Originally posted by IvanZana
Besides, if there were advanced humans 30,000-20,000+ years ago, how would you be able to tell their advancement by their bones? Tools you say? In africa you have modern cities while hundreds of kilometers away you have peoples living like they did 5000 years ago.

If in 20,000 years from now we lost our history, lets hope they dont dig somewhere in brazil or africa or they would think that around 2000 a.d humans were still using spears and living in huts.

Not really. Our roads and cities make permanent changes in the landscape, as does agriculture and mining efforts. We get lots of information from garbage pits and houses (people lose things in the house and the house decays... we find tools and other things that survived when their human owners crumbled to dust.)

We find campsites of humans 30,000 years ago (and much longer ago.) We find living areas that are 100,000 years old (remains of fire, jewelry, tools, bone of animals they killed, etc.)

An advanced civilization doesn't just suddenly show up out of nowhere -- just as an adult human doesn't suddenly appear out of thin air complete with computer and cell phone. That human had a mother and a father and grandparents and so forth and had a long childhood although they may not remember it. Genetic testing can link them to several groups.

Same with civilizations. If there's an advanced one, it came from not-so-advanced ones.

That said, I wouldn't be surprised to find some stone age/early bronze age peoples with a sophisticated culture and the date of "civilization" pushed back even as far as 15,000 years. But I'd be darn surprised to find electronics and high tech manufactured ceramics of that time period.

To me, the terrible part of the original article is that there is nothing to indicate what constitutes "human". The Omo finds (at 195,000 years) bear no specific designation along the Homo line as far as I can tell, Homo sapiens idaltu (Herto finds) being the oldest HS designation at 160,000 years. If we're talking about the Homo line itself, then Homo habilis, at roughly 2.4 million years ago makes the 276,000 year timeframe almost irrelevant. Seems to me that an agreed upon definition of "human" needs to be set before making claims of pushing back the "human" timeline.

cormac

this is silly.

to me, humans are very old.

look at what we did in 200 years

I think maybe we've been wiped out almost totally many times through out our history (Atlantis)

I agree the problem here is the definition of Human. There were people living a hundreds of thousands of years ago not radically different from modern man. We tend to use the emergerge of Cro-magnon Man as a beginning place, but earlier men may have lacked knowledge of agriculture, shelter building, art, etc - but they were not necessarily less intelligent.


Mike F

Originally posted by Byrd

Originally posted by IvanZana
Besides, if there were advanced humans 30,000-20,000+ years ago, how would you be able to tell their advancement by their bones? Tools you say? In africa you have modern cities while hundreds of kilometers away you have peoples living like they did 5000 years ago.

If in 20,000 years from now we lost our history, lets hope they dont dig somewhere in brazil or africa or they would think that around 2000 a.d humans were still using spears and living in huts.

Not really. Our roads and cities make permanent changes in the landscape, as does agriculture and mining efforts. We get lots of information from garbage pits and houses (people lose things in the house and the house decays... we find tools and other things that survived when their human owners crumbled to dust.)

We find campsites of humans 30,000 years ago (and much longer ago.) We find living areas that are 100,000 years old (remains of fire, jewelry, tools, bone of animals they killed, etc.)

An advanced civilization doesn't just suddenly show up out of nowhere -- just as an adult human doesn't suddenly appear out of thin air complete with computer and cell phone. That human had a mother and a father and grandparents and so forth and had a long childhood although they may not remember it. Genetic testing can link them to several groups.

Same with civilizations. If there's an advanced one, it came from not-so-advanced ones.

That said, I wouldn't be surprised to find some stone age/early bronze age peoples with a sophisticated culture and the date of "civilization" pushed back even as far as 15,000 years. But I'd be darn surprised to find electronics and high tech manufactured ceramics of that time period.

Ok you're talking purely on the scale 100-900,000 thousand years. In that time frame they found things barely recognizable on. So what about millions of years? Alloys, metals, electronics even without it being maintained after 200,000 thousand years would struggle to be standing. Most of that stuff breaks down during our life times so why would it still be around after it's been abandoned for thousands of years. I can't see your point being valid at all. Look at the Baghdad battery after a thousand years or how ever old it is.



[edit on 16-12-2008 by Quiintus]