Stone-tipped spears predate existence of humans by 85,000 years

reply to post by SLAYER69


Seeing the timeline

buddha

and I would bet they! found a underground bunker
that had information on the technology.
in the last 200 years we have suddenly made
airplanes, cars TV's lasers and landed on the moon.
it was very slow until then.

last 200 years, is actually about industrial revolution and it was a start of technological progress. Next person had his information somewhere behind the moon?

Krazysh0t
Also keep in mind, there was also another significant change that happened to the world a little over 200 years ago. The birth of the United States. One of the first countries that promoted social mobility and self-rule. Without undue restrictions placed on the majority, they were free to do or develop whatever they wanted, not to mention gone was the stigma that you had to do what your father did. As other countries joined the craze, their populations were able to join in with the technological revolution.

You don´t see what is said before and why some are disagreeing..
***

Had to restart computer... to add a little
Personal Freedom isn´t new either it´s roots goes way back to ancient era and can´t see the point why it´s supposed to be american innovation either..

Some things just seems to get twisted..

SLAYER69
"Our species' Homo Sapiens?


I'm pretty sure there were other tool making 'Homos"

* Yeah, yeah, I know how that may come across but I'm being serious.

edit on 14-11-2013 by SLAYER69 because: (no reason given)

Yep. We tend to downplay our predecessors' brights, don't we?

Homo erectus was a tool user as well. In fact, a point of debate is trying to find the answer to "how did homo erectus get to Flores Island around a million years ago?". So a potentially seafaring homonid species other than our own, sailing the waters like a boss, about a million years ago...possibly. I also seem to recall that H. erectus may have built very simple shelters, too (sticks of wood tilted into each other). They also used fire and wore clothing.

Quibble on the boat thing but brings up other boat evidence such as Neanderthals (100 kya) and Australia (45-50 kya): www.newscientist.com...

reply to post by peter vlar


Not only that but time estimations for stone objects can only be made by strata (the level it was found) in relation to organic material dating. It is highly imprecise to start with...

WhiteAlice
So a potentially seafaring homonid species other than our own, sailing the waters like a boss, about a million years ago...possibly. I also seem to recall that H. erectus may have built very simple shelters, too (sticks of wood tilted into each other). They also used fire and wore clothing.

Quibble on the boat thing but brings up other boat evidence such as Neanderthals (100 kya) and Australia (45-50 kya): www.newscientist.com...

I don't know about a million years ago but there are changes in some long held beliefs.



Neanderthals May Have Sailed to Crete

From the paper.

At Kathu Pan, in South Africa, Middle Pleistocene hominins made hafted stone-tipped hunting spears ~500 thousand years ago (ka); these were, however, not projectiles but hand-delivered thrusting weapons

PLOS ONE

reply to post by alldaylong


I think what crazy meant, basically, is that the US had a great contribution to what made the world how it is. He may have been a bit off in dates of specifics but the general idea is accurate. The other person was questioning how we could as a species, in such a short period of time, gain such high levels of technology compared to were we were a few hundred years ago.

You cannot deny that America's contribution to the world's technological advancement has been great. The US quite literally revolutionized many industries, and was for a time during this great tech leap a world supplier of goods, services, and technology.

Time travel back to 1800, look around. Then time travel up to 1900, things are different, but not drastically so. Then travel forward to 2000, the differences are massive, truly monumental. The last 100 years has really given us biggest leap forward in technology, and a large part of that came from the US.

As I said, he may have had his dates off a bit, but the point holds true. The other poster wondered how we made such a huge leap in tech so quickly. You cannot deny the US played a huge part in that, in the last 100 years, which have been the most explosive in new advancement.

Panic2k11
reply to post by peter vlar

 

Not only that but time estimations for stone objects can only be made by strata (the level it was found) in relation to organic material dating. It is highly imprecise to start with...

Actually, stratigraphy alone is never used for geochronology and is usually used in conjunction with radio metric dating(not to be confused with radiocarbon or C-14 dating) as well as the utilization of thermoluminescence which can be used to get a fairly accurate date. It's not 100% perfect by any means which is why a margin of error is always included with potential dates of artifacts but it does give a pretty good window of understanding.

edmc^2
Here's a simple question:

If I dug up a rock and made a spear tip out of it then someone (gullible) found it and dated it to be 85,000 years old, does this mean that I'm 85,000 year old homo sapien?

just askin - what say you?

If you then let it sit in the ground for 85,000 years, yes.

When you chip away the surface of a rock, that fresh new surface begins weathering, and the amount of "wear' on a surface can give a rough idea of age. Obviously this isn't going to be very precise because of all the obvious issues with this technique.

They can also date it based on the level in the ground it was found at, and then carbon dating nearby organic matter, or by predetermined age of the level it was at.

