New dating techniques indicate that the earliest true human (homo sapiens) fossils are 195,000 years old.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/20...050216_omo.html


Using that as a starting point let’s explore the possibilities and probabilities.


Human Timeline (Terra, Sol)
200,000 BC
190,000
180,000
170,000
160,000
150,000
140,000
130,000
120.000
110,000
100,000
90,000
80,000
70,000
60,000
50,000
40,000
30,000
20.000
10,000

Somewhere around here is where our recorded history begins.

1 AD
2,000 AD - Present

Does it strike anyone, as it does me, that there’s an awful lot of unrecorded human history? It has only taken approximately 8,000-10,000 years for our civilization to go from zero to being a space faring one. So how many times could this have happened before? Let’s think about it. 10,000 year to become a technologically advanced race seems like a long time, but in reality it is not. If humans have been on the earth for at least 195,000 years, surely some other group of pre-historic humans achieved the same. Time-wise there were 19.4 other 10,000 year long periods for this to happen. SO why don’t we know about them? Beats me! Maybe because there is no medium to record history on that can last more then 10-20 k years. Even stone erodes to dust in time. Another is that pre-historic human civilizations were so technologically advanced that their methods of recording their history evade our current technological skills to find it.

Whatever the reasons are, for us, not knowing what happened to humanity in the far past does not alter the fact that we, as a race have about 185,000 years of history unaccounted for. Maybe we should be looking harder for messages from our ancestors.

Maybe the aliens ARE our ancestors. They do seem to look an awful lot like us considering the infinate possibilities for shape and form.

Just musing.

There has been indications that man or somebody has been around much much longer than that even.
There have been found strange man made items like links of gold chain, coins and other items found in coal veins that date back millions of years.

So...you will take their dating techniques ..but when the same scientists also tell you that 195,000 years ago man lived in tiny groups of 10 to 15 people (for example..) you just throw THAT PART out?

Technology grows exponentially and needs certain factors that didnt come about for a long time. Same with population.

If there had been advanced cultures sometime before now, presumably they would have left behind evidence. There is none.

I agree with you to a certain point Vetamur.
But there is some evidence, but it is very few and far in between and certainly not academically accepted.

What I find interesting is the fact scientists have estimated Modern Humanity has been around for a couple of hundred thousand years or so yet we have only a verbal/written history of Humanity dating back to no more than what, 10,000 years max.

What, Humans only recently evolved into literacy (4k BCE)?
Our brains were not capable of ‘writing’ 10,000 years ago? Our brains lacked the necessary ‘wiring’ for these things until recently, relatively speaking?

Agriculture seems to be a fairly recent development as does animal husbandry etc. There must have been some monumental leaps in Humanity’s evolution in the last 10,000 years to account for the rapid development of Modern Humanity’s Civilization imho

There is solid evidence regarding the ‘exponential’ rise of Humanity’s technology etc. but, I still wonder if Humanity hasn’t had ‘help’ along the way…:alien: ~rore

Where do OOPARTS fit in here. Anyone know if any have been put under the rigors of a proper scientific investigation, or are these all just here say?
I guess another question would be if their was a hypothetical civilization living here say 100,000 years ago, that ceased to exist for some reason. What structures or objects would be expected to survive after 100,000 years? Ceramics, plastics ??

http://www.byerly.org/whatifo.htm

Rore.. your post is interesting because you have questions..and you answer them in the same post without realizing it.

In order of your post.. writing requires a huge leap in thinking to accomplish..and basically needs an impetus. It doesnt mean people 50,000 years ago were not as smart. If you follow that line of reasoning you would need to believe that people in the vast majority of cultures around just 300 years ago "werent as smart" as they didnt have a written language. Written language has been INDEPENDENTLY invented a tiny handful of times. Depending on whom you ask, perhaps FIVE. In all peoples in all cultures ever. FIVE.

To tie in to what you later wrote, agriculture seems to be a pre condition for written language. Agricultures calories surplus, need for storage, etc leads to situations where written language comes in handy. It also leads to cities.. its only when you have cities that technology becomes possible.. specialization of labor etc is necessary.

But remember, for a long time after the development of farming and animal husbandry..it wasnt clear who was going to "win"..non technological, nonsedantry cultures made a good game of it until very recently..again it depends on who you talk to ..but say until the 1200s it wasnt obvious that cities were the way to go. Until even later the populations of non-city cultures were generally healthier.

