Posted on 06/11/2003 8:03:26 AM PDT by blam
Oldest human skulls found
By Jonathan Amos
BBC News Online science staff
Three fossilised skulls unearthed in Ethiopia are said by scientists to be among the most important discoveries ever made in the search for the origin of humans.
Herto skull: Dated at between 160,000 and 154,000 years old (Image copyright: David L. Brill)
The crania of two adults and a child, all dated to be around 160,000 years old, were pulled out of sediments near a village called Herto in the Afar region in the east of the country.
They are described as the oldest known fossils of modern humans, or Homo sapiens.
What excites scientists so much is that the specimens fit neatly with the genetic studies that have suggested this time and part of Africa for the emergence of mankind.
"All the genetics have pointed to a geologically recent origin for humans in Africa - and now we have the fossils," said Professor Tim White, one of the co-leaders on the research team that found the skulls.
"These specimens are critical because they bridge the gap between the earlier more archaic forms in Africa and the fully modern humans that we see 100,000 years ago," the University of California at Berkeley, US, paleoanthropologist told BBC News Online.
Out of Africa
The skulls are not an exact match to those of people living today; they are slightly larger, longer and have more pronounced brow ridges.
These minor but important differences have prompted the US/Ethiopian research team to assign the skulls to a new subspecies of humans called Homo sapiens idaltu (idaltu means "elder" in the local Afar language).
Herto reconstruction: What the ancient people might have looked like (Image copyright: J. Matternes)
The Herto discoveries were hailed on Wednesday by those researchers who have championed the idea that all humans living today come from a population that emerged from Africa within the last 200,000 years.
The proponents of the so-called Out of Africa hypothesis think this late migration of humans supplanted all other human-like species alive around the world at the time - such as the Neanderthals in Europe.
If modern features already existed in Africa 160,000 years ago, they argued, we could not have descended from species like Neanderthals.
"These skulls are fantastic evidence in support of the Out of Africa idea," Professor Chris Stringer, from London's Natural History Museum, told BBC News Online.
"These people were living in the right place and at the right time to be possibly the ancestors of all of us."
Sophisticated behaviour
The skulls were found in fragments, at a fossil-rich site first identified in 1997, in a dry and dusty valley.
Stone tools and the fossil skull of a butchered hippo were the first artefacts to be picked up. Buffalo fossils were later recovered indicating the ancient humans had a meat-rich diet.
The most complete of the adult skulls was seen protruding from the ancient sediment; it had been exposed by heavy rains and partially trampled by herds of cows.
SEARCH FOR HUMAN ORIGINS
The Herto skulls represent a confirmation of the genetic studies
The skull of the child - probably aged six or seven - had been shattered into more than 200 pieces and had to be painstakingly reconstructed.
All the skulls had cut marks indicating they had been de-fleshed in some kind of mortuary practice. The polishing on the skulls, however, suggests this was not simple cannibalism but more probably some kind of ritualistic behaviour.
This type of practice has been recorded in more modern societies, including some in New Guinea, in which the skulls of ancestors are preserved and worshipped.
The Herto skulls may therefore mark the earliest known example of conceptual thinking - the sophisticated behaviour that stands us apart from all other animals.
"This is very possibly the case," Professor White said.
The Ethiopian discoveries are reported in the journal Nature.
Typically evolutionists make the most ambitious claims based on fossils that are fragmentary, i.e., the less they have to start with the more they can invent. For instance, about twenty years ago they found a fossil they called Sivapithecus and said it was a human ancestor. Creationists who looks at the fossil said it was probably an ape but it was too incomplete to be sure. Later a more complete fossil of a sivapithecus was found, and evolutionists had to admit it was just an orangutan.
In this article you can see they found three fairly complete skulls and they admit that they are humans. If the skulls were in little tiny pieces they could glue together however they wanted, who knows what claims they would make. If it was Johanson or the Leaky's, instead of Tim White, I suspect the claims would really be spectacular.
;)
The Golden Years
You doubt the findings, the evidence. Another case of throwing out the facts when the theory is unpalatable.
I was responding to your claim that creationists can't make up their minds as to whether Java and Peking Man were human or ape. I think you're being disingenuous, if you really mean to say that serious creationists (rather than some amateur who doesn't really know the subject) can't decide if a whole class of hominids is human or not.
What do you imagine that I'm making up? Here again is the web page:
A Comparison of Creationist Opinions.
Note the chart. The leading lights of creationism are all over the map in deciding what to call "An APE! Just an APE!" versus "A MAN! Just a MAN!"
What passes for facts in the evolutionary world in most cases are nothing more than inferences. There is no proof in this article to support the "theory" as you call it. If you want to consider it a fact, go ahead, but the data are insufficient to support that position.
Taxonomy, Transitional Forms, and the Fossil Record.
It happens with all kinds of things, going back in time, that are a cinch to tell apart now. The bins are arbitrary, but taxonomic trees are the reflection of a real historical tree of common descent.
A skull in hand is not an inference. You have to start somewhere. Given such a skull, what is your explanation for it? And inference doesn't make things wrong. It makes sense, for instance, that the back side of the moon is a continuation of the sphere you see from earth.
They might, along with a beetle-browed skull cap or "primitive" teeth.
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