Both are prone to several issues as you could imagine, which is why these dates are really just nothing more than slightly educated guesses. Which means using dates to disprove current ideas is difficult, as those dates aren't concrete proof of anything, but it also means the foundations that the current ideas are based on the same shaky evidence, but they have more time and people behind them.

peter vlar

Panic2k11
reply to post by peter vlar

 

Not only that but time estimations for stone objects can only be made by strata (the level it was found) in relation to organic material dating. It is highly imprecise to start with...

Actually, stratigraphy alone is never used for geochronology and is usually used in conjunction with radio metric dating(not to be confused with radiocarbon or C-14 dating) as well as the utilization of thermoluminescence which can be used to get a fairly accurate date. It's not 100% perfect by any means which is why a margin of error is always included with potential dates of artifacts but it does give a pretty good window of understanding.

But, as I understand it, Radiometric dating can only tell the absolute age of rocks and what not. The age of the rock really isn't important in this circumstance, unless someone is implying the spear head was formed immediately after the rock was formed.

As another poster mentioned, if you use ancient rock to make a spear tip, that doesn't mean the spear tip is ancient.

Am I wrong in assuming only the absolute age of the rock can be determined with Radiometric dating?

reply to post by James1982


I'd say that's a fairly accurate assessment, which is why I included thermoluminescence. With TL dating you can narrow down the time frame considerably. It does, as with most dating methods, have some limitations. It's most effective in dating ceramics or pottery because it gives you an age based on when the item had been fired or in a fire of 500 deg or higher. How this helps with points is that every so often you get some fool of a hominid, perhaps a drunk one or maybe he was just careless but I digress, if a point is dropped or kicked or somehow knocked into a fire we can then date it based on the decay rate since the object was fired. This is why multiple methods are used. It's just good due diligence to cover as many bases as possible and with the ever increasing techniques becoming available we should be able to further narrow the margin of error we currently have.

this gives a better depiction of TL and other Luminescent dating techniques than Im capable of with kids crawling over me at the moment- archaeology.about.com...

this one gives examples of a few other somewhat exotic dating methods as well as their limitations and what they're good for- archaeology.about.com...

reply to post by buddha


Humans ancestors does that mean homo habilis or home erectus, anything from over five hundred thousand for neanderthal (whom were tool users and shaped stone) to near 4 million plus for other supposed branches.
Ardi is supposed over 4.4 million years old news.nationalgeographic.co.uk...
But I tend to think it was probable an ape as I do not ascribe to the ape ancesty theory but believe the human race to far older, still stone tools are not inconcievable for an early primate ancestor if I put my own bias out of the way.

SLAYER69

WhiteAlice
So a potentially seafaring homonid species other than our own, sailing the waters like a boss, about a million years ago...possibly. I also seem to recall that H. erectus may have built very simple shelters, too (sticks of wood tilted into each other). They also used fire and wore clothing.

Quibble on the boat thing but brings up other boat evidence such as Neanderthals (100 kya) and Australia (45-50 kya): www.newscientist.com...

I don't know about a million years ago but there are changes in some long held beliefs.

Neanderthals May Have Sailed to Crete

Hominems reached Flores about a million years ago and that's actually a really pretty neat trick as the island has never been connected to the continent. There's always been open sea between the two.

mygeologypage.ucdavis.edu...

They had toolmaking for over a million years:
www.public.wsu.edu...

And yes, they created shelters. Sticks at between 900k to 100 mya but possibly stone nuts by around 400 kya.
blog.chron.com...

reply to post by peter vlar


I'm not an expert but my understanding is that radiometric dating is extremely imprecise (increasing with age) requires not only the presence of radioactives but is build on a very shaky understanding, almost based on statistic guess work, around their decay and what influences it. I never seen it be used alone (without any other strong clue) to establish dates (it is mostly used as a verification) the use of Luminescence is even more imprecise...

WhiteAlice

SLAYER69

WhiteAlice
So a potentially seafaring homonid species other than our own, sailing the waters like a boss, about a million years ago...possibly. I also seem to recall that H. erectus may have built very simple shelters, too (sticks of wood tilted into each other). They also used fire and wore clothing.

Quibble on the boat thing but brings up other boat evidence such as Neanderthals (100 kya) and Australia (45-50 kya): www.newscientist.com...

I don't know about a million years ago but there are changes in some long held beliefs.

Neanderthals May Have Sailed to Crete

Hominems reached Flores about a million years ago and that's actually a really pretty neat trick as the island has never been connected to the continent. There's always been open sea between the two.

mygeologypage.ucdavis.edu...

They had toolmaking for over a million years:
www.public.wsu.edu...

And yes, they created shelters. Sticks at between 900k to 100 mya but possibly stone nuts by around 400 kya.
blog.chron.com...

