers flew. Your methods don't work any better than theirs.
Oh, a point I was intending to make, you might need to update history books to reflect that B-17 and P-38 lightnings were flying cover for the 1700s plate fleets or something.. Cause that's how far back the dating method would put Glacier girl and the rest of the squadron that went down with her. You can't correct for the known actual date because you don't have any fixed points in history to work against in ancient cases - none. It's a farce.
Any arbitrary age the finder felt like assigning.
And how about this heavy revelation:
Despite being half and [sic] million years old the tool is very well-preserved
"Looks like a rock that someone who knew what he/she was doing whacked (multiple times) with another rock, to me..."
What you are suggesting is that it arose as the result of design. How unscientific. Surely the shape of the rock is the result of time plus chance plus a bigger rock. This is a rock that evolved into a stone ax head as the result of a multitude of small incremental changes. (/sarcasm off)
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