Exactly How Old Are Homo Sapiens?

[GaryN]

New study suggests earliest humans were not very different from us.

There are no such things as modern humans, Shea argues, just Homo sapiens populations with a wide range of behavioural variability.

http://in.news.yahoo.com/study-suggests ... 5-397.html

This will become more accepted, IMO. The primitive tools and other evidence for
lesser 'quality' ancestors is merely from the fact that cyclic catastrophe
on earth has continually knocked us back to a cave-man like existence,
while destroying evidence of any more advanced accomplishments that we may
have made. The same will no doubt happen again.

[ItJustMakesSense]

New study suggests earliest humans were not very different from us.

There are no such things as modern humans, Shea argues, just Homo sapiens populations with a wide range of behavioural variability.

http://in.news.yahoo.com/study-suggests ... 5-397.html

This will become more accepted, IMO. The primitive tools and other evidence for
lesser 'quality' ancestors is merely from the fact that cyclic catastrophe
on earth has continually knocked us back to a cave-man like existence,
while destroying evidence of any more advanced accomplishments that we may
have made. The same will no doubt happen again.

I have a feeling that we are on the cusp of another great catastrophe that it is over the people that took refuge in caves will draw on the walls what they saw as well as a record of animals that were around before the catastrophe. This is also why there is arrow heads and stuff like that found at these sites becuase what would you do if you had to eat.

[GaryN]

I have a feeling that we are on the cusp of another great catastrophe that it is over the people that took refuge in caves will draw on the walls what they saw as well as a record of animals that were around before the catastrophe. This is also why there is arrow heads and stuff like that found at these sites becuase what would you do if you had to eat.

Makes sense to me, IJMS!
It has often been noted that some of the flint spear tips, going back 300,000
years (if dating methods are in the least trustworthy) though often simple,
showed 'advanced' production techniques, and shapes optimised for particular
functions.
And in observation of the early North American cultures:

Recent discoveries of 'soft technology' or degradable objects such as clothing, tell us that these first people could sew. They were able to make fitted clothing and boots and probably had outfits for different seasons.
So, wherever these first arrivals came from, they appear far more advanced and versatile than the cliché of spear-throwing stone-age man would have us believe.

Not the image of the 'primitives' that I'd been lead to picture.

[hex]

Basically, no writing, no civilization.

The Early European cave men produced meticulously crafted paintings - if they were the remains of an advanced civilization, how come there was nobody trying to write something on the cave walls?

[Sparky]

Basically, no writing, no civilization.

The Early European cave men produced meticulously crafted paintings - if they were the remains of an advanced civilization, how come there was nobody trying to write something on the cave walls?

do you write on your walls?

actually, a good point...counter argument would be, what do you consider civilization? Seems that native americans were civilized, and did not have written records. Pictorial records could be considered as a form of "writing" couldn't it?

[GaryN]

@hex

Basically, no writing, no civilization.

The Early European cave men produced meticulously crafted paintings - if they were the remains of an advanced civilization, how come there was nobody trying to write something on the cave walls?

Literacy has always been confined to the clerical classes and the elite, throughout history. The
military, artisan, farming, servant classes were always illiterate, even up to relatively recent times.
It's very unlikely any cave dwelling survivors of catastrophe were literate, which is what the ancient Greeks told us.
Even nowadays, "According to 2002 UNESCO estimate, more than 867 million adults are reported as illiterates at the end of 2000." And there are many more who function at very low levels of literacy.

[webolife]

I'm totally in agreement with the above posts of Gary, Sparky, and IJMS.
The earliest humans were easily as or more intelligent than we today, and highly adaptable, artistic and inventive.
The idea that writing = civilization is a very western and modernist idea, and would not fly well with hundreds of millions of very intelligent, inquisitive, and mind-expanding toddlers and preschoolers around the world!

[MaddieBusch]

Age 40000 years

[vatek1]

One of best books I've read is "Hidden History: Forbidden Archaeology" by Mike Cremo and Richard L. Thompson. It documents many incidents of recovered evidence of Homo Saps being around in the ~ 1 Million years range. Also, the book Documents photographically and evidential, of Homo Saps and Dinosaur footprints in a shale layer, i believe in the Americas. I would have to refer back to the book, to say for sure. It is a fantastic read and there are a lot of referenced materials footnoted for further study. There are two books, be sure to get the latest book, it is abridged.