An important thing to keep in mind is that it is not just technolgoy that is exponentially growing..but population. Although modern humans may date to 190,000 years ago the populations were very low, very dispersed. And about 100,000 (or 120,000 ..again..depends on who is looking at the data) humans seem to have gone through a "bottleneck" in terms of DNA..for whatever reason people surviving after that date either survived a major crisis for humans or for some reason one segment of human population replaced all others.

Regarding the "some evidence"..not accepted by science.. I think it is not accepted for good reason. I can go on digs all over and never find any sign of human occupation past a certain point.. I never find metals past a certain point, I never find stone tools of a certain make past a certain point. I can do these digs again and again. Then some one comes up with ..oh..for example that iron ball..claims its ancient. Well..where is the associated culture? Where are the other iron balls? Where are the other iron artifacts at that depth or time? Are we to believe a civilization flourished to the degree that it developed iron..yet left but ONE iron artifact? Or is it more likely (and I forget the exact details of that case) that there is a hoax or honest mistake being made? These are not "his word vs. my word" type of situations. They are accumulated and ongoing evidence versus. a single so called anomaly.

And lets not invoke some presumed conspiracy of science. Scientists are by nature competitive. If you want to get grants, to publish, to be well known, to perhaps even get rich..you need to make NEW discoveries. If an archeologist stumbled across a bit of writing from say... 15,000 years ago and could confirm it that would cause a sensation. If someone came across a 15,000 year old mastadon skeleton with an iron spear tip imbedded in it (as opposed to the usual stone), again, the discoverer would have much to gain as would we all. But where are the iron (or even steel! what a discovery it would be!) arrow and spear tips? Where are the wheels from..say 9,000 years ago?

No.. we dont find them. Instead, we see the slow march of technology and instead of wondering what took them so long, instead I wonder what made that first family group settle down and farm at all? In their location and time.. hunting gathering was almost certainly easier and definately tastier. Instead of wondering why husbandry took so long.. I feel thankful that someone thought (when it was still a new idea) that it would feasable to GET ON one of those animals and ride it..and I wonder how many generations it took for them to catch on that for various reasons some animals, even though they look similar, were domesticatable while some were not (horse vs. zerbra for example).

Cool, well obviously OOPARTS or whatever they are called fit right into the hypothesis that ancient antideluvian civilizations did exist. THen again you could just as well say that these OOPARTS are artifacts left behind accidently by human time travelers from our own future. For that matter, god may have made them to confuse and intrigue us.

Truth of the whole matter is unless they left some time of time capsule legacy somewhere, we're going to never know about them. ANyone been digging under the Sphinx lately? lol

I'm glad to be back. May I join in your discussion?

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Language and technology - Very interesting question, if you ask me.

I remember a scene when I was in Ethiopia, during a digging campaign in the Afar region. Just to kill time, I and one of my friends (a well-known paleoanthropologist) were weighting stone tools and measuring the lengths of what we call blades (the active part - or cutting edge - of the said tool), and we added the observed measures to the total. Of course, we were comparing cut stones of the same material (1kg of cut stone for each lithic industry found in the digs). What we found was very striking.

We obtained blades of 10cm for 2M year stone tools; 40 cm for 500K year stone tools; 200cm (that is 2m) for 50K year stone tools; 2,000cm (that is 20m) for 20K year stone tools...

The observed exponential curve was unambiguously correlated with the technological advances, to such a point that no comment was necessary to be made whatsoever.

So, what you are saying is that the older the item was, the more advanced it was??!! Did I read your post right? That would be mind blowing!

no that is not what she is saying RWTAKEN.

another reason why so called evidence of older than accepted advance civilizations not be taken seriously be that if they were accepted it would mean a complete change in everything we know about a lot of things and maybe we don't want to do that so everything just has to change in increments.

Vet posts: Rore.. your post is interesting because you have questions..and you answer them in the same post without realizing it.
=====================

I realized it Vet. My posting style varies when it comes to questions regarding Alien visitations to Earth.

I’ve posted Humanity’s progression throughout the last 150 years in various threads and, if anything, the technological progress of Humanity during this time-frame is nothing less than ‘awesome’ imho.
This ‘tipping point’ so many are eager to embrace in regards to Humanity suddenly becoming as technologically advanced as it is today in a relatively short period of time needs to be understood or explained a little better in order for me to say, ‘yes, Humanity is clever enough to have discovered and utilize sub-atomic tech etc in under a hundred years to the point we are now in space (cyber as well as ‘outer’), on the verge of utilizing 'fusion' energy and so much more. In so little of a time-frame. Truly astonishing.

