Rise Of Man Theory 'Out By 400,000 Years'

Times Online ^ | 6-25-2007 | Dalya Alberge

[blam]

Rise of man theory ‘out by 400,000 years’

Dalya Alberge, Arts Correspondent
June 25, 2007

Our earliest ancestors gave up hunter-gathering and took to a settled life up to 400,000 years earlier than previously thought, according to controversial research.

The accepted timescale of Man’s evolution is being challenged by a German archaeologist who claims to have found evidence that Homo erectus — mankind’s early ancestor, who migrated from Africa to Asia and Europe — began living in settled communities long before the accepted time of 10,000 years ago.

The point at which settlement actually took place is the first critical stage in humanity’s cultural development.

Helmut Ziegert, of the Institute of Archaeology at Hamburg University, says that the evidence can be found at excavated sites in North and East Africa, in the remains of stone huts and tools created by upright man for fishing and butchery.

Professor Ziegert claims that the thousands of blades, scrapers, hand axes and other tools found at sites such as Budrinna, on the shore of the extinct Lake Fezzan in southwest Libya, and at Melka Konture, along the River Awash in Ethiopia, provide evidence of organised societies.

He believes that such sites show small communities of 40 or 50 people, with abundant water resources to exploit for constant harvests.

The implications for our knowledge of human evolution — and of our intellectual and social beginnings — are “profound” and a “staggering shift”, he said.

Professor Ziegert used potassium argon isotopic dating, stratigraphy and tool typology to compile his evidence. He will publish his findings this month in Minerva, the archaeology journal.

The news divided scholarly opinion yesterday.

Sean Kingsley, an archaeologist and the managing editor of Minerva, said: “This research is nothing less than a quantum leap in our understanding of Man’s intellectual and social history. For archaeology it’s as radical as finding life on Mars.

“As a veteran of over 81 archaeological surveys and excavations . . . Ziegert is nothing if not scientifically cautious, which makes the current revelation all the more exciting.”

But others were far from convinced. Paul Pettitt, senior lecturer in palaeolithic archaeology at the University of Sheffield, said: “Are they truly the remains of huts and not a natural phenomenon? Do they really date 400,000 years or are they much more recent? The site formation, age and implications are all questionable.”

He said that Homo erectus was a highly mobile hunter, that human remains can accumulate for a number of reasons and that the evidence to be published by Minerva does not indicate a year-round settlement.

Further scepticism was voiced by Paul Bahn, an archaeologist who specialises in the palaeolithic period. Although he believes that Homo erectus was quite advanced and capable of building durable structures, occasionally coming together in large groups, he remains to be convinced about settlements.

He said: “Homo erectus could have been there for a few days. He wouldn’t have carried the tools around. Inevitably, they accumulate. If hunter-gatherers found no cave or rock shelter, it makes sense that they might have built a shelter for a few days or seasonally. Just the fact that they’re made out of stone doesn’t mean they were permanent settlements.

Nick Barton, a lecturer in palaeolithic archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology at the University of Oxford, said: “No unequivocal dating evidence is presented except that based on the typology of the artefacts. It is entirely possible that the site represents a palimpsest of material spanning the palaeolithic to the neolithic.”

Homo erectus — a species that has been recognised since the late 19th century — lived from about 1.6 million to 200,000 years ago, ranging widely from Africa and Asia to parts of Europe. Most of the anatomical differences between Homo erectus and Homo sapiens relate to the skull and teeth, with the former having a jutting browridge, a wide nose and large teeth.

Professor Ziegert said: “The first archaeological revolution in fact was not triggered by anatomically ‘modern humans’ in the neolithic, or indeed in the technological and cultural revolution associated with the upper palaeolithic, but by Homo erectus, upright Man, an altogether different ancestral species making waves at the dawn of humanity.”

After decades of fieldwork, Professor Ziegert is convinced that future discoveries will uphold his conclusions. Under his direction, the University of Hamburg has scheduled a further programme of excavations at Budrinna and Melka Konture over the next four years.

1891

— The year in which evidence of Homo erectus was first discovered, in central Java, Indonesia

[SunkenCiv]

The Neandertal Enigma
by James Shreeve
in local libraries

"Frayer's own reading of the record reveals a number of overlooked traits that clearly and specifically link the Neandertals to the Cro-Magnons. One such trait is the shape of the opening of the nerve canal in the lower jaw, a spot where dentists often give a pain-blocking injection. In many Neandertal, the upper portion of the opening is covered by a broad bony ridge, a curious feature also carried by a significant number of Cro-Magnons. But none of the alleged 'ancestors of us all' fossils from Africa have it, and it is extremely rare in modern people outside Europe." [pp 126-127]

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[gleeaikin]

It makes sense that man could have lived in small settlements where there was a constant food source like supplied by the sea or a large lake. As to why development did not go faster, we have to consider the periodic ice ages that occurred around every 100,000 years. We know that Long Valley and Yellowstone blew up around 700 and 600 thousand years ago, what about other more recent world wide catastrophes. Toba blew about 74,000 years ago and scientists now feel the subsequent 6 or so year long nuclear winter seriously reduced the world hominid population. If we go back into another ice age will we end up with nuclear warfare fighting over the reduced area of useable, growable land? What will our “civilization” look like then? The “Dark Ages?”

