Very interesting. A cache of tools uncovered, estimated to be 13,000 years old.
Protein found on the tools included that of Camels.
Ralph
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090226/ap_on_sc/ancient_tools
Ralph Berg said:How could soft tissue survive that long? How was the age of 13,000 y.o. determined? Otherwise a pretty cool find.
Very interesting. A cache of tools uncovered, estimated to be 13,000 years old. Protein found on the tools included that of Camels. Ralph http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090226/ap_on_sc/ancient_tools
Well,
The key word is estimated.
I indeed find it interesting.
Ralph
The “Clovis” culture is reasonably well documented:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clovis_culture
They are regarded as the first human inhabitant of N. America
Radiocarbon dating:
Here we go again. Radiocarbon dating methods are known to be flawed.
http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19900521&slug=1073046
http://www.pathlights.com/ce_encyclopedia/encyclopedia/06dat5.htm
http://www.essortment.com/hobbies/carbondatingac_szhq.htm
mike omalley said:
The "Clovis" culture is reasonably well documented:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clovis_culture
They are regarded as the first human inhabitant of N. America
Radiocarbon dating:
Mike,
I’ve read a bit about the Clovis people as well as carbon dating over the years.
My question is: How do they use carbon dating to determine when the stones were chiseled into tools?
Ralph
This gives new meaning the the phrase, “I’d walk a mile for a Camel.” :lol:
“What researchers found on the tools also was significant. Biochemical analysis of blood and other protein residue revealed the tools were used to butcher camels, horses, sheep and bears. That proves that the Clovis people ate more than just woolly mammoth meat for dinner, something scientists were unable to confirm before.”
Does this also prove that man eats everything he kills?
Ralph
Whilst researching the history of the horse in the Americas, I came upon this site. At the bottom of the page is a link to articles for supporters of all popular theories. Sobering reading for the doubters amongst us. Topics covered are the age of the earth, the biblical flood, rat/bat fossils and other juicy items. If you have a closed mind then you are wasting your time visiting the site.
Ralph Berg said:mike omalley said:
The "Clovis" culture is reasonably well documented:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clovis_culture
They are regarded as the first human inhabitant of N. America
Radiocarbon dating:
Mike,
I’ve read a bit about the Clovis people as well as carbon dating over the years.
My question is: How do they use carbon dating to determine when the stones were chiseled into tools?
Ralph
From the reference I gave: “[there are] substantial reservoirs of carbon in organic matter, the ocean, ocean sediments (see methane hydrate), and sedimentary rocks.”
But I actually have no idea how they dated these particular samples. Or how they got organic material from them. I’m thinking the whole thing is a little light on detail
David Hill said:Everything is. The state of human knowledge is imperfect
Here we go again. Radiocarbon dating methods are known to be flawed.
Things from the past usually bring up more new questions, rather than answer all the old questions.
Ralph
Interestingly, and on the same kind of subject, was a little presentation we went to last time we were in Eugene, OR. The subject was the Fort Rock Cave sandal cache - thrteen pairs of sage-grass sandals of varying sizes, all much worn, dating from about 7000BC.
We even got to touch these remarkable objects, on display in the university of Oregon Museum and Cultural Centre.
BTB, the Clovis connection has been more or less discarded in the light of many more recent discoveries, including this cave find in Oregon - http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26819601/
A photo along with this file shows University of Oregon archaeologist Dennis Jenkins posing in July 23, 2008 in the cave outside Paisley, Ore., where excavations unearthed a coprolite,fossilized feces, that contained human DNA and was radiocarbon dated to 14,300 years ago, 1,000 years before the Clovis culture once thought to be the first people in North America.
And for those just too relaxed to go read the text - here it is - a really facinating read!!!
Coprolites — ancient feces — were found to contain human DNA linked directly to modern-day Native Americans with Asian roots and radiocarbon dated to 14,300 years ago. That’s 1,000 years before the oldest stone points of the Clovis culture, which for much of the 20th century was believed to represent the first people in North America.
The idea that coprolites contain valuable information is not new, but extracting DNA from them is. When the findings were published this year in the journal Science, they plopped Jenkins and his colleagues in the middle of one of the hottest debates in North American archaeology: Just when did people first come here, and how did they get here?
