World's oldest stone tools predate humans

www.foxnews.com... 384

Now i wonder if maybe other humans have existed before, whole civilisation maybe..another ancient facebook, internet, pc, everything...apparently it only takes 400 years for plastics to degrade completely and about 2000 years for metals IIRC...millions of years would erase all the concrete ever poured visible today.

a reply to: Choice777

Lets not get carried away with past computers. They just found old stone tools that predate our known ancestors. It just means that our ancestry goes a bit far back than we thought.

Its always a possibility and by all the unexplained underground citys and pipes found in areas that they should no be makes it even more possible

Past computers or past 1000 of miles of highway and thousands of ferarris ...they would all be eroded away in 2-3 million years..by ...umm.. by wind.. yeah that's it.

a reply to: Choice777

Perhaps this is the crux-the critical point in development where our ancestors first developed tools-and it might have taken ingenuity and had nothing to do with evolution.

Imagine an alpha male trying to carve stone tools while the young watch. The alpha might not have success, but the young might and attempts it himself when he is older as the young watch as they once did. Eventually over the generations there had to be a eureka moment and maybe this is it.

The more i see story's like this
the more convinced i am getting that our history reaches back
a lot further than we either know or are told depending on your view
it may even be that we are a result of an earlier version of man
being almost wiped out by some catastrophic event we developed
in the aftermath to fill the gap perhaps the annunaki of the Sumerian story's
or the people of what we know as Atlantis were not "gods" but survivors
of the event trying to start over.

a reply to: Choice777

What if it's from another intelligent species that isn't human?

As long as they come back to give us warp drive and antigravity, i'll forgive them for abandoning this pos rock.

a reply to: Choice777

They predate humans but were used by hominids, and they were not advanced tools, just sharp rocks. Don't forget that Bonobos have been observed using flints to cut through ropes and membranes. It was believed that Homos were the first to use stones to cut through meat, but this proves that cognition was already changing 3.3 million years ago.
Amazing!
S&F OP!

a reply to: Choice777
Calm down there ... they found sharpened rocks, not Facebook. And they found them pretty much where they expected them to be, just a little bit earlier in the evolutionary timeline than the previous set of sharpened rocks. This discovery confirms the broad strokes of human evolution, so it's additional evidence against the idea that "humans" were posting on Facebook millions of years ago.

a reply to: Choice777

This world is littered with evidence not of this world.

You know I think paleontology, archeology, and geology are awesome. Digging up history is pretty amazing.

Yet it always perplexes me how they put these momentus ages on the things they find.

Carbon dating is good for 50k years at most before its deemed unreliable.

Relative dating of sediments is only good for referencing the rate of change between one formation and another. Even this can be flawed by unusual geological activity such as a great flood or a great drought, a metor impact, an ice age or perhaps ancestrial influence.

Honestly how do you tell the difference between something thats 2.2 million years old and 3.3? Haha the jokes on you, because you cant. (Not to say we wont discover a means later)

Just that we have to take these dates with a grain of salt. Especially when they don't go into the specifics of how the items were dated in the article.

i'll forgive them for abandoning this pos rock.

Wait a moment, this "rock" has nothing to do with it. She was beautiful before we got here. We made the stink that we sleep with.

originally posted by: randyvs


This world is littered with evidence not of this world.

Well, these are not, they are just bones and rocks.... just rocks, how are they out of this world?

a reply to: Choice777

Our genus (homo sapiens sapiens) has existed for roughly 200,000 years. Before us, there were other hominids. Hell, even while we were around there were different hominids (i.e. homo neanderthalensis). There is nothing to "wonder" about, it's pretty well documented that our ancestors, dating back millions of years to the australopithecines, used primitive stone tools.

a reply to: DestroyDestroyDestroy

Apparently Sahelanthropus tchadensis is an extinct hominine species that is dated to about 7 million years ago...it looks kinda like a mix between man and ape.
So around 3.6 mil years it would have been possible for some variant of them to use stone tools ?
Australopithecine is at about 2.8 mil years.

originally posted by: Choice777
www.foxnews.com... 384

Now i wonder if maybe other humans have existed before, whole civilisation maybe..another ancient facebook, internet, pc, everything...apparently it only takes 400 years for plastics to degrade completely and about 2000 years for metals IIRC...millions of years would erase all the concrete ever poured visible today.

It doesn't take much great intelligence to figure out how to make a basic blade. Even chimpanzees have been known to make spears and stone tools.
It's just more evidence that it took a really, really long time for skills like this to be passed down through generations and aiding our survival and building a evolutionary path towards imagination and intelligence. Interesting find indeed, but it's no evidence of an ancient advanced civilization with sky scrapers, plumbing and computers.

Well what i'm saying is that based on the graph below, is that there might be enough undocumented space in between the Hadean and Archean period.
As stated in the second link, only between 5 and 40% of current planetary surfaces date to the Archean. So the Hadean was hot and with bombardment, but towards it's end it stops and it cols at 4.2 ga.. Already we have when the Archean begins the temperature and stable conditions for life.
It says on the 2rd link that life begins to appear around 3.5 bill years. So thats the oldest prokaryotes and no multicell life, BUT thats only what has been found because only 5-40% of land remains. Let's take a round 25% remaining land from Archean...we have a period of 1.5 billion years when the plates have been moving and 75% recycled aka gone, turned into magma and new land formed.
Given that the graph shows about 1.5 billion between prokaryotes and animals...There is the space in the time frame from end of Hadean( almost no remaining land mass) to limit of Archean/proterozoic of about 3.8-2.5 bil or ''ga'' as per graph. 1.5 billion years where the bombardment ended, surface cooled, and we don't have access to most of the surface.
1.5 billion years to go from single cell to multi cell and another 200 years to space faring species.

https ://en. wikipedia. org/wiki /Geological_history_of_Earth#/ media/File: Geologic_Clock_with_events_and_periods . svg

en.wikipedia.org...

It's been postulated that dinosaurs might have evolved into an intelligent species long before our ancestors made their appearance.

I believe that this did in f act occur. Stone tools would naturally be a first step in becoming a self aware, reasoning individual.

As Choice777 points out, remnants of our civilization could disappear in as little as several thousand years. This by extension would be true of other species achievements.

The very fact that they could have a head start of several million years of development could pave the way for their leaving the planet for the stars. Taking account of our planetary tectonics it is not outside the realm of reason that the record of their achievements have been wiped clean and the world started afresh.

My two cents on the subject.

I know many will shoot this theory down but it really must be considered.

originally posted by: Cynic
It's been postulated that dinosaurs might have evolved into an intelligent species long before our ancestors made their appearance.

By whom?