Interesting article -

Rethinking our ancient roots
By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY

Modern humans aren't so modern after all, report scientists who have dated two skulls to about 195,000 years ago.

Found near Ethiopia's Omo River in 1967 but not accurately dated until now, the "Omo I" and "Omo II" skulls are the oldest anatomically modern human fossils yet found.

They push back the date thought to mark the origins of the modern Homo sapiens species by at least 35,000 years, according the report in today's Nature journal.

"Modern humans now go way, way back," says John Fleagle of Stony Brook (N.Y.) University, a study co-author.

Most paleontologists believe people first evolved in Africa and moved from there into other continents within the past 90,000 years, the "Out of Africa" model of human development.

The age of the Ethiopian skulls indicates that they hearken back to what genetic studies indicate was the starting point — about 200,000 years ago — of modern humanity.

The skulls were found by a team led by renowned human-origins researcher Louis Leakey. Using a less reliable dating method, their age was tentatively put at 130,000 years, a figure largely discounted by researchers at the time.

Fleagle and his colleagues traveled to the discovery site in southern Ethiopia. Using modern techniques that estimate ages from the natural radioactive decay of the gaseous element argon, the team dated samples from the rock strata that bore the skulls.

The results show that the skulls' owners lived about 195,000 years ago, give or take 2,000 years. Although the two skulls look different — one is less rounded and stouter, associated with "archaic" human species like Neanderthals — they were contemporaries living in a wet, forested region.

"I think they've nailed the dates," says anthropologist Rick Potts, who heads the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History. The two skulls' differences point to when modern-looking people first split from their older ancestors, he suggests.

Further, "the difference suggests the transition (to modern-looking humans) must not have been a neat and clean one," but a more disorderly emergence of modern features, says anthropologist Alison Brown of George Washington (D.C.) University. A shift to complex tools also appears in African dig sites from about 200,000 years ago, she notes.

Compared with Europe, East Africa has only begun to yield its secrets to paleontologists, Brown adds. "And it's likely we'll be seeing a great many more surprises from there."

Cool...that means we were living side-by-side with both Cro-magnons and Neanderthals

Not to mention opening up all kinds of possibilities as far as lost cities go...

I love it! I read the AP release of the article.

We ARE Cro-Magnons, BTW.

According to Sitchin, he placed the creation of Adam at 300,000 BC, or so.
According to the Bible, using the Code, Adam was created about 267,000 BC.

sitchin is a fake historician his findings are based on mistranslations.

the whole adam and eve scenario is ridicilous

Really? Do you suppose he can spell "historian?" He capitalized all proper names in his book. And he used proper punctuation too. Is that what upsets you about him?

And on what credible findings do you base your slanderous opinion?

The Biblical version IS ridiculous and was written that way so we would search to find out what really did happen. Which I told you in my post.

this coming from someone who thinks we are cro magnont

his might surprise you but english is not my first language. it may be a lot to take in for you




dumbest thing you can do is ridicule some one's opinion,

now for sitchin's findings, let us start with the amazing sumerian tablets he researched. niburu according to him is a planet that can travel back and forth and comes to earth each 2000 years. most archeologists also researched the tablets and niburu actually means ferry. he also said that annuaki are a species that created man. no such thing was ever mentioned. just one of the things he mistranslated




explanation?




bible code? correct me if i am wrong
according to the bible the earth is 6000 years old
bible code has been proven wrong on this site. someone predicted that new york would be nuked on 31 december 2004. just one of the many many things the bible code got wrong
it amazes me that people actually believe a whole species could come from 2 people. inbreeding a species would eventually make it extinct. and apparently adam and eve were also multicolored.

zecharia sitchin is a pseudo historian. all things he said were wrong

Well said Hotoke.



Has anyone ever found out how long a Human Skull can last for before it fully deteriorates into nothing?

Not through findings of bones...but science of sort

How do they figure out how old they are anyway? Always wondered that.

Read this article this morning...very interesting. Someday I'd love to be the one to stumble upon such an incredible discovery... (there's no wistfully-sighing smiley??)

About determining the age...I know in this case they dated the rock they found the skulls in. I'm pretty sure that's somewhere in the article...ah, yes here it is:


Good stuff, that.

ya know... with that whole half-life thing for dating stuff... even if you know the decay rate of it, how do you know how much radioactivity the sample had in the first place? i admit that i know very little about dating stuff... so if someone could explain this, it'd be appreciated.

I'm not entirely sure how it works myself. But i do know it only works up to about 200,000 years or something, and everything we've dated older than that is mostly dated by the rock around it.
Rock life can be counted alot like counting rings for every year a tree has been alive.

I believe in this specific instance it was the rocks that were being dated using potassium-argon dating. Here's an explanation of it from a website that has pretty clear explanations of several techniques:



With Carbon 14 dating, they know how much C14 was in the sample to start with by measuring the amount of C12, which is a stable isotope, and so doesn't decay.

(Gee, I hope all this html coding works!)
Edit: It didn't.

Oh! I think I just figured out a simple way to explain the whole C14 thing!

Let's say you have a bowl of jelly beans and you know that there are two red ones for every black one. You also know that your rotten little brother is going to eat one red one every three and a half minutes, but he won't touch the black.

SO, if you want to figure out how long the bowl of jelly beans has been sitting out, you count the black ones and multiply by two to figure out how many red ones were there originally. Then you count the red ones to see how many are left, figure out how many have been eaten and multiply it by the, uh, snack-rate <G> to figure out how long ago the bowl was set out!

Does that make any sense?

That's a really good explaination Elfstone, i'm quite impressed!

Thanks!

oh! thanks Elfstone... good explaination... (guess what! this is my 1000th post! )

Heeyyy happy 1000 JF!

thanks BS... i'm still far from what you've done, and you joined only 2 months before i did!

maybe the skulls were of two time travelers whos went back in time and died 195,000 years ago..hahaha wat im just using my imagination

Congrats, JF! And at Ash!

We should all make a pact. If any of us ever find ourselves mysteriously transported to the distant past we should hide a message for 21st C. archeaologists. Something like a cave painting of UM moderator icons, or grafitti in Pompeii reading, (in Latin, of course) "Uppity Annoyance will never believe this one!" or maybe just a tombstone with the epitaph, "this topic has been closed for being pointless"!

Not really a human but it shows that the earth is definitly not 6000 years old... once again.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4274129.stm

Oldest fossil 'rabbit' unearthed

The fossilised skeleton of a rabbit-like creature that lived 55 million years ago has been found in Mongolia, Science magazine reports.

The fossil adds weight to the idea that rabbit-like creatures first evolved no earlier than 65 million years ago.

"This skeleton is very complete," co-author Robert Asher, of Humboldt Universität, Berlin, Germany, told the BBC News website.

"Gomphos gives us valuable information about the anatomy of early rabbits - it tells us what they looked like.

"Gomphos had a true 'rabbit's foot'; that is, a foot more than twice as long as the hand that could be used for hopping."

But the ancient creature did have some traits that were unlike its modern relative. For example, Gomphos had quite a big tail and some of its teeth were more squirrel-like than rabbit-like.

This must be one of Fluffybunny's distant ancestors!