Oldest Remains of Modern Humans Are Identified by Scientists

New York Times (AP Wire) ^ | February 16, 2005 | AP Wire

[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.

[VadeRetro]

Without considering VSL, all things being equal, a star 100 times less dense than another (having 100 times more volume) is also 100 times more opaque, because the photons have much more volume to overcome without being dissipated by scattering or absorption. The path out may be less sparsely populated, but there is much more non-escape volume to be deflected to, which increases photon extinction. It appears this opacity must mean 100 times fewer photons will reach the observer, which forces me to conclude the remainder are dissipated into kinetic energy within the larger volume. This is ordinary non-VSL astrophysics derived from this site.

Gee, this paragraph would look different if the true multiplier was 11 million instead of 100, wouldn't it? Apparently the current solar radius is 695,000 km, which my calculator claims gives a solar volume of 1.406 x 10¹⁸ km cubed. Times 11 million would be 1.547 x 10²⁵ km cubed for a solar volume at primoridial c time.

But I want the back-then solar radius. So times .75 (4/3 written upside-down) and divided by p, then cube-rooted gives 154,566,615.4 km. I want that in miles, so we multiply by .621 to get 95,985,868.15. The sun has swelled to about three million miles beyond the Earth's current orbit. It not only fills the daytime sky, it fills the night-time sky. The literature of the time probably would have noticed this.

The Earth would not exist. Even if my calculations are off somewhere, the continued existence of the two inner planets Venus and Mercury is particularly hard to explain if the Sun was ever that much bigger than it is now. You can't swell the Sun that much before Mercury is eaten, never to return. That we have a planet Mercury tells me the Sun was never that big.

So for tonight, I think the excess energy is staying within the star.

Absolutely not. No star will stay at disequilibrium for long. All the stars we ever see are at equilibrium under their current conditions. The obvious exception would be a star undergoing supernova at the time.

You and Setterfield are trying to simply throw a blanket of opacity over the Sun. You can't do that. Opacity increases, yes. As a star fuses heavier and heavier elements ("metals" in astro jargon), the opacity of the stellar gas indeed does rise--slowly. The star becomes a red giant. Opacity is indeed the mechanism of the swelling. The bigger atoms have more ability to trap electrons, become partially un-ionized, and thus to resolve photons.

With VSL in play, with c increased by 10, we have a star 100 times less dense without volume change (because space is less granular, higher resolution, and mass and density decrease inverse to c^2). But it also is putting out 10 times the photons moving 10 times as fast. These factors overcome the factor of 100 times fewer photons, so the photon output is the same as the original comparison star.

No. This is what I thought I was seeing a long time ago and opacity won't do that. Opacity makes more photons and redder, not fewer photons which ever way you try to go. And the energy of the star is going to get out. The star is very hot and under pressure. Space is very cold and has no pressure. Opacity just makes the gas float farther out from the center as a storm of photons slams into the particles.

I'm just cherry-picking the things that jump out at me in your post for now. Aftershocks may be expected continue for days. So I'll skip over some for now. Down the page, this hit my eyes.

My incomprehensible paragraph was intended not to explain the excess energy, but the reason the excess energy does not create major redshift, which point you seem to permit.

Since I didn't understand your paragraph at all, I wasn't aware of just what exactly you were explaining with it. Excess energy should not happen. OK, across quantum jumps in a Setterfieldian world it is somehow allowable, but this is within a quantum jump and conservation of energy is being violated by solar fusion.

Never mind the number of atoms and the number of photons involved. I'm now looking at the per-fusion-event balance. We are fusing atoms with a tiny fraction of the mass of modern ones but getting out photons with quite a large fraction of the modern energy. That's where the books don't balance. This is bad.

People come on the Internet--even onto FR sometimes--hawking free energy schemes. One I recall involved using some kind of catalytic process to break down water into hydrogen and oxygen with a lower-than-straight-electrolysis energy cost. The device produced a mild energy surplus by then burning the hydrogen and oxygen for energy. It was ready for investors to get in on the ground floor.

Apparently, you're the guy THAT guy was looking for.

My statement about the datapoint chart was about the datapoints, not the curve.

The existence of the datapoints is not in dispute. The curve is controversial.

I'll leave your summation for later. I have more than I like to have on tap for today.

[VadeRetro]

They did have to do that, or the observed decay rate of SN1987A would be wrong.

You're right. If they didn't need it in 1981, they have absolutely needed it since 1987 or they would have been falsified in 1987.

[VadeRetro]

VR: but this is within a quantum jump

I meant that this is in the interval BETWEEN quantum jumps. It is explicitly stated that energy conservation holds between jumps. The rule appears to be violated here, big time.