Was there a relatively recent (1500< years ago) giant step in Humanity’s inherent ability to understand and manipulate the World around them? Was this evolution something in the brain? Because physically we appear to have not changed that much compared to how advanced our tech is. Did we recently evolve mentally?
All the ‘digging’ in the world will not tell us how the Human brain was wired 1500 years ago will it?

Hmmm I wonder if there are any mummified/frozen/preserved brains from a couple of millennia or so ago to put under the microscope? ~rore

Language.

We know that right from the origins in the tropical forests, cerebral areas analogous to those of Broca and Wernicke were already present in an endocranium of 380cc; this braincase was in the skull of an individual of 1.1m of maximal height and of 40kg of maximal body weight, And so we know that this individual had all the abilities to communicate symbolically.

On this particular point, the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) was as potentially gifted as any modern chimpanzee.

This MRCA would have lived about 7 or 6 million years ago (7-6M years ago, or 7-6Mya), and maybe it was either Orrorin tugenensis (Orrorin) or Sahelanthropus tchadensis (Tumai), maybe not - we simply don’t know. Our knowledge is as fragmentary as the fossils. And to be objective, we possess no tangible hint as to their aptitudes for symbolic communication.

Then we have zooliths from Ardipithecus ramidus and Ardipithecus kadabba (of 5.5-4.5Mya). They are younger and better known than Orrorin and Tumai, but we are basically in the same situation: we have no clue as to their language skills. Besides, in my most humble opinion, they are both closer to the Paninae (the chimpanzees) than to the Homininae – their cranial base looking just like the one of the chimpanzees. (This cranial part is an important area to look at when it comes to language skills since it is located between the brain and the pharynx.)

Next we find the Australopithecines. We got plenty of zooliths (fossils, sorry ). We know no less than 5 species of these hominids, namely: Australopithecus anamemsis, Australopithecus afarensis (the best-known being AL-288-1, in other words the famous Lucy), Australopithecus africanus, and Australopithecus bahrelghazali, to that bunch we must add Kenyanthropus platyops (with a braincase of ≈500cc)...

All these hominids lived near forests or arboreous savannas. They used tools of various kinds, notably long sticks to dig for tubers. Peritrophic evidence that the Australopithecines developed new cognitive capacities. (Note that chimpanzees do not dig up underground edible stems or other plant parts.) They were able to select foods, to detect tuberous plants, to dig up for them, harvest them, and to clean them. (Roots, stems and tubers are very tough but offer a good nutritive quality.) This omnivorous regimen forced them to exploit a very vast territory. It forced them to go their separate way to look for foods, then to reunite at a known meeting place, to eventually partake what they found according to elaborate rituals. To do all this, they acquired knowledge and passed it on down. This omnivorous regimen undoubtedly permitted to feed a larger brain (380 to 500cc), which was differently organized. Most notably, their parietal area was relatively well-developed. This cerebral area responds to the need of a multimodal treatment and/or integration of visual, auditory, and sensorimotor information. Moreover, this cerebral zone is where some language areas are to be found.

That being said, these hominids did not make stone tools. Earliest traces of this technological advance aren’t found before ≈2.5Mya.


(To be continued.)

hi allison.. good posts.

In Ethiopia did you work with Tim White?



Mandela..you seem to take the view of science as some single minded enterprise. In fact it is competitive. There would be hesitancy to throw away established "facts" because a whole new generation could profit and gain from it.

Vet, thanks for the info in your post #7.

Good to have you back Alli!! Looking forward to your expertise…

I do not think ‘language’ is the main thrust of the thread in that most of us here at AU should surely be aware there are many animals other than Humans that utilize a form of ‘language’ in their everyday lives.

Of all things, even Ravens may have a discernible language…
“Certain species top the avian IQ scale.
Crows in the northwestern U.S. (a blend of Corvus brachyrhynchos and Corvus caurinus) show modest linguistic capabilities and the ability to relay information over great distances, live in complex, hierarchic societies involving hundreds of individuals with various "occupations"
More @~
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crow#Calls

If they start writing, welll… Although crows may leave physical ‘signs’ for other crows to ‘read’. Need more research.

Vet, I get what you are saying about a written language. If there is no need/desire for one, why bother to develop one.

And the fact cities will promote specialization of labor.
China has had a substantial civilization/population with cities, science, ‘The Arts’, innovative mechanical tech, agro tech, medicine etc for thousands of years so they should be at the top of Human tech development if I am following your line of reasoning.

Egyptians too. The Roman Empire… And Others…

But it seems like it wasn’t until the mid 19th century that the Hi-tech advances (the Global use of steam power etc) started manifesting and the truly amazing science (nuclear, electronics etc) which developed in the early 1900’s on a grand scale. Curious.