[gleeaikin]

Aside from the settled life, I think you need a certain size of population and interaction of towns. You are far less likely to find the genius who invents writing in a community of 40 or 50 people, perhaps 20 adults, than in communities with 10,000 or more. Also, where everyone knows everyone else, you just talk to each other. If you have large villages and towns engaged in commerce with neighbors, then you need to be able to record facts about transactions. Actually, it seems that early writings were primarily about numbers of different kinds of cattle and other commodities.
Regarding the disappearance of languages and people in the early middle east, did the formation of a one or two mile wide impact crater in the Iraq marshes around 4,000 years ago have anything to do with that???

[no-to-illegals]

Valid questions. Civilization was slow (imho) because of low life spans. Live spans were low because of lack of proper diet and medicines. Trade increased diets with choices available and eventually life spans increased and then medicines to increase life spans. Any worldwide catastrophe returns mankind to the Dark Ages. Never is mankind safe. A university Professor was listening to summed it up best (imho) when the Professor lectured on life and how fragile life is .... His final three words of the lecture were, “Good Luck, Everyone!” Don’t know about the other people in the class but the Professor’s lecture scared the ‘heck out of me’. Lecture was a long time before the global warming scam. At that point was listening to Professor the world was beginning to think the New Ice Age was beginning. Cycle come and go. How often those cycles come and go is one for debate though none of has/have any idea. Basically our minds are useless in knowing the history of our planet except for knowing once there were dinosaurs and dark ages.

[SunkenCiv]

There have been periods of massive glaciation, but there have never been periodic ice ages, they’ve happened rapidly, and at random intervals. And there was no ‘population bottleneck’ at Toba — there’s no genetic evidence for it, any more than there’s genetic evidence for out-of-Africa. And the archaeological evidence is to the contrary.

Toba super-volcano catastrophe idea ‘dismissed’
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3015183/posts

Modern Humans in India Earlier Than Previously Thought?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3067171/posts
‘Pompeii-Like’ Excavations Tell Us More About Toba Super-Eruption
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2464512/posts

[no-to-illegals]

nuclear warfare fighting

many think and this is only a theory that our planet has experienced nuclear warfare in our past. I do not know. Many of the reasons do sound possible to an occurrence having occurred but then there is also the radiation of space ... thus a past nuclear war on planet Earth becomes another 'unknown'. Someone once made the comment .... Maybe we destroying ourselves is God's Way of telling us to get it right this time or you shall repeat the process until I, God, decide to interrupt. Only person alive that knows though is God. (imho) ...

[Sawdring]

I keep a close eye on these archaeological and anthropological threads and I can't say I have heard what the modern theory is on how life started on this planet. Sure, primordial soup, comets, we are just star dust, etc.

The questions I have are:

Did life start with one set of accidental molecules coming together in an area and then dividing into different organisms so every bit of life on Earth comes from a single point or did it develop independently during different epochs?

Is life still being created here on Earth in its most fundamental form?

Maybe I will have to stick to the belief that life was seeded by a vast corporate power like in Jupiter Ascending a 100,000 years ago.

[BroJoeK]

Mechanicos: "Seems DNA evidence of 4 male ancestors, population growth size, etc. put current man at a bottleneck about 4K years ago - the same estimates for the flood."

Here is a short timeline of events from 3,000 BC to 2,000 BC.

Here is a short timeline of events from 2,000 BC to 1,000 BC.

You will note, there was no "interruption" or population "bottleneck" around 2,000 BC.
In fact, there is no scientific evidence at all -- none -- for a world-wide flood or population bottleneck, in 2,000 BC or any other time.

[SunkenCiv]

[Little Bill]

I think that this has evolved in to a wilderness of mirrors. The PHD’s have constructed a scenario that fits a construct that makes no sense on close examination.

Lucy could have wandered into the Afar Triangle as well as wandered out, same goes for a lot of human diffusion.

Why do no White people live South of the, historically, Atlas Mountains or the Third Cataract of the Nile? Why did they live on the China Boarder?

I have looked at this for Sixty years and am lost.

[bert]

: )

[discostu]

Subsistence level societies don’t have much time to develop “extras” like technology and civilization. Look at modern semi-stone age societies. When life is a constant hunt for food and shelter, when any change in the weather could result in death of the whole group, the guy who wants to sit down and design a system of laws, or fiddle with these 2 sticks until they make something cool is going to be an outcast. It’s a really slow trudge up until the point people have time to kill, then the rubber band starts moving.

[SunkenCiv]

Settled lives meant population increases, and increased family sizes, which led to a narrowing of the local genomes, and they have relatively more living descendants. Prosperity is how “bottlenecks” happen, rather than the reverse; and settled lives means agriculture. The earliest traces of post-hole structures are about 800,000 years old, while the earliest RC dated traces of agriculture known so far go back 14,000 years. Geometry grew out of keeping track of property lines, and recordkeeping for the same reason; simple numbering of things and names led to a literate class. Having large, well-fed, settled agricultural populations led to a need for common defense, standing armies, city-states, city walls, cults, the works. :’)

[SunkenCiv]

Looking for the origin of humans in Africa is like looking for a lost article outside the restaurant where it was lost because the light’s better.

:’)

https://www.youtube.com/results?q=hendrix+room+full+of+mirrors&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=w1

[BroJoeK]

Sawdring: "Did life start with one set of accidental molecules coming together in an area and then dividing into different organisms so every bit of life on Earth comes from a single point or did it develop independently during different epochs?"

Science has no confirmed answers to such questions, only a rather lengthy list of possible hypotheses.
But a lot of work has been done, and today's best thinking about abiogenesis (living organisms growing from nonliving matter),
begins with natural organic molecules which can self-replicate.
Self-replication with "mistakes" is, by definition, the beginning of evolution even though neither "parent" nor "child" molecules can in any way be classified as "alive".

Mistakes in replication means some offspring will be better adapted to survive & reproduce than others, and so the process continues, slowly, slowly "complexifying" over billions of years, eventually resulting in organisms we classify as certainly alive.

Sawdring: "Is life still being created here on Earth in its most fundamental form?"

Self-replicating organic molecules still exist in nature, but they are not "alive" and most likely make a tasty lunch for living critters such as bacteria, etc.
So there is little opportunity for them to "complexify" significantly.

Sawdring: "Maybe I will have to stick to the belief that life was seeded by a vast corporate power like in Jupiter Ascending a 100,000 years ago."

You are, of course, entitled to "believe" whatsoever you wish, so long as you don't call such beliefs "science".

[Sawdring]

I might be a little young to appreciate that old dance number! ;)

[Sawdring]

Thanks for the information BroJoeK!

[Little Bill]

I had to do a Science Project in my Catholic (Hard Core) Prep School. Being of a Calvinist Nature I did one on Leakey's work in the Olduvai Gorge, not well received.

Looking back, what did Leakey really discover? What he claimed gave me pause about what he really found, same with Johnson, did it start there or did it wander there?

I liked Zappa better as an ax man.

[Mechanicos]

1. The Human Genome Project was declared complete in April 2003. One of its findings was that all humans have virtually identical DNA. They suggested that this is due to a population bottleneck in our past, where our numbers dwindled so low that we teetered on the brink of extinction.

2. Y chromosomes are indeed similar worldwide. No divergent Y lineages have been found. Therefore, evolutionists acknowledge a paternal common ancestor, calling him Y-chromosomal Adam.

3. There are indeed three main mtDNA lineages found worldwide today. Evolutionists have labeled these lines “M”, “N”, and “R”. In a court of law, this would be considered inculpatory evidence.

4. There is little difference between these three mtDNA lineages, so they must have originated in a single female, who lived not long before the bottleneck. (Evolutionists call her Mitochondrial Eve).

5. Since humans have virtually identical DNA, the genetic diversity is consistent with thousands of years, not millions of years.

...

“Large-scale surveys of human genetic variation have reported signatures of recent explosive population growth, notable for an excess of rare genetic variants, suggesting that many mutations arose recently” “We estimate that approximately 73% of all protein-coding SNVs and approximately 86% of SNVs predicted to be deleterious arose in the past 5,000–10,000 years”

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v493/n7431/full/nature11690.html

[Mechanicos]

All humans today have virtually identical DNA, indicating a recent population bottleneck. New (Jan 2013) genetic analysis found “recent explosive population growth”, “suggesting that many mutations arose recently”, which “arose in the past 5,000 to 10,000 years”. This logically dates the bottleneck to within the Biblical timeframe, rather than the evolutionary 70k+ years timeframe, otherwise there would have been virtually no mutations for at least 60,000 years, then suddenly almost all mutations. Illogical plus it's contrary to the Molecular Clock idea.

The Y chromosomes in all humans worldwide are very similar, indicating a recent sole male ancestor – matching Noah, and before him, Biblical Adam.

There are three mtDNA lineages, perfectly matching the Bible's record of the three wives on the Ark who repopulated the Earth.

These three mtDNA lineages are very similar, indicating they diverged from a single female ancestor who lived one to two thousand years before the Flood – matching Biblical Eve. Eve's mtDNA would have diverged down through Eve's descendents for roughly 1,500 years (~75 generations), then at the Flood only three lineages were taken onto the Ark.

The life spans of Noah's descendants decrease exponentially – on a graph, it's a biological decay curve. This is expected if creation is true.

Humans have a high mutation rate, passing down over 100 mutations per generation. This is consistent with a human history of thousands, not millions, of years.

If we descended from apes millions of years ago, our DNA would have diverged considerably (1 million years = ~50,000 generations). Since all humans today have virtually identical DNA, evolutionists had to come up with an explanation for this, so a population bottleneck was proposed (actually two, for males and females) where only ONE female's lineage AND ONE male's lineage survived to today, while thousands of other males and females, living at the same time, lineages died out. One lineage dying out is very improbable; BOTH dying out - in an expanding, post-bottleneck population no less - is ridiculously improbable.

http://www.astirinch.com/creation/dna-proof-of-noahs-flood/