This is not a lawyerly nitpick. Revising the paper to remove the contradicted statements will not suffice. We really do not observe free energy.

[VadeRetro]

Never mind the number of atoms and the number of photons involved. I'm now looking at the per-fusion-event balance. We are fusing atoms with a tiny fraction of the mass of modern ones but getting out photons with quite a large fraction of the modern energy. That's where the books don't balance. This is bad.

But, yet again, if you DO balance the books on energy, the emerging photons are infra-infra-infrared, vastly longer wave than now. No eyes on Earth could possibly see using them.

[Thatcherite]

But I want the back-then solar radius. So times .75 (4/3 written upside-down) and divided by p, then cube-rooted gives 154,566,615.4 km. I want that in miles, so we multiply by .621 to get 95,985,868.15. The sun has swelled to about three million miles beyond the Earth's current orbit. It not only fills the daytime sky, it fills the night-time sky. The literature of the time probably would have noticed this.

LOL.

[VadeRetro]

With VSL in play, with c increased by 10, we have a star 100 times less dense without volume change (because space is less granular, higher resolution, and mass and density decrease inverse to c^2). But it also is putting out 10 times the photons moving 10 times as fast. These factors overcome the factor of 100 times fewer photons, so the photon output is the same as the original comparison star. Apparently the opacity (increased photon extinction) means 10 times as many photons are being converted into internal kinetic energy. This energy then appears free to manifest as temperature, volume, pressure, and density compensation.

I thought for a bit that the bolded part of this was an answer to my opacity objection, but I realize now that it is not. You're just stating something I, for one, already knew:

As you boost c, nucleon (and other particle) mass goes way, way down, but the strength of the gravitational force goes up correspondingly, the electron orbital radius of an atom is the same, and large-scale physical objects like someone named Adam in a garden named Eden do not shrink. Furthermore, the loss of density tends to be invisible--or that's supposed to be the idea, anyway--since everything gets less massive and less dense at the same time. Wood still floats on water and lead still sinks.

I'm really not trying to glide blithely past any important points by overlooking them. The red portion I take as your acknowledgement that, just as understood in current stellar physics, increasing the opacity of the solar medium will cause the Sun to expand in volume.

This was just a CYA post and may be ignored unless I'm wrong. Now I mean it, gotta go.

[VadeRetro]

It's actually far worse than that. Messianic was only increasing c by 10, not 100. If c is boosted to 11 million times c(now), the multiplier is 11 million squared, not 11 million.

I'm not going to do the calculation over, as it's absurd.

The Sun's furnace would not light in the first place until it had collapsed to a much higher density than that. The fire would go out long before it expanded to such size under fusion pressure. (But the Earth would be a goner before then.)

Now I gotta gotta gotta go.

[WildTurkey]

I hit paydirt by Googling "redshift definition" and, wouldn't you know, setterfield.org came up in the top five. He also is #1 for "atomic orbit energy".

Still doesn't make him right. His hypothesis would have light speeding up with time instead of slowing down. Why don't you use that noodle.

[VadeRetro]

I want to take a little bit to examine my/our assumptions on the opacity dilemma. There's a wrinkle which may be a partial out or at least a mitigator of sorts but leads to other problems for the alleged transparency of quantum jumps to the inhabitants of the universe.

Radiation pressure comes from the transfer of momentum from a photon to a massive particle. It isn't really the total Energy (E = hc/l) of the photon that provides the push, it's the momentum = h/l. Because of the way hc = constant in Setterfield terms, the energy and momentum of a photon are now bizarrely decoupled. A green photon in early days has no momentum compared to now, h being so much tinier than now. There is no c in the formula to counterbalance.

So there's less momentum to do the pushing. What has changed about the about the mass to be pushed?

The mass of a massive particle goes down with c squared back through time. There are two things we're going to do with the mass. One is accelerate it. That is, we're going to change its current momentum. The other is we're going to lift it some distance against the resistance of gravity until its new momentum is lost and it starts to fall back again.

Mass in the formula f = ma is a resistance to acceleration. It takes more force (torque) to get a fully-loaded 18-wheeler off the drag strip starting line than it does a motorcycle. Because of the low mass of early-universe particles, they're a snap to get moving.

You can isolate this property from what we call "gravitational mass." Out in the depths of space, everything is weightless but it still has mass. You smack into something, it resists acceleration according to its mass.

If you swat a fly (never mind how it got out there), it is accelerated rapidly away from you while you are microscopically accelerated in the opposite direction. You don't notice much acceleration because of your mass compared to the fly.

