What a find!

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070820/sc_nm/..._antiquities_dc

Could be the greatest discovery in Egypt!

Great, i really hope it is.
I wonder what the religous and creationists are gonna make of this. bible says 6000, footprint says 2 million. theeheehee.

Yes, this discovery should really "kick up some dust," to use a pun!

Not human as in Homo Sapiens. Not even Homo anything, it seems. So, they're being quite liberal with the use of the word "human."

Harte

Maybe not so: "Khaled Saad, the director of prehistory at the council, said that based on the age of the rock where the footprint was found, it could date back even further than the renowned 3-million year-old fossil Lucy, the partial skeleton of an ape-man, found in Ethiopia in 1974.
... Previously, the earliest human archaeological evidence from Egypt dated back around 200,000 years, Saad said."

And you know this how?

Are your familiar with anthropology? THis is how he probably knows.

Probably an early form of gracile autralopithecus, afarensis or africanus.

The author of the article makes no claim whatsoever that this is the footprint of H. Sapiens. Or H. anything else.

The dates for A. Robustus and A. Afarensis come later than the dates for this footprint.

The article would be blasted all over the news if any species of Homo were to be identified from the time period associated with this footprint.

Zahi Hawass would be sputtering, stuttering and stroking out if the footprint were from any species of Homo.

That's how.

Harte

i don't want to sound stupid in front of you science folks but how exactly can one tell how old bones or a footprint is?

radiometric dating, which dates radioactive material in the rocks and bone? please correct me if im wrong didnt have time to google lol

but scientist arn't even sure these methodes are 100% accurate do to the fact there are many things that can effect the outcome.

First that is a false statement created by creationists to decieve the public. Second there is a reason you take more than one sample and do many trials in a given dating method. You dont just say, lets take a piece and date that lone piece. You take MANY different samples.

actually i didn't hear that from creationist, i've read this from science books in my high school days, science web sites, and also telivition programs and what not.

How about a link then? That would be nice! Because, I would like to see this for myself.

Its true that no dating technique is 100% accurate, but 99.999999999% isnt bad....

And to make sure there is no mistake you just use more than one method and test them against each other, easy eh? And of course things will effect the outcome but with a bit of experience(or book of somone else's experience) you can take this into account and still get the right answer. The science is in the comparing the data to what is alrady known.

You'll never get the exact hour of the day the foot print was laid down, not even the right century, but you dont need to. When your discussing Deep Time where "a hundred thousand years"= " a blink of the eye" (which from the planets persepective, it is) getting to within a millenia or so is basically a bullseye!

of course the more recent an event/object is the easier it is to date, and to date it more accurately.

Edit: I always knew I took archaeology at uni for a reason!

Hello Harte
I believe homo habilis lived 2.4 - 1.6 million years ago - article states 'could be around 2 million years old", that would put a 'homo' into the time period, would it not?

QUOTE from article: "This could go back about two million years," said Zahi Hawass, the secretary general of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities. "It could be the most important discovery in Egypt," he told Reuters."

The author of the article via Reuters states they are waiting for test results to confirm anything about it so I would find it most unlikely any one would be jumping up and down about anything just yet....

They say it could be older than Lucy further down the article.

Even if you don't want to class homo habilis as such, homo erectus first appeared 1.9 million years ago. That's pretty close to 2 million years old too. Could be a homo erectus footprint, could it not?? If not, why not?

PS: It is blasted all over the internet, results are not known so we probably won't see it blasted all over the news just yet.

WAAS,
Quite correct, and thanks. I'd seen the article on Monday elsewhere, and only skimmed it. I was thinking of the speculation about the footprint dating to before Lucy, as was mentioned in the article further down, as you said.

Let us also not forget that fossil specimins of every extict hominid have certainly not been found. It could turn out that there was a species of Homo around even as early as 3 million years ago. Truth is, A. Afarensis could, sometime in the future, be reclassified as some species of Homo.

However, I was responding to the questioning about why I thought they were being rather liberal in their use of the word human, and when I said that the author does not claim the footprint was made by a species of Homo, I was correct.

Harte

Well if it's older than Lucy than it has to be strange, because before Lucy (Australopithecus) there weren't any humans what so ever, even Lucy is considered by some as an ape. Of course if it turns out older than Lucy.

Yeah I know you were referring to the second part which said maybe older than 3, but firstly 2 was put forward so I found it a bit hard on you to jump on the 3 mill. I thought you of all people would have taken that into consideration....You know what I mean and you know I'm a nit picker...lol......forgive me?

No more than I deserve, WAAS.

Harte