New Discovery in South Africa pushes back apparent "oldest human" remains

South African Archaeologists are attempting to reframe human development:
www.thetimes.co.za...

It does mention an ice age nearly 200,000 years ago as a possible event that helped to drive human development. The cultural evidence will probably be controversial, but it's interesting.

(edited to correct mistake... this IS apparently "homo sapiens" and not Australopithecus, as I'd assumed.)


[edit on 28-10-2008 by Byrd]

nice find!

this is a huge step forward in understanding how we became what we are...

flag/star

the oldest human remains are probably miles deep under the bed of an ocean. or perhaps off world altogether.

Exciting find! What I wouldn't give to see my ancient ancestors in their primitive setting. This is fascinating news, I bet they find quite a complex culture. I would be surprised if they didn't.

Nice find indeed. I have always been intrigued by the Fact that we found more traces of dinosaurs than primitive human. Dinosaurs are millions of years older than first humans, then why should we find more of their bones than primitive human?

reply to post by rattan1


They were around longer, there were a lot more of them, and they were much more spread out than we were. In the same light, we have more fossil evidence of mammals than we do of humans specifically.

Nice find. Worth investigating further. However that's a mighty long trek from the cape to the Middle East region, we would need to find the trail they left behind to add credence to the claim.

reply to post by Byrd


Great find and thank you for the link. This will help with the theory that civilization is far older than previously thought.
There is still a long way to go for the proof of that theory as needed.

Originally posted by rattan1
Nice find indeed. I have always been intrigued by the Fact that we found more traces of dinosaurs than primitive human. Dinosaurs are millions of years older than first humans, then why should we find more of their bones than primitive human?

Because dinosaurs were around for 230 million years (give or take.) Humans have only been around for 2 million years.

Depending on the timeframe, if dinosaurs had only been around for 2-4 million years, we'd either find almost nothing (if they lived 230 million years ago and then died by 297 million years ago) or lots of material (if they lived 6-4 million years ago.

Also, we've found hundreds of different species of dinosaurs (perhaps thousands... I'm not as up on my dinosaur lineages as I could be.) So we're not talking a single lineage of species but a wide variety of species.

More on Dr. Curtis Marean and his work at Mossel Bay. The date given is 164,000 years ago which pushes these ancient homo sapiens back into the time of the Neanderthal and Homo Habilis :
gustavus.edu...

An early (2007) article when they announced some of the earlier findings is here:
asunews.asu.edu...

Note that down at the bottom, the author writes that paleoanthropologists were already beginning to say that h. sapiens evolved between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago ("Middle Stone Age" as it's called in the article.) Humans apparently weren't attracted to coastlines and oceans since it's a lot harder to fish in the ocean than it is to run down a steak dinner.

More on this from the National Science Foundation website (which funded the research) -- excellent article, and easy to read with a lot of nice in-depth information.
www.nsf.gov...

Originally posted by kidflash2008
reply to post by Byrd

 

Great find and thank you for the link. This will help with the theory that civilization is far older than previously thought.
There is still a long way to go for the proof of that theory as needed.

Kidflash,

I assume you mean human cultures here and not "civilization."

The article says nothing at all about civilizations and no inference can be made about the rise of early civilizations based on the mere presence of the bones of human beings.

Harte

reply to post by Harte


I mean cultures with more advanced knowledge than we give credit for. I don't think there were I-Pods and materialistic junk back then. I guess I use civilizations because they did live in villages.

I have always wondered why we consider ourselves as civilized when we are just materialistic. Doesn't civilization also mean the arts and sciences? I think we are moving backwards in that regard. Just look at the college entrance exams!