Posted on 02/16/2005 11:01:16 AM PST by Alter Kaker
NEW YORK (AP) -- A new analysis of bones unearthed nearly 40 years ago in Ethiopia has pushed the fossil record of modern humans back to nearly 200,000 years ago -- perhaps close to the dawn of the species.
Researchers determined that the specimens are around 195,000 years old. Previously, the oldest known fossils of Homo sapiens were Ethiopian skulls dated to about 160,000 years ago.
Genetic studies estimate that Homo sapiens arose about 200,000 years ago, so the new research brings the fossil record more in line with that, said John Fleagle of Stony Brook University in New York, an author of the study.
The fossils were found in 1967 near the Omo River in southwestern Ethiopia. One location yielded Omo I, which includes part of a skull plus skeletal bones. Another site produced Omo II, which has more of a skull but no skeletal bones. Neither specimen has a complete face.
Although Omo II shows more primitive characteristics than Omo I, scientists called both specimens Homo sapiens and assigned a tentative age of 130,000 years.
Now, after visiting the discovery sites, analyzing their geology and testing rock samples with more modern dating techniques, Fleagle and colleagues report in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature that both specimens are 195,000 years old, give or take 5,000 years.
Fleagle said the more primitive traits of Omo II may mean the two specimens came from different but overlapping Homo sapiens populations, or that they just represent natural variation within a single population.
To find the age of the skulls, the researchers determined that volcanic rock lying just below the sediment that contained the fossils was about 196,000 years old. They then found evidence that the fossil-bearing sediment was deposited soon after that time.
Paul Renne, director of the Berkeley Geochronology Center, which specializes in dating rocks, said the researchers made "a reasonably good argument" to support their dating of the fossils.
"It's more likely than not," he said, calling the work "very exciting and important."
Rick Potts, director of the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, said he considered the case for the new fossil ages "very strong." The work suggests that "we're right on the cusp of where the genetic evidence says the origin of modern humans ... should be," he said.
G. Philip Rightmire, a paleoanthropologist at Binghamton University in New York, said he believes the Omo fossils show Homo sapiens plus a more primitive ancestor. The find appears to represent the aftermath of the birth of Homo sapiens, when it was still living alongside its ancestral species, he said.
Where?
Yes.
That explains Einstein's kids......
Whereas Evolution produces nothing BUT imperfect specimens, because 'perfect' implys a goal to which one is trying to attain - E has NO goals other than survival.
How sad.....
Send $150 and I'll let you take the full Mensa test........
Were?????.....
Please... do not turn this thread into one about gay sex.....
or maybe "Somebody knows" or "I think so".....
That's 'cause them chimps won't write nuthin' down!
Each one of us has a rational mind. We decide how to act based on what we understand about our world, and what we predict what will be the result (both immediate & long-term) of our actions. We judge these results in terms of how well they maximize that which we value.
None of us is able to directly inject our thoughts into another's brain (as in mental telepathy). We can only indirectly influence other people's thoughts by talking to them, by letting our behavior set an example, by physical force, etc. To the other person, our attempt to modify their behavior is just another fact of the outside world, competing with all the other things they know or theorize about how the world works. They form their own judgements about what we're trying to get them to do. They judge our reputation for honesty & wisdom; they judge possible reasons for why we would lie to or manipulate them, and they judge what might be the outcome if they follow our suggestion.
In short: People have free will. Therefore each one of us is a moral actor.
In order for a collective to be a moral actor, the individuals who make up the collective would have to lose their moral responsibilities. But since moral responsibility comes from having free will, which comes from having rational minds with the capability of making judgements, this means they'd have to give up their ability to think rationally.
But history shows that this is impossible for most people to accomplish. Some people willingly join cults where they suppress their instict for judgement because of their devotion to the cult leader. Cults almost always remove themselves from society in order to limit what the followers know about the outside world. Many cults are organized around tightly-knit communal housing arrangements, where there are built-in psychological pressures for conformity.
The vast majority of people rebel at the notion of giving up their free will. This is why cult leaders must go to great lengths to build & sustain an environment where their followers will continue to follow the leader's will against their better judgement.
Slavery has always needed a system of dehumanizing the slaves in order to survive. Thus it was illegal to teach a slave to read & write. And even after the importation of slaves was made illegal - so that eventually most slaves had been born into slavery and had no direct knowledge of any other way to live - the slave system was still sustained by the constant use of force.
Thirdly there are the collective systems of the 20th Century. Communism, fascism, & Naziism were collectivist ideologies that believed that groups, not individuals are the true moral actors. (Respectively, the economic class, the nation, & the biological race.) They all failed rather spectacularly. They all were forced to spend constant effort on sustaining varying degrees of physical terror and isolation (where propaganda took the place of real knowledge) to keep their people from rebelling. The one system that lasted for decades - Communism - was left in the dust economically by the system that's based on moral individualism - capitalism.
Here is HIS conclusion. His statement shows he did not apply the scientific method; only "experience-based analysis":
"Conclusion
An experience-based analysis of the causal powers of various explanatory hypotheses suggests ...
Crystaline Entity..........
Don't even think it, I did not evolve from that monkey.
Where?
The Bible.
This SCM?
"This is nothing new for Dembski or the Discovery Institute. In 2002, they provided a list of 44 citations to the Ohio state school board that allegedly showed problems with evolution or support for ID. But when the authors of all of those 44 papers were contacted, every single one of them said that the Discovery Institute was distorting their work, that nothing they had written provided any reason to doubt evolution or to support ID. But even after being shown the statements from every single author whose work they cited saying otherwise, the DI's Stephen Meyer still wrote an op-ed piece a month later claiming that those citations "raise significant challenges to key tenets of Darwinian evolution" - never mind that the authors of those articles themselves said that the articles did no such thing."
Uhhh. What is moral?(using your argument)
The published works for which I copied author names, mostly refereed, were Setterfield-Norman, Montgomery-Dolphin, Magueijo, Barrow, Albrecht, Moffat, Tifft, Davis, Bell, Missler, Guthrie-Napier, and of course Anderson-Laing-Lau-Liu-Nieto-Turyshev. That last one proves that Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 have an anomalous measurement consistent over 11 years which could be either an uncaused change in acceleration, or a change in fundamental constants which is consistent with an annual lightspeed loss of 3 cm/s, abstract below:
Our previous analyses of radio Doppler and ranging data from distant spacecraft in the solar system indicated that an apparent anomalous acceleration is acting on Pioneer 10 and 11, with a magnitude a_P ~ 8 x 10^{-8} cm/s^2, directed towards the Sun (anderson,moriond). Much effort has been expended looking for possible systematic origins of the residuals, but none has been found. A detailed investigation of effects both external to and internal to the spacecraft, as well as those due to modeling and computational techniques, is provided. We also discuss the methods, theoretical models, and experimental techniques used to detect and study small forces acting on interplanetary spacecraft. These include the methods of radio Doppler data collection, data editing, and data reduction.
There is now further data for the Pioneer 10 orbit determination. The extended Pioneer 10 data set spans 3 January 1987 to 22 July 1998. [For Pioneer 11 the shorter span goes from 5 January 1987 to the time of loss of coherent data on 1 October 1990.] With these data sets and more detailed studies of all the systematics, we now give a result, of a_P = (8.74 +/- 1.33) x 10^{-8} cm/s^2. (Annual/diurnal variations on top of a_P, that leave a_P unchanged, are also reported and discussed.)
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