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.
It is impossible to suppress the evidence that instead of producing thought, brain activity is a result of thought, which exists independent of the brain.
Stay with me -- inasmuch as these thoughts originate independently of the brain, they must exist outside the physical dimension. How can we surmise that?
This fact is self-evident on the basis of the many thoughts for which there is no physical counterpart nor coincidently, any physical stimulus: truth, justice, perfection, holiness, evil, God, ad infinitum. Thus is demonstrated consciousness -- or if you wish -- the "mind," which itself exists outside the realm of the physical (the brain.)
Moreover, if thought were merely the result of neural activity in the brain as many scientists believe, we would all be helplessly dragged along by /chemical/electrical processes determining our thoughts -- even our morals and emotions. The psychologists and psychiatrists are/were wrong.
Simply put, ask yourself: "Do I have power of choice?" If you answer "yes," then your "mind" controls your "brain."
First, let me make a comment about your approach to the topic. There's something you don't understand, but instead of merely trying to learn the answer, you preface it with a charge of flawed logic. You've already decided that there is no answer.
The fact that you adopt this attitude is no reflection on the quality of the science itself. AndrewC and others on FR are forever attempting to play "gotcha" with the spectacularly robust theories of relativity and quantum mechanics, every time believing that the student exercise they can't solve constitutes a crisis that will bring the entire edifice of physics crashing down. I don't think it's a very honest approach.
I can think of an answer to the mosquito question off the top of my head. The general shape of the mosquito is stuck in a deep local minimum. In other words, it is (locally) optimized for the job it does. That's not to say that it's the ideal parasite; it's just that too large a change in shape will degrade its performance somewhat. Evolution, therefore, will pull the mosquito back into shape if it drifts too far away. (N.B. that there is a fair amount of morphological difference between the various living species of mosquito.)
This doesn't mean that the mosquito has stopped evolving, far from it. Morphology may be all there is to the fossil record, but it's not all there is to biology. Wholesale changes may have gone on under the hood, for all we know. The genomes in all likelihood have changed dramatically; maybe someday we'll find out by how much. But very few of those genes are responsible for morphology, and as long as evolution keeps pulling those few back into line, the shape should not be expected to change until the relevant conditions do.
Humans, by contrast, are not optimized for anything. Our brains have been changing dramatically of late. Someday that may max out--achieve an optimum--but right now we're on a pretty steep slope, rather than stuck at the bottom of a deep valley.
Josephus was a Jewish historian who collaborated with the Romans and wrote a history of Judea which briefly mentions Jesus. In one of the surviving manuscripts, Josephus says that Jesus was regarded by his followers as a miracle-worker; that he was crucified by Pilate; and that his followers were called "Christians" and still existed in Josephus' time (about the year 95). Josephus is thus strong evidence of the life and death of Jesus.
There are also some manuscripts of Josephus, found in a Christian monastery in Greece, which add several phrases saying that Jesus was the Messiah and rose from the dead. Virtually all reputable scholars regard that passage as an interpolation by the monks who copied the text, because (1) it's not in the other manuscript; (2) Josephus was a Jew, not a Christian, so he obviously didn't believe that Jesus was the Messiah; and (3) because Josephus devoted long sections of his 20-volume book to other first century religious leaders, but devotes only one paragraph to Jesus.
You can read more on Josephus and Jesus here (a Christian view) and here.
At least I may have given you food for thought ;-)
Note the top of the head - you can see clearly that it has been pasted up like a jigsaw puzzle in which the pieces do not fit very well. In fact, the nose section and everything but the upper jaw seems to be a paste up job.
This therefore is just another evolutionist hoax trying to make up evidence which they do not have.
I wish you folks would stop HIJACKING my threads. Go away!!
...contents positively identified as mush.
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