For many years the prevailing view was that the Clovis people walked from Siberia across a land bridge exposed by the Ice Age to Alaska and spread south through an ice-free corridor down the center of the continent exposed 10,000 years ago by warming temperatures.
The Paisley coprolites indicate people had found another way, perhaps crossing the land bridge but then walking down the coast, or even crossing the ocean by boat, the way people went from New Guinea to Australia thousands of years earlier. The findings kill the suggestion some of the earliest Americans came from Europe.
And they almost didn’t get to tell their story.
Bill Cannon calls himself a “used archaeological site salesman,” but is really the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s Lakeview District archaeologist. Cannon knew University of Oregon archaeologist Luther Cressman had dug here in the 1930s, along with numerous looters.
Cannon can show you the rusty nail Cressman drove into the wall of Cave No. 2 as his data point, from which the locations of artifacts are measured, as well as recent illicit excavations.
Cressman found evidence — a dart point, basketry, sandals and animal bones — that people were here before Clovis and they hunted large animals. But he could make no strong conclusions, and he saved no coprolites.
Cannon could see there was a lot that hadn’t been dug, and figured Jenkins was the guy to do it.
Jenkins is a senior research associate at the University of Oregon Museum of Natural and Cultural History, and head of its Northern Great Basin Archaeological Field School. His office in a Quonset hut on the campus in Eugene is decorated with the antlers of mule deer he has shot in the high desert east of the Cascade Range. His arm carries a tattoo from an outlaw motorcycle club from Las Vegas, where he grew up and went to college.
Jenkins has never found one of the distinctively shaped, fluted, stone spear points that mark the Clovis culture, named for a site near Clovis, N.M., uncovered in 1929. But in three digs at Paisley _ 2002, 2003 and 2007 — Jenkins has gathered 700 coprolites, perhaps a third of them human.
The coprolites contain pollen, seeds, chipmunk bones, sage grouse feathers, trout scales, things that ancient people would have been eating, but Jenkins couldn’t be sure they weren’t coyote. He had estimated their age at 1,000 years before Clovis from dating bone and obsidian flakes found nearby.
Jeff Barnard / AP file
One of some 700 coprolites, ancient feces, that were unearthed in caves near Paisley, Ore. Some of the coprolites have been found to contain human DNA and were radiocarbon dated to 14,300 years ago, making them the oldest human remains in North American.
Unlike bone, obsidian cannot be radiocarbon dated. But the time since a flake was broken off can be estimated from how far moisture has penetrated, leaving a visible band. The distance depends on temperature, so to refine the measurements, archaeological consultant Tom Origer and his team from Santa Rosa, Calif., tracked the underground temperatures for a year.
At $600 a shot, Jenkins still didn’t want to get any of the coprolites radiocarbon dated until he knew they were human.
Then in the fall of 2003, he received an unexpected e-mail from Alan Cooper of Oxford University, who was looking for sites to test with techniques he was developing to extract ancient DNA from soils.
Cooper and Jenkins arranged for Eske Willerslev, then a Danish postdoctoral fellow working for Cooper at Oxford, to deliver a paper on his work with ancient DNA before the Northwest Anthropological Conference. They also wanted Willerslev to pick up some samples from Paisley Caves.
In 2003, Willerslev extracted from Siberian permafrost DNA of mammoths, bison and mosses that proved to be 300,000 to 400,000 years old. More recently, he teased out DNA from silt-crusted ice cores from Greenland that showed forests, beetles and butterflies had lived 800,000 years ago where a glacier stands today.
Willerslev took home 14 coprolites, but was not very interested.
“To identify if humans were using caves as a toilet, I didn’t see that as important,” he said.
For years, they sat in a freezer at Oxford. Willerslev took them with him when he took a professorship in biology at the University of Copenhagen, and in 2006 turned them over to a graduate student who needed a project. She found DNA from two of the five Native American genetic groups. Both have links to Asia.
Radiocarbon dating — at two different labs — showed three were more than 14,000 years old.
“It is the oldest evidence of human presence” in North America, said Willerslev, now director of the Center for Ancient Genetics at the Copenhagen school.
Vance Haynes, professor emeritus of geoarchaeology at the University of Arizona, has spent his career studying the Clovis people.