There have been relatively stable (many hundreds of years?) ancient Civilizations with writing, science, construction-tech, agro-tech, Arts, medicine, big cities etc that did not produce a simple steam engine used for industry, even though the principle was known, or gas turbines, radios etc. The means were there and apparently the ‘brains’ too?

What was/is the ‘mechanism’ that compels a species to advance by mega leaps and bounds in an extremely short period of time I.e. Less than a hundred and fifty years?

And I cannot get over what appears to me to be a fact: Nothing in recorded Human history has happened like what we are experiencing today, in less than a 150 years, and for me to believe it is just because of a hyper population growth/cities versus rural living etc does not sit right with me yet. (“There’s no big countdown billboard or sign in Times Square to denote it, but Wednesday, May 23, 2007, represents a major demographic shift, according to scientists from North Carolina State University and the University of Georgia: For the first time in human history, the earth’s population will be more urban than rural…” http://news.ncsu.edu/releases/2007/may/104.html ).

Also, a hyper population growth of any species on Earth usually results in some catastrophic population reduction for said population, which happened to Humanity in the early 1900’s, but after the crisis the population just explodes in less than four generations?
The World pop becomes multi-billion?
High-technology blossoms on an unprecedented scale.
Weird series of events here.

And it follows on the heels of an Emerging Nation, a Super Power, affectionately called ‘The Cultural Melting Pot of The World‘… The USA.
A Nation advocating a Republic form of Govt. independent of theocracy and motivated by commerce and competition and a ‘The Devil be damned‘ attitude towards one‘s ethnicity or sex.

All of this in less than a 150 years. Not at all unexplainable, but still ‘awesome‘… And… “Curious“. ~rore

it was just a thought my man.

Add another two or three more million years to our evolution and then we have humans. To believe the lies and corruption we are being fed by the government and scientists would be a mockery to our level of intelligence. Take a look at the most basic species on this planet, millions and millions of years of evolution to perfect the basics of life, so by being aware humans are the closest thing to the most intelligent and perfect being created on this planet, our evolution or creation would have been million if not hundreds of millions of years to get to our most primitive form, go back 195,000 years that is a drop in the ocean on an evolutionary basis and don't forget the massive gap of lost history we cannot recover or are told what knowledge we are programmed to be aware of.... I would say a minimum of 250,000 years at the least....

Rore.. thanks for the good post. I think this thread is one of the rare ones that could be a good exchange without anyone resorting to name calling or frustrating.

Im going to focus on your China example because its perfect. Youre definately right.. as one of the oldest cultures we would in a sense expect it to possibly be the most "high tech" culture. One problem with that, and I will come back to it later (if I remember..I just woke up and Im sleepy!), is that technology doesnt care about national borders..but generally flows through connected geographical areas. But putting that aside for a moment, in Chinas case we see geography being a double edged sword.

Chinas geography allowed it to unify into a large empire very early.. relatively flat plains with two major and many minor rivers meant few obstructions to created borders. This, plus the age of its culture were oe of the reasons that for centuries they WERE the most high tech country. Gunpowder, written language, paper money, the printing press, they were on a roll. BUT (and there is always a but). The other side of this geography sword comes into play. Precisely because China unified so early it eventually fell behind. When a country unifies under an emperor it becomes subject to the whims of one person. In Chinas case in 1422 it closed itself off to the world. It stopped sending trading fleets out and basically lost interest in the world. No longer competing with the world, it fell behind technologically.

A contrast to this is Europe. Europes numberous high mountain ranges, peninnsulas, etc meant that unification to this day hasnt been achieved. So, if for example, Spain in 1492 had decided, like China, to simply not compete, it would have been threatened, and other countries would have sponsored trips to find other trading routes and the Americas would still have become known to Europe.

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Touching on why the mid-19th century seems to start the really "impressive" technological advances.. there is a reason. One bit of technology allows all the rest: internal combustion engine. So why did it take until then to make the internal combustion engine? A combination of things. It took advances in metallurgy.. it took advances in scientific theory. It took all kinds of pre conditions that were only finally met at this time. It very much was a "tipping point" situation. Its like playing Scrabble and having all consonants in your hand.. then along comes a vowel..and you can make all kinds of things.

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Further evidence for this, is that although history tends to remember one particular "inventor" for one object.. most things and innovations were being co-developed in numerous places. The airplane was independently developed around the same time by an Italian in Italy.. Edision had numerous rivals.. there were numerous start and stops on internal combustion engines.. There doesnt seem to be a need nor evidence for anyone "helping out" the process of technological advancement.. at least not to my eyes.

