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.
Absolutely right. The evidence is not as strong for this as for other theories, but they do have spectrography which can measure and identify wavelengths of certain elements. So, there is some measurement going on with stars. What is the measurement used with this skull that is in any way reliable or confirmable? Those sneakly little paleontologists are presuppositions rattling around their brains before they ever break dirt with the shovel, and any find they make is filtered through these presuppositions, until, voila!, they conclude (surprise!) that they found another missing link! After all, it must be a missing link since they know that molecules-to-man evolution occurred (evidence?).
But a relatively well-armored gut cavity, especially against blows or stabs from the side.
Yup. You will never make this sale in scientific circles--there are too many cross-correlates in the rich array of modern methods of gathering evidence. For example, the piecing-together of bone fragments is now a great deal less the stabbing in the dark you make it out to be. Methods like microscopic examination for erosional continuity and amino acid racimation make this a far more certain enterprise than it used to be.
The conclusions they make are not supported by the visual evidence.
Of course they are, dramatically.
You compare apples and oranges and draw false conclusions. Astronomy and astrophysics also run on many theories, some much stronger than others, some testable, some not.
Uh huh? And that differs from paleontology how?
There are physical laws that govern the cosmos that can be tested and confirmed and used to make some other strong conclusions. Not so with a bunch of bone fragments in this article. The conclusions reached in this article are nothing more than assumptions based on presuppositions - no doubt about it. Would you like to call their conclusions a FACT? If you do, you are doing so on faith, not on the evidence - no escaping that.
All natural sciences run on faith in the evidence, and faith in the inductive (and, indeed, any kind of) analysis of the evidence. The difference between science and other enterprises is that scientists relentlessly grind away at their faith with a professionally analytical jaundiced and cynical eye.
The difference between the deployment of inference in astronomy and paleontology is one of degree, not of kind. If it is even that.
My skull is a different shape than your skull [bigger with larger brain ;)]. So what? What does that prove? Nothing. There are slight genetic variances in any species.
Until we catch some reproductive DNA from a Neanderthal, the question of whether they were capable of interbreeding with us is, I agree, up for grabs.
You are not up to speed on this subject. Many of the tools employed in astronomy are now employed in paleontology, not least of which is spectrographic analysis.
If the ecological conditions under which people and mosquitoes live were at all similar, I'd see your point. Give humans a stable ecological niche for 100 million years, and we'll see what happens.
And then, too, are you sure that humans have changed more over the last 100,000 years than have mosquitoes? I'm not. To a mosquito, I'll bet we've hardly changed at all.
When was the last time you saw a continent drift with your naked eyes? When was the last time you saw bi-polar junction discharge with your naked eyes? When did quantum mechanical physicists last personally observe a sub-nuclear event? When did you personally observe that the earth circles the sun, instead of the other way around? That's not what I observe when I sleep outdoors.
That is an economic concept, but I think it might apply here as well. The problem with evo'n is that it has become entrenched as an unquestionable truth now.
That is not how science works. And any scientist who could demonstrate a definitive refutation would have published in a heartbeat, to make his career, contrary to the vast conspiracy theory of science popularized here by creationists.
So all scientists take evo'n as a given. They are simply now trying to piece together how whatever-evidence-they-find fits in with the theory.
I re-iterate. That is not how science works. Scientists are professional skeptics, by work-a-day trade, and any scientist who could work up a credible story along the lines you would encourage would make his and his associate's careers in so doing.
Gaps are explained away as merely an inconvenience. Gaps should be viewed as a potential warning signal, that maybe evo'n, as an all-encompassing theory, is incomplete, or wrong.
Gaps are not explained at all, except by the creationists who invented them, because they are viewed as expected events, as occurs in any natural science. Perhaps astronomers should take the lack of evidence in the void between the stars as a sign of the looming collapse of astronomy--NOT.
all-encompassing theory
Once again, this is not how science works. Current evolutionary theory, like any natural sciences hypothesis, is a contingent working thesis. It explains and predicts pretty well, so we'll buy it for now. No scientist worth his salt will tell you that evolutionary theory is closed.
The differences in detail, scope and magnetude of the theory now, and in Darwin's day is remarkable. You'd hardly recognize Darwin's signature in the remarkable facts we've discovered about retro-viruses and the immune system complex that look rather more like lamarkism than like darwinism.
Nothing about Newton's laws precluded subsumption by Einstein's laws and, likewise, nothing about Darwin's theory precludes subsumption by, say, the panspermian theory -- or for that matter, ID or creationist theories. Hey, all you guys need to be admitted on the playing field is some credible evidence.