So, anyway, in the early c days, if a photon smacks into a smallish particle of matter, it sends it flying 11 million times better than in the same situation now. The photons have lost momentum inversely with c, but the massive particle has lost resistance to acceleration inversely with c squared.

That's right. The changes don't even cancel (a c-squared change the wrong way and a c change to mitigate). The problem is worse by another factor of c. That's what I was figuring earlier.

But I forgot something. The solar particles in question are in a strong gravitational field. Gravity is cancelling the mass difference. All of it. That's right. Gm = constant. We did that to keep orbits the same.

Now the photons have less swat to lift the gas particles, but the gas won't fly up much except for the fact there are 11 million times more photons banging into it. But against THAT, 11 million times more particles than now have the property of opacity in the first place so there's more to lift.

So now we got rid of the c-squared factor. We have 11 million more photons, each with almost the same energy as now, but tiny momentum compared to now.

One thing this means is the opacity doesn't red-shift the light very much when it eats the momentum. There isn't much to eat.

That in turn means that the "opacity" you get by adding a crazy number of "opaque" particles almost isn't opacity at all. The "opaque" particle absorbs the photon, re-emits a photon of almost the same wavelength as before and its own momentum is barely changed. Yes, there's a scattering effect but they're all still going to find their way out. This isn't doing its job.

That alone means there's still a problem and this isn't working, but let's never mind that just for now.

If we ignore the problems already noted with the low-momentum escape clause, you are perhaps in the clear if I'm keeping score accurately. The star doesn't have to swell too awfully much, maybe. Everything has nominally canceled.

I thought at first that we had lost the equivalence principle between inertial and gravitational mass here. That among other things is why a feather and a cannonball fall at the same speed on Earth in a vacuum's chamber. But that's probably hyperbole.

What has happened is that radiation pressure doesn't work the same in low-gravity environments across quantum jumps. If you go that way, that has to be an easily falsifiable prediction.

I suspect that we see radiation pressure events in astronomical objects, some of them under low gravity. Nebulae and so forth. Old supernova remnant puffs in the neighborhood of stars, maybe in the Magellanic Clouds, for instance. Perhaps different things farther out.

Thus, we could see the rules changing for low gravity radiation pressure if the rules did change. I suspect we would have noticed by now.

This mess just ain't workin' for me.

[WildTurkey]

Without considering VSL, all things being equal, a star 100 times less dense than another (having 100 times more volume) is also 100 times more opaque, because the photons have much more volume to overcome without being dissipated by scattering or absorption.

A totally false assumption considering that a star is not uniform throughout its radius.

[VadeRetro]

Been thinking more over a late lunch and more errands about the consequences of very low photon momentum.

It makes things very different on Earth, too. Nothing really gets a lot of energy from absorbing a photon. Yes, there are a lot--11 million times--more photons to absorb, but you can't cancel one number with another one in this case.

Things look different than now. Everything then is pretty much one color, the "color" of a mirror. Every particle on Earth or in the sky that absorbs a photon re-emits almost exactly the same thing. Chlorophyll doesn't work. No photochemical reaction works the same as now. Plants starve. Eyes are blind, even though there are photons of the proper wavelength subspectrum to go around after all. The optical properties of everything on Earth are really screwed up.

You can't go there. But you already did.

[VadeRetro]

Where it's at NOW ...

Found a web page on Photon Absorption. There are three main processes of same.

1. Photoelectric Effect (PE) - knock out an electron
2. Pair Production (PP) - convert to electron-antielectron pair
3. Compton scattering (C)- elastic collision off an electron

It goes on to give the relative weights of these processes as follows:

µPE ~ Z⁵
µPP ~ Z²
µC ~ Z

Where µ is an absorption coefficient.

Of those three, only the low-weighted Compton Effect seems to be momentum dependent. The other two absorb all the photon's energy and thus from what I can tell would not be so fragile in a Setterfieldian world.

A web page that ties at least some of the concepts involved together is here.

So cancel some of the alarm. ASSUMING I AT LAST HAVE THIS RIGHT (but I'm no physicist), we have the following.

Chlorophyll still works on Earth. So do eyes. However, we also have restored another factor of 11 million that the Sun has to swell, since opaque things then are indeed almost as opaque as now and they are getting all the photon energy, not just that tiny momentum. I hope it's clear by now that I don't think opacity does good things when it "works."

It also means all of the energy and not just the momentum of a given photon is available to knock gas particles across space. That means radiation pressure on free-space objects should have worked 11 million squared times better than now in the first days and in proportion with c squared down the decay curve. Given the alleged decay of c just within historical times, we should perhaps see things relating to dust clouds happening faster in the 170,000 light-years distant Magellanic Clouds than in closer objects like this one. The slowed-frame effect which has been invoked repeatedly on this thread is still there but shouldn't cancel.

