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.
So who is to say these remains weren't previously spelunkers from say 2000 years ago.
Found in a slurry of ancient cave bear dung.
No self respecting neanderthal would club that over the head and drag it back to the cave. No matter how hungry he was.
Good question. Exactly what is the evidence here? Too many don't use critical thinking anymore and get suckered in to believing what the press or other scientist is foisting upon us.
Theory without data = Presupposition.
Radio Carbon dating, has a presupposition that the radio-carbon was originally an initial value and was undisturbed over time. Mineral leaching can affect the dates widely. So many dates have been off, that scientist look for outside clues.
My point is that I have no frame of reference, in this article, on what the date was based on. Without that frame of reference, why should I believe this author?
Yes the Nastasaurus makes for very foul eating. Researchers think the male nastasaurus was both blind and deaf.
Not really. They find tiny levels of 14C in very old coals. All that means is that, in addition to the atmospheric source, there is a mechanism for producing very low levels of 14C within the earth - likely irradiation by exogenous radioactive sources.
As Baumgardner admits, even if you claimed a common age for all the coals, based on the 14C content, and said that was the age of the Genesis flood, you'd come up with an age of 50,000 years. So he then has to introduce the ad hoc assumption of 'accelerated nuclear decay', for which there is no plausible physical mechanism, to make it consistent with Genesis.
That's why science has something called error bars, to determine confidence.
Also, it's good to remember that the levels that Baumgardner measures are trace amounts...corresponding to levels at the very upper time ranges of C14 dating, where people will be using other dating techniques primarily anyway, and simply using C14 as a guide to make sure that ages match with multiple techniques.
Few scientists are dumb enough to just use one technique, when there are many techniques available to get an answer. Any age given in a scientific paper is likely run through a battery of multiple tests to get it's age. Indeed, that's what a scientific paper is supposed to do....give you a detailed list of experiments done to get from the author's assumptions to their conclusion. A recipe, in essence for others to follow if they wish to replicate (and verify) the author's work. Included in that recipe is every technique the author used to verify his assumptions rigorously, lest he is called to the carpet for shoddy work.
Baumgardner isn't presenting anything earthshattering in his paper...he's just discovered something that other scientists have known for quite some time, and trying to use it for his own purposes...being specifically untruthful in that he should know damn well how other scientists do date analyses. Silly creationists.
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