Lots of links on youtube for Michael Cremo, personal interviews. I have a few posted myself under my userid "AI4WD" on youtube...I received permission from publisher to post the copies. Cremo states that Archaeology/Anthropology has become like Cosmology that Darwinism is the Holy Grail and to beseech it is instant loss of your Professorship and/or no publication in peer reviewed journals...does this sound familiar folks?????? Do not question the current Paradigm or you or blackballed from Archaeology grants to fund your digs? Almost like having Telescope Time taken for speaking of an EU?

best regards,
Forrest

[tholden]

For the benefit of any who might have missed it, Gunnar Heinsohn puts the Neanderthal/Human divide around 3500 years ago. Heinsohn is best/brightest category in European academia and a frequent speaker at NATO gatherings since his population youth bulge theories predict political unrest with near 100% accuracy; he's also a major player in the ongoing efforts to reconstruct Med-basin chronologies. His "Wie Alt ist das Menschengeschlect" describes the problem with the dating schemes typically associated with Neanderthal studies:

Mueller-Karpe, the first name in continental paleoanthropology, wrote thirty years ago on the two strata of homo erectus at Swanscombe/England: "A difference between the tools in the upper and in the lower stratum is not recognizable. (From a geological point of view it is uncertain if between the two strata there passed decades, centuries or millennia.)" (Handbuch der Vorgeschichte, Vol I, Munich 1966, p. 293).

The outstanding scholar never returned to this hint that in reality there may have passed ten years where the textbooks enlist one thousand years. Yet, I tried to follow this thread. I went to the stratigraphies of the Old Stone Age which usually look as follows

modern man (homo sapiens sapiens)

Neanderthal man (homo sapiens neanderthalensis)

Homo erectus (invents fire and is considered the first intelligent man).

In my book "Wie alt ist das Menschengeschlecht?" [How Ancient is Man?], 1996, 2nd edition, I focused for Neanderthal man on his best preserved stratigraphy: Combe Grenal in France. Within 4 m of debris it exhibited 55 strata dated conventionally between -90,000 and -30,000. Roughly one millennium was thus assigned to some 7 cm of debris per stratum. Close scrutiny had revealed that most strata were only used in the summer. Thus, ca. one thousand summers were assigned to each stratum. If, however, the site lay idle in winter and spring one would have expected substratification. Ideally, one would look for one thousand substrata for the one thousand summers. Yet, not even two substrata were discovered in any of the strata. They themselves were the substrata in the 4 m stratigraphy. They, thus, were not good for 60,000 but only for 55 years.

I tested this assumption with the tool count. According to the Binfords' research--done on North American Indians--each tribal adult has at least five tool kits with some eight tools in each of them. At every time 800 tools existed in a band of 20 adults. Assuming that each tool lasted an entire generation (15 female years), Combe Grenals 4,000 generations in 60,000 years should have produced some 3.2 million tools. By going closer to the actual life time of flint tools tens of millions of tools would have to be expected for Combe Grenal. Ony 19,000 (nineteen thousand) remains of tools, however, were found by the excavators.

There seems to be no way out but to cut down the age of Neanderthal man at Combe Grenal from some 60,000 to some 60 years.

I applied the stratigraphical approach to the best caves in Europe for the entire time from Erectus to the Iron Age and reached at the following tentative chronology for intelligent man:

-600 onwards Iron Age
-900 onwards Bronze Age
-1400 beginning of modern man (homo sapiens sapiens)
-1500 beginning of Neanderthal man
between -2000 and -1600 beginning of Erectus.
Since Erectus only left the two poor strata like at Swanscombe or El-Castillo/Spain, he should actually not have lasted longer than Neanderthal-may be one average life expectancy. I will now not go into the mechanism of mutation. All I want to remind you of is the undisputed sequence of interstratification and monostratification in the master stratigraphies. This allows for one solution only: Parents of the former developmental stage of man lived together with their own offspring in the same cave stratum until they died out. They were not massacred as textbooks have it:

monostrat.: only modern man's tools

interstrat.: Neanderthal man's and modern man's tools side by side

monostrat.: only Neanderthal man's tools

interstrat.: Neanderthal man's and Erectus' tools side by side

monotstrat.: only Erectus tools (deepest stratum for intelligent man)

The year figures certainly sound bewildering. Yet, so far nobody came up with any stratigraphy justifiably demanding more time than I tentatively assigned to the age of intelligent man. I always remind my critiques that one millennium is an enormous time span--more than from William the Conqueror to today's Anglo-World. To add a millenium to human history should always go together with sufficient material remains to show for it. I will not even mention the easiness with which scholars add a million years to the history of man until they made Lucy 4 million years old. The time-span-madness is the last residue of Darwinism.

Heinsohn is not putting an exact age on the Neanderthal die-out; what he IS stating is that there is no legitimate interpretation of existing evidence which would indicate that they died out any more than four or five thousand years ago.

[webolife]

Hear, hear! Thanks, tholden, for that great post.
Enough evidence to suggest that our modern sense of sapiens superiority is just another form of neo-Darwinist racism.

[moses]

Well it is conceivable that modern humans needed to move into the caves quite suddenly and found a lot of Neanderthal tools and made use of them until they could make tools that they were more to their liking. Then the caves could have been vacant for long periods.

The concept that Neanderthals changed into or mutated into modern man during intense electrical activity, needs to be considered very carefully. Whereas this might be possible, it is also possible that many different varieties of humanity existed on Earth at one stage, and dramatic circumstances wiped out most of these creatures/humans.

I find that the concept that people who speculate publically on these things using electrical interpretations, damages EU, misses the relative significance of the issues. EU theory is insignificant accept when it is applied to the significant issue that affect humanity and the Earth. That some wanker theory is replaced by a much more correct theory doesn't matter much. How humanity came to be and what huge events affected humanity, matter an enormous amount. Along with what constitutes a human and other such important things.
Mo

[webolife]

Well hey moses, not only that, but troglodites are among us in the modern era as well... who's to say they are more or less intelligent? As far as that goes, ignorance isn't the absence of intelligence, but may be either the lack of literacy, motivation or opportunity. Earlier migratory people groups sought shelter in caves as they came upon them across the world, particularly Europe and Asia, used them and whatever crude materials they could find to survive, and then moved on when they were ready, and the same pattern is found with the modernization of so-called "primitive" tribes in recent times. A funny old movie, "The Gods Must Be Crazy", comes to mind here... there are plenty of "modern" features of [eg. western] "society" that cause others in the world to raise their eyebrows with disdain...

[vatek1]

I find it surprising that when evidence bluntly disproves strata geological dating or disagrees totally with the anthropology Paradigm (Darwinism) that people in this Forum would fall into the current Paradigm trap. It has been proven that Hom Saps have been present in Strata dating at 2.5 Million years. In South America, significant finds in Archaeology have been complete ignored because the find did not agree with Darwin's world. How do you explain Structures built in SA that predate the Pyramids at Giza by 10000 years. Megalithic Construction of Interlocking stones weighing in excess of 300 tons, being built by Homo-erectus, not hardly a feat performed by the discoverers of fire and who only used Stone tools. I thought this Forum was based on the acceptance of ideas that challenge the current Paradigm. In Bolivia, the ancient city of Puma Punkhu, estimated age 15000 + years, the Megalithic construction stones were so precisely cut that a line was milled the entire length of the Block (est 30 tons each) at a depth so precise that it is within 1 mm precision depth. Is someone trying to tell us in this forum that Erectus constructed these building blocks?? With Stone tools and who relied on lightning for fire?

Remember these stones are in Bolivia and Peru and are of definite age of 15000 years, are we to believe the Land Bridge (bering straits) nomadic tribes made it that far into South America and were that civilized to construct huge cities? I thought the current Paradigm was that they did not even cross the Land Bridge until 10000 to 15000 years ago. Give me a break! All of the Anthropology, Archaeology, and Geology current theories and paradigms are just as Fact deficient as Cosmology IMHO. Are we supposed to believe that Societies all around the Globe mysteriously appeared 5000 years ago with writing and building Huge structures in both Eastern and Western Hemispheres. I for one, will not bite on that hook! Darwinism(Evolutionary theories) are just as much in need of overhaul as modern Cosmology theories are in need of overhaul.
HOM SAPS have been around a long time and as Mike Cremo pointed out, probably a million years according to his studies. According to Mayan, Indian, Chinese, Greek, Sumerian, and Egyptian oral and written histories, we are currently living in the 5th age or world of Man. How long were those ages or worlds, we do not know for sure? But we do know that the we emerged from an Ice Age about 5000 years ago, that was the beginning of the 5th age of man. According to Velikovsky, that was the passage of Venus as a Comet and the time of great turmoil through Electrical Discharges between Earth and Venus. While we were in the tail of Venus, we suffered through 40 days of floods, according to the Bible and all written and Oral Histories throughout the world.

Barry Fells, wrote a book "Bronze Age" which through archaeological finds in the US that put the Phoenicians in Michigan over 4000 years ago mining Copper. Wake up people and smell the coffee, Historians have been lying to us all of our lives by espousing Darwinian theory for the origin of Man. According to Fells, Gaelic Settlements dot all of Northeastern America dating 3500 years, not by Carbon dating, but by written record on a stone used for mooring ships in current New England. Settlements all along the Southwest US , suggest that Libyan scribes recorded the travels of explorers in the Southwestern states as well as evidence of an Egyptian written presence in the Grand Canyon area. The History of Man being taught to our children is a Darwinian pack of lies!

Best regards,
Forrest

P.S. I am not a Creationist or a Bible thumping religious fanatic, but i am not so naive to believe we are a Darwinist accident!

[nick c]

I find it surprising that when evidence bluntly disproves strata geological dating or disagrees totally with the anthropology Paradigm (Darwinism) that people in this Forum would fall into the current Paradigm trap.

I don't think that you will find much support for conventional geological dating or Darwin's version of evolution on this forum
Perhaps it would be best for you to specify which particular post or statement in this thread supports one or both of the above paradigms, or with which you disagree?

Remember these stones are in Bolivia and Peru and are of definite age of 15000 years,

How was that "definite" age established?

Nick