Astronomers should be arguing over the odd "speed-up" effect as you look back across time in the dissipation of dust and gas around stars. I am not aware of such a discussion. This would seem to be a failed prediction.

[VadeRetro]

Forgot to mention what Z is and it matters. Z is the atomic number of the material involved. Thus, the Compton effect is actually pretty important for low Z material like clouds of hydrogen in a first-generation star. Still, I'm going to stay rule-of-thumb crude and say for our non-first-generation Sun there's plenty of non-Compton absorption.

I'm not even going to ask why some stars appear first-generation and some stars appear second or third-generation in our universe if they were all made at the same time.

[Messianic Jews Net]

The Sun was never that big. Of course it wasn't, the opacity did not resolve into volume. What I said was, all things being equal, lower density resolves into opacity; but within VSL, not necessarily into volume. You seemed to acknowledge later the sun does not bloat like the caricature.

All the stars we ever see are at equilibrium under their current conditions. Of course, and as c gradually changes everything stays in equilibrium. The Stellar History link above suggests the excess energy is partly retained as internal radiation pressure, and partly dissipated by convection and other transfer into heat and kinetic energy.

Opacity makes more photons and redder, not fewer photons. I think you mean, increased opacity with VSL permits more and redder photons (because opacity doesn't "make" photons). Of course it does, my point was that opacity means fewer photons are getting out in balance with more being generated.

We are fusing atoms with a tiny fraction of the mass of modern ones but getting out photons with quite a large fraction of the modern energy. Of course, because the atoms fused have increased velocity and thus the same formation energy, so naturally produce photons with similar energy.

The existence of the datapoints is not in dispute. Of course, and the datapoints show that constant c (or h) is statistically rejected. You can pick your own curve.

[Messianic Jews Net]

We really do not observe free energy. Of course, between quantum jumps there is energy conservation. Since the reaction is going that much faster, there is that much more stellar energy, by ordinary means, not "free energy".

[Messianic Jews Net]

If you DO balance the books on energy, the emerging photons are infra-infra-infrared. What you mean is, if the sun produces the same amount of energy as now, the photons must have much greater wavelength, completely off the visible spectrum. Well, of course, but we've agreed instead that the sun is producing much more energy in the past than now, and the redshift is only minor and for other reasons.

[Messianic Jews Net]

The red portion I take as your acknowledgement that, just as understood in current stellar physics, increasing the opacity of the solar medium will cause the Sun to expand in volume. Of course, it can expand a little, but the 10^7 increase in energy is not all directed to volume expansion, it appears primarily directed into radiation pressure and heat convection to the outer stellar atmosphere.

[lasereye]

But I thought the whole creationist schtick was that no animals are related to one another.

That's the evolutionist characterization of creationism.

Natural Selection

[lasereye]

Genetic studies estimate that Homo sapiens arose about 200,000 years ago...

A testable prediction made by the Theory of Evolution.

Do predictions that contradict evolution theory count or only the ones that allegedly confirm it?

[Messianic Jews Net]

That in turn means that the "opacity" you get by adding a crazy number of "opaque" particles almost isn't opacity at all. The "opaque" particle absorbs the photon, re-emits a photon of almost the same wavelength as before and its own momentum is barely changed. Yes, there's a scattering effect but they're all still going to find their way out. This isn't doing its job.

This one I think an error. Opacity is not obtained by adding opaque particles, but by dissipating more photons by scattering and absorption (so opacity can be caused by lower density). You have described scattering correctly, but particles also absorb photons into their own kinetic energy without re-emitting them. Scattering changes photon trajectories including sending them back inward to cancel other photons; absorption converts them entirely into kinetic energy. Opacity is defined as the coefficient by which scattering and absorption reduce the photon output.

I think you're assuming that all photons "find their way out" as photons. No, they can turn into heat energy which is then convected outward and dissipated into local space; convection is an alternative mechanism to radiation. They can contribute to an increased internal equilibrial radiation pressure. And so on. The excess energy need not remain in the form of light.

The narrative by which you conclude the cancellations is correct in the broad outlines, but I believe the final cancellation is not "a strong gravitational field" but the massive particle's increased velocity, which increases its "resistance to acceleration" by the same degree as your cancellation.

I think this also answers your concerns about whether past radiation pressure process could be observed as different: they wouldn't be any different. If you think there would be an observable major change in radiation pressure please explain that a little better, thanks.