Hey Vet... No I didn’t work with Prof. Tim White. At the time I was mentored by the CRA, a subdivision of the CNRS.

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Tools and language are closely brought together. This relationship derives from the fact that the cognitive skills needed to make tools and to speak are closely linked. Fact one: the enantiomorphic neurons. When I make a tool, when I think of making a tool, or when I say that I intend to make a tool, data obtained by scanning the brain (MRI, CT scans, etc.) show that in humans all of these actions activate the same cerebral areas. Fact two: to cut a stone you need to carry out a procedure involving a very complex sequence of operations. These operations and language have many characteristics in common – sequences of precise moves to make in order to cut stones and sequences of phonemes giving a message. We have also referential aspects in space and time. According to computed cerebrotomography tool making and language are in close association.

We can’t help of being amazed by the skills of the first stone cutters, by the way they worked stones. Tools between 2.6 and 2.3Myr old have been found in Kenya (at Lokalelei). These stone cutters crossed arboreous savannas and went on to find outcrops of basaltic rocks located near the banks of the Lokalelei River. There we’ve found tens of workshops, strewn with chips, nucleus and tools. The way they stroke stones implies an excellent knowledge of the physical proprieties of the raw materials - silex, basalt and quartzite. These rocks were all used to produce cutting objects that could be used to butcher or dismember animals, as well as to provide access to a wide range of plant-based food. The striking and fracture patterns indicate skilled individuals who used their right hand – which correlates with the marked asymmetry of the left brain against the right brain, a part where language-related areas are to be found.

Who were these skilled individuals? We don’t know. More to the point, they are various candidates. They could have been Homo habilis (or H. rudolfensis), Australopithecus garhi (who was discovered in Ethiopia, was estimated to have lived 2.5-2.3My ago, and who was found close to chiselled tools that must also have been used as an aid to eating meat), Paranthropus boisei, or P. robustus. Did all these hominids cut stones? Maybe some of them made tools, and others either stole or borrowed the tools...

Then the Australopithecines disappeared. They disappeared due to climate changes that dramatically altered the planet between 2.5 and 3Mya. Africa dried up, the savannah expanded, the grass species multiplied and the fauna was renewed. In this new biotope, new hominids appeared: the Homo and the Paranthropus. They shared a more evolved brain than the Australopithecines and were more distinctively bipedal. But there were differences between them, in particular in terms of size and teeth, and these differences grew from 1.5Mya, in what is known as ecological divergence.

The first incontestable representative of our genus is Homo ergaster, who appeared in Africa between 1.8 and 2Mya. It is associated with two types of culture – the Odowayen and the Acheulean.

H. ergaster were tall – over 1.70 m – perfectly bipedal, and able to live without the protection of trees. Their brain capacity was between 700 and 850cc. Their anatomy enabled them to walk long distances and to run in the vertical position, which is an advantage when moving around in the savannah and steppes. Running became possible due to changes in their morphology. Their larger cranium limited oscillations of the upper body compared with the pelvis. Their shoulders were broad, distancing the arms from the torso and making the upper body more stable. The lower limbs were long, the thigh and leg were aligned by means of an articulation of the stabilised knee, the foot was short and compact.

H. ergaster quickly spread. It inhabited the whole of Africa and soon reached Europe and Asia, between 1.5 and 2Mya. Fossils found in the province of Java, in Georgia, confirm the presence of Homo erectus about 1.7Mya, and then Homo heidelbergensis in Europe in Ceparano (Italy, 900K year ago) and in Grand Dolina (Spain 800Kya). About 1.2 million years ago, when there was a notable cooling, the only hominin to survive was the Homo genus. But in fact, since Homo spread outside of Africa, we do not really know how many human species succeeded one another or co-existed. Take, for example, the recent discovery of a small species of man, Homo floresiensis, who lived in isolation on the island of Flores, east of Java, and who died out about 18 Kya, at about the same time as Homo sapiens was painting the Lascaux caves, that is 15 000 years after the disappearance of the last Neanderthals in Europe.

Back to language. In my opinion, I don’t think that the larynx moved down before we could run. And the first to run in the vertical position, and the first to be able to run over long distances was H. ergaster. Their larynx moved down in a clear process of exaptation. They were able to modulate sounds. The innervations of their ribcage was denser and wider; they controlled their breath and their larynx; their endocranium was larger; the FoxP2 gene is present (development constraints linking pharynx and brain).

Are H. ergaster the first chatterers of our lineage? I tend to think that socio-ecologically speaking these first Men needed a new social compact, and thus they needed a sufficiently developed means of communication in order to p