Age of Modern Humans Revised, Depending on Whom You Believe
The official age of the oldest anatomically modern humans is now 195,000 years, some 65,000 years older than previously thought. This announcement was made in Nature1 by Ian McDougall, Francis H. Brown and John F. Fleagle, based on revised radiometric dates calculated from sediments surrounding two human skeletons in Ethiopia. These specimens, named Omo I and Omo II, were found in the 1967 by Richard Leakey, and were then dated at 130,000 years old. The authors believe these are “the earliest well-dated anatomically modern humans yet described.” The earlier record was about 160,000 years.
Revisions sometimes have unintended consequences. Timelines are tied with other events, so moving one date by a third is bound to shake up other calibration points. A summary on EurekAlert explains,
Brown says that pushing the emergence of Homo sapiens from about 160,000 years ago back to about 195,000 years ago “is significant because the cultural aspects of humanity in most cases appear much later in the record – only 50,000 years ago – which would mean 150,000 years of Homo sapiens without cultural stuff, such as evidence of eating fish, of harpoons, anything to do with music (flutes and that sort of thing), needles, even tools. This stuff all comes in very late, except for stone knife blades, which appeared between 50,000 and 200,000 years ago, depending on whom you believe.” (Emphasis added in all quotes.)
Fleagle agrees that there is a “huge debate” in the archaeological literature about the dating of the first cultural artifacts, though the accepted date hovers around 50,000 years. “As modern human anatomy is documented at earlier and earlier sites,” it becomes evident that there was a great time gap between the appearance of the modern skeleton and ‘modern behavior.’”
Another consequence is that inferences about modernity from appearance are more subjective. Omo II was supposed to be a more primitive form, but appears from the newest dates to be nearly contemporaneous with Omo I. The team interpreted the history of rock and ash layers to arrive at the dates of the fossils, and selected feldspar crystals for potassium-argon analysis. Science Now has pictures of the skull caps.
1McDougall, Brown and Fleagle, “Stratigraphic placement and age of modern humans from Kibish, Ethiopia,” Nature 433, 733 – 736 (17 February 2005); doi:10.1038/nature03258.
We already knew that judgments about who is primitive and who is not are highly subjective (see 01/01/2005 entry). The labeling game amounts to a kind of paleoanthropological racism. Primitive is in the eye of the beholder. Since Mr. Omo II can’t show off his intellect, the Darwin Party racists are free to categorize him as “less highly evolved,” like the early Darwinians used to classify non-Englishmen. Even with the new dates that make him a contemporary of Mr. Modern Omo I, Fleagle says, in effect, “well, what do you know; primitives and moderns lived at the same time.”
The other inference about the culture gap is so incredible, so absurd, it calls into question the intelligence, if not the sanity, of anyone who would accept it. They are claiming that human beings, virtually indistinguishable from us, went for up to 150,000 years without learning how to make a tool, catch a fish, harpoon a mammoth, ride a horse, plant a farm or drill holes in a reed to make even a simple flute. What did these brethren do for amusement? Look how much humans have accomplished in the 6,000 years of recorded history, from cuneiform to Saturn spaceships. To think that fully-endowed humans could not think of even the simplest cultural advances for 25 times that length of time is patently ridiculous. Even crows and chimps show more capability than these humans who are supposed to have walked the earth for eons without leaving a trace. Pile this absurdity on top of that: “Brown says the fossil record of humans is poor from 100,000 to 500,000 years ago….” Let’s build conclusions on evidence, not the other way around, OK?
If it were not for the Darwin Party’s total commitment to millions of years of evolution, and their totalitarian control over the media, this claim would be laughed off the stage as the funniest thing since the Dean scream. This is another one of the aspects of evolutionary theory that will some day make history students wag their heads in disbelief that so many educated people could be duped for so long by the teachings of a primitive-looking guru named Charlie.