While there is a growing body of evidence and acceptance of the idea that people were in North America before Clovis, the evidence remains skimpy and confusing, with no coherent thread like a common way of flaking obsidian into spear points, he said.
He would like to see dates further confirmed by another radiocarbon dating because if it is accurate, the find offers important evidence that early people traveled down the coast as they spread through the continent, and then moved east, and did not need the ice-free corridor.
Jenkins figures the caves have much more to tell. An obsidian flake and a duck bone have been dated to 16,000 years ago. And he can’t wait to dig beneath some boulders that apparently fell from the roofs of the caves between 7,000 and 9,000 years ago, guarding whatever lies below from looters and other archaeologists.’
Even Mexico has figured recently with carbon-dating on a cache of bones found last century - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2538323.stm
Then we have Kenniwick Man - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4651831.stm - a non-native indigenous human from around 9000 years ago - an near contemporary with the Fort Rock sandals…
The jury is still out on the Clovis Culture being the only one around when the Bering Straits ice-road finally disappeared.
All fascinating stuff!!!
tac
www.ovgrs.org
Deleted
TonyWalsham said:
Thank you Terry.That will go quite some way to debunking the theories of our well known resident Creationist.
If that doesn’t, this will.
http://www.unpo.org/content/view/7855/77/
40,000 years is an awfully long time, and some scientists think it may actually be up to 60,000 years.
Why not try debunking Creation Science yourself. Read some of the posts I referenced. Find ONE confirmed “transitional life form” either in the past or today. There should be hundreds of transitional forms observable today, or did evolution abruptly stop for some reason?
You provide absolutely no proof in any of your arguments, you only criticize others. “It’s much easier to tear down than to build.”
I see no incongruity other than the assumed Carbon-14 dating results, which are acknowledged to be estimates only.
There are two type of people you cannot argue with, the Fanatic and the Idiot. The Fanatic simply will not accept any other viewpoint, the Idiot simply cannot grasp any other viewpoint.
Both types have been provided fierce loyalty in the realm of religious fundimentalist ferocity. The notion of any other religion, phylosophy or scientific research could overarch and in some ways debunk their fundimentalist religious beleives brings them sometimes to physical violence. Its not just the Muslims, my first encounters with these “fierce beleivers” had nothing to do with Islam, it was with what I now call “psyco-christians” People who belive that every word is literally and historically truth and that any other viewpoint that contradicts that beleif must be the work of the devil. These people are often seriously disturbed, yet the scary thing is that I have seen people go from rational thinking creatures slowly devolve into these religious foamers, some losing work, houses, relationships, all for the alienating verocity of thier rigidly fundimentalist believes. This comes from 20 years of dealing with people I knew, friends, co-workers, bosses, who got sucked into this religious nonesensical beleif structure and cast aside all reason in lieu of blind faith, I’ve learned blind faith can get you killed, just ask the folks at Jonestown, Waco, and those Hale-Bop nutjobs. Religious teachings used to be about how we live and interact with each other, what moral guidleines we use to live our day by day with, now its all about “Your goin to hell cause you dont go to MY church” and other such idiocy. Seems the older I get and the more I observe the world, the more Mao was right, when he said “all religion is poison” he understod how it can be used to corrupt people, control them, poison their minds against their own better judgement, as much as is shown by someone strapping a bomb to themselves, getting on a bus as by loading a U-haul full of fertilizer and detonating it in front of a goverment building on the prairie, or barricading yourself and your children in a firetrap and igniting it.
Their is NO SUCH THING as “creationist science” there is ONLY “SCIENCE” you either have fact, evidence, proof, the Science, or you have belief, and as such the creationists consistantly fail to persuade that they have ANY real evidence other than some vague theories that are often just warped self justifications of almost 99% of the times christian genesis justifications. First they postulated absolute beleive in Genesis, when that got laughed out of the lecture hall they retooled it into “Intelligent Design” but even that has been proven to be nothing more than “creationism lite” in the courts.
NO ONE with any scientific rationalism view this ridiculous ideas with any credit, and almost all of these same scientist go to some form of church, temple or synagog, and raise their kids with religious groundings and beleives without cramming a bunch of fundimentalist nonsense down their thoats, