Posted on 04/29/2004 1:32:24 PM PDT by me_newswire
WASHINGTON - More than three-quarters of a million years ago, early humans gathered around a campfire near an ancient lake in what is now Israel, making tools and perhaps cooking food, in the earliest evidence yet found of the use of fire in Europe or Asia.
Researchers have found evidence that these early people hunted and processed meat and used fire at a site called Gesher Benot Ya'aqov in the northern Dead Sea valley.
Developing the ability to use fire "surely led to dramatic changes in their behavior connected with diet, defense and social interaction," said lead researcher Naama Goren-Inbar of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Occupation of the site has been dated at about 790,000 years ago, according to the research team. Their findings are reported in Friday's issue of the journal Science.
The remains of burned wood indicate the possibility of a hearth, the researchers said, and there were tiny flint pieces, probably chipped off in the process of making tools.
There also is evidence of consumption of meat, including bones with cut marks and breakage patterns indicating the extraction of marrow.
The evidence indicates the early humans ate a variety of animals including horses, deer, rhino, hippo and birds, Goren-Inbar said in an interview via e-mail.
Several types of wood were burned at the site, including willow, poplar, ash and wild olive. There also was evidence of oats, wild grapevine, bedstraw, barley and several types of grass.
The find "enlarges the scope of our understanding of the behavioral patterns of the early humans," Goren-Inbar said. "It allows us to understand that these hominins were capable of coping with dangers, food, acquire warmth and later on in the history of mankind enabled some very meaningful technological inventions."
The earliest previous sites in Europe and Asia that show evidence of human use of fire have been dated at about 500,000 years ago.
Thus, the new finding pushes back the earliest evidence for control of fire by residents of Asia or Europe by more than a quarter-million years.
There are earlier sites associating fire with early humans in Africa, though some researchers believe the evidence at those locations is ambiguous and natural fires cannot be ruled out.
Anthropologist Paola Villa of the University of Colorado, who was not part of the research team, called new the report an important find.
"The evidence presented in this paper is very convincing because it is based on a combination of different kinds of data," she said. "Supportive evidence for the presence of fireplaces is also provided. The authors have considered all possible alternative explanations," she said.
"This is an important find that will encourage European archaeologists to take a closer look at their data," Villa added.
The Israeli site is at a crossroads for movement between Africa, Asia and Europe and use of fire could have helped spur the colonization of the colder climate of Europe, which began about 800,000 years ago.
Still unknown is exactly who these early people were. The paper notes that residents of this site have been assumed to be the now extinct Homo erectus or Homo ergaster, but may also have been an archaic version of modern humans, Homo sapiens.
ON THE NET Science: http://www.sciencemag.org
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See current Middle East News links at Mideast Newswire:
www.mideastnewswire.com
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It's Talmudic of God that, "If I knew Him, I'd be Him."
I rather try to have faith, which science only seems to support.
God Bless....
But it is capable of disproving particular misconceptions held by those who place too much stock in their own human fallibility when it comes to deciding what their gospels actually do or do not say.
It's an argument that can go on forever.
On one side we appear to have somebody who believes in the absolute accuracy of the Bible, and therefore anything which seems to contradict it must therefore be false.
On the other side we have somebody who believes in scientific evidence, and Occams Razor, and therefore believes that if a chain of scientific evidence definitely indicates a 6 billion year old universe, it is unreasonable to think that the universe is only 6000 (or 6500) years old and God scattered all this evidence around because He likes playing head games with us.
The claim that the research team was able to date this site to 790,000 years ago is a very dramatic and controversial claim, and it is the core element of this article, yet the authors offer no clue or evidence whatsoever of just how that age was determined.
Given that the half-life of carbon-14 is only 5,730 years, it is clear that carbon-14 dating could NOT have been used to date an item 790,000 years old. (Any remaining carbon-14 would have been reduced to less than one part in 1040.)
Since the claim of 790,000 years is so controversial, it makes you wonder why the authors failed to offer any substantiation of that claim.
--Boot Hill
Charred Remains May Be Earliest Human Fire (Israel - 800k yo)
Know what .....I am not the one getting hung up on a date, you are. Personally i adhere to the concept that in God's scheme of things there are more important things than whether the Earth was made 6,000 years ago (and I am still waiting for a biblical source from you confirming that), or whether it is much much older than that. And i find it intersting that you are saying it could be plus or minus some years (Whether it is 6000 or 6500 makes little difference ), but that is still being compared to a paradigm that states it took Billions of years. The disparancy between the two is prodigious, hence the 'rounding off' factor may be off by, who knows, several millenia, several thousand millenia .......there is a whole lot of spatial difference between 6,000 and 5-6 billion.
How many times have you read the bible? ----BibleWonk
Funny. I did tell Protest-1 that whenever i question someone about this, asking for biblical proof, they either say some smirky (or at times outrightly vitriolic) comment , or they hush. I guess you must be the former BibleWonk because i do not see how my reading of the Bible pertains to this. And to answer your question, I read it a lot. And not only in the normal translations but in the direct greek and Hebrew translations. And i have never found a place that says the world is 6,000 years old, nor have i found a place that says paying indulgences will lead to salvation, etc etc. And that is why i am asking if YOU have.
If your asnwer is to inquire how many times i've read my bible then i guess your belief in the 6K figure is also based on Archbishop Usher's calculations.
NO, it cannot prove anything supernatural.
You seem to be the one with the attitude problem.
I read the bible every day. I've read it about 30-40 times. It never ceases to amaze me how many people read it much less and are quite qualified to tell me all about what it means and says.
I already told you where it says the age of the universe. If you are demanding where the number 6000 years is in the bible then you have a serious problem.
You can't really measure when something happened, so if there are writings in a cave, you have no clue how long they have been there. Ice age evidence is based on what? Continental drift is discussed in the bible very briefly. There is mention of the land separating somewhere in there. Dinosaurs are definitely mentioned in the bible in Job and were most likely present on the ark. They were not able to survive in the changed atmosphere. What kind of change do you suppose God made when He made rainbows exist that didn't exist before. Either it never rained or light was not refracted by water or something.
There is evidence that just 4000 years ago, before the flood, the whole earth was a much warmer and more tropical place which is why they find mastadons in syberia frozen in place with tropical plants in their mouth. There are literally hundreds of books on this topic but you will not find them in colleges and public schools. I got saved from being a major evolutionist so it was very interesting to hear this new perspective on creation that turned out to be held by millions of people in this country.
How do fossiles form in the first place. When things die they decay away to dust, only a giant flood would produce the fossiles we find. Naturalists assume 100's of millions of years to form the layers of sediment yet we find whales fossilized through a billion years of this sediment. He would have had to wait there a billion years while all this sediment formed around him. NOPE: It was the flood.
There is a study of the population of man. Look at our rate of increase, even before modern medicine. It simply doesn't work out that we have been around for a million years and our population not expand in a much different way. There are literally hundreds of evidences for a young earth, not PROOFS, but evidences to put along side the old universe people leaving us with only faith in either one model or the other.
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