Of course. There is a mildly consistent drumbeat of mutational distance you can examine in just a few generations of a species. Our recent revision of the root of the tree of life, which I mentioned earlier, is based on observations of this phenomenon.
If you are going to critique evolutionary theory effectively, you should at least try a wee smidge to identify the target of the exercise. Evolutionary theory, as stated in the form you are groping toward, holds that evolution happens because a random set of mutated offspring are tossed on the table, then selected from by subjecting the population to environmental factors that winnow their numbers--which means that the entities that reproduce have NOT been selected from a uniform pool. They have been selected from a pool with a distinct mean and standard deviation that corresponds to having successfully coped with the current environment.
Okay, fine, so tell me just how spectrography can lead you to conclude that these bone fragments are from a non-human skull of a creature that existed 200,000 years ago.
Another presupposition. One could just as easily conclude from the evidence that the differences are explained by simple genetic variance which is common within species, therefore, it can hardly be considered as scientific fact - it's just another assumption. Provide proof that there is a macro-evolutionary change going on with this skull. You can't since there are other possible explanations! Therfore, it's metaphysical assumption. Elementary, my dear Watson.
Of course, it won't sell in evolutionary circles - materialistic naturalists (philosophers, not scientists) control the rules of the game. The fix is in. It's like the Twilight Zone - "we control the horizontal, weeee control the vertical..."
Even if the bones are pieced together properly, there is no evidence to indicate this creature wasn't purely human! PROVE IT! I see nothing but fragments forming a partial skull and an imaginary sketch that looks human to me! Where is the evidence that says it isn't fully human other than inside the materialistic naturalist's brain? You call that science? I dunt.
Not ture - they run on the faith presupposition that all life evolved by natural means. In case you didn't notice materialism and naturalism are philosophies (metaphysics), not science. Are you going to pretend there is no philosophical undergirding for naturalistic sciences? For example, prove to me that all reality is material with your materialistic mind/brain; prove to me that empiricism is true -impossible since there is no way to prove that empirically. Oh, you people make metaphysical statements all the time - there is no such thing as an objective scientist - that is precisely why logical positivism failed as a philosophy - it did not take the observer into account. There are ALWAYS first principles. Always - no escaping it. In a short sentence: Worldview dictates interpretation.
Amongst other things, by getting spectographic signatures of the residue on the fragments being pieced together, and matching them up to verify that we really are putting back together what was asunder, before making any morpological comparisons. Just like we do with stars to see what elements they are made up of.
This says nothing about whether the species is fully human.
And I would guess some serious musculature. Good post!
Just as astronomy based on Newtonian mechanics ran on the faith presupposition that the universe is a fixed and invariant time frame. At any rate, you are not representing the current conviction of evolutionary science accurately. The main line of evolutionary theory is about how creatures known to have existed are related to each other. As a workaday matter, it does not speak significantly to where life may have come from, just as Darwin frequently re-iterated, and just as most scientists currently agree. Nothing about evolutionary theory precludes external explanations for the origins of life, including at the hands of a creator.
In case you didn't notice materialism and naturalism are philosophies (metaphysics), not science.
So?
Are you going to pretend there is no philosophical undergirding for naturalistic sciences?
Not really necessary, since there is no such thing as "naturalistic" sciences. Formally speaking, naturalism is an exclusionary philosophy which assumes that what we don't know about, or can't know about, doesn't exist. Very few scientists, now or ever, have had such a naive view of the universe.
prove to me that empiricism is true -impossible since there is no way to prove that empirically.
Fortunately, no one cares except midaeval scholars with too much time on their hands.
You don't need to prove a thing in order to use a thing.
Oh, you people make metaphysical statements all the time
Really? Who would "us people" be?
- there is no such thing as an objective scientist
As most any scientist would agree, and the recognition of which phenomenon has produced our modern peer-review system of technical publication.
- that is precisely why logical positivism failed as a philosophy - it did not take the observer into account. There are ALWAYS first principles. Always - no escaping it. In a short sentence: Worldview dictates interpretation.
Well, now, quite a selection of, apparently somewhat randomly selected, ringing philosophical claims. To what do they relate? Why should I care about FIRST PRINCIPLES in this discussion? Whether they exist or not, science has to operate largely on induction, since science is operated by scientists with finite perception, and a very finite supply of the possible available evidence.
By the way, rather odd place to be using the phrase "first principles". When we design, say, a measuring device, we say we are designing to "first principles" if we are deriving our equations to massage the raw data input from the basic laws of physics associated with the device in question. "First Principles" does not somehow magically mean you aren't engaged in inductive reasoning to use or understand them.
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