Yes there is evidence they may have reached many places that were never connected to land and that asks the question that though we have no archeology to back it up could there have been familys of neanderthal that at a time when there food supply was ample were able to develop socially and culturally with the attendent technologys (boat, shelters etc) only for that to be lost when climate change almost starved there species to extinction as remember they had to eat more protine than us and had higher calorphic dietry requirements as evidence by there massively greater relative muscular strength but some of there craniums show very large brains.
This dietry requirement means that they probably spent most of the day hunting and not thinking.

reply to post by LABTECH767


Well, the way that I see it is (and my former employer actually snitched this from me) is that history is really like a puzzle. Overtime, you're bound to lose a number of pieces due to time, itself. The further back in time we go, the harder it is to develop an accurate picture. Because archaeology requires evidence as a scientific field, it makes a bit of sense that we're probably going to dumb down those predecessors due to lack of evidence. The problem becomes, however, when there is suggestive evidence and it is ignored or the possibility is entirely dismissed.

I once got into a pretty heated debate with a well-known archaeologist on the possibility of sea faring in paleolithic times years ago. I suggested that it was possible if we compensated for probable growth in the ice sheet in the Northern hemisphere during the last Ice Age, which would've provided stopping point, fresh water and food (sea/ice creatures). In the end, he did admit that I offered a good solution but until there was evidence found of sea faring, there was no way to prove it. So an archaeologist can see that something could be possible but they are still bound by evidence.

reply to post by Panic2k11


As with many things, there are so many variables involved that it isn't as simple as a straight yes or no. The type of material you are dating, the stratigraphy, you have to account for contaminants and so on, can all affect your potential dates. Depending on geochronology, which is just a fancy way of saying you compared the stratigraphy with radiometric dating to get yourself a baseline. then you bust out the big guns like TL. Depending on the material you are dating as well as your baseline(of course with prerequisite margin of error) there are various techniques to choose from. If you know you have organic material that's under 40,000 YA obviously your go to is going to be C-14. If you're trying to date something with iron in it, you can utilize paleomagnetics because of the regularity and predictability of magnetic pole movement essentially frozen into the iron. The short answer though is that no, there is no 100% certifiable method of guaranteeing an accurate date. I often get crap for this because I try to be as honest as possible when dealing with things like this but it is the truth when discussing things of this age and that is "This is the best answer we currently have based on the most current methodologies". But I think that when you're dating 2.5 billion yr old rocks and your margin of error is only 2 million years you're doing OK. Likewise with younger or more recent dates. there will be a margin of error but when using multiple sources you narrow that margin down considerably in my humble opinion.

LABTECH767

This dietry requirement means that they probably spent most of the day hunting and not thinking.

edit on 14-11-2013 by LABTECH767 because: (no reason given)

I would say you're spot on up to the last sentence that I quoted above. While they definitely needed a huge amount of calories, especially the further north they were, there is considerable evidence that they did not spend all of their time hunting or foraging. We are talking about some of the first real evidence of culture in humans. Neanderthal created art, made jewelry, likely believed in an afterlife, buried their dead with accoutrements, they cared for the injured as seen by remains of Neanderthal specimens with broken legs that were never set and healed so poorly the person likely never walked on his own and definitely could not have survived on their own as well as amputees. Neanderthals practiced medicine, including trepanation(drilling into the skull) and appeared to have knowledge of medicinal plants. These people were doing just as well as any current "indigenous" tribes that have little contact with the modern world such as we have seen in the Amazon. Hell, there's even evidence of them sharing the same villages with anatomically modern humans for roughly 50,000 years in Israel and Lebanon. I firmly believe that both of these people lived and worked side by side and well the evidence is speculative right now, I am of the opinion that a human would not be buried in the same cemetery let alone next to a Neanderthal had they not been part of a close knit social structure and regarded each other as comrades and family. Sorry for the tangent, I'm a big fan of the Neanderthals and what they accomplished.

reply to post by peter vlar


Spot on, and of course we may be also descended from them so the term extinct were they are concerned may actually not really apply.
As for religion some buriels show traces of red ochre on the bones which may indicate a use of the pigment as a funerary right on the bodys as well as you point out some with funerary goods and also in foetal positions when buried.
What little we know also shows that from there earliest interaction with cromagnon they copyed the cromagnon and may have traded with them as well but the clincher is as you point our israel, I wonder if that was an equal partnership though or if the neanderthal were slaves.

SLAYER69 :

'One of the first countries that promoted social mobility and self-rule Now, how are you getting "causing and making change" out of that? I think your own possibly bias stance is getting the better of you

dollukka

SLAYER69

'One of the first countries that promoted social mobility and self-rule

Now, how are you getting "causing and making change" out of that?

I think your own possibly bias stance is getting the better of you

That isn´t truth either. first railway is old invention it´s has roots to egypt then to germany and in England they made first railways and even public railways before United States.
And birth of automobile needed steam engines ( firstly invented in England ) and first car was made in German by Benz. What American´s did they started to make cars like Ford T in assembly line.

Different form of mobility ......

'Social mobility' refers to the movement of people within the social hierarchy of society.

reply to post by buddha


Human's have been around for nearly 1 Million years. Science will continue to find evidence to support this in the coming years. I believe they will also find that humans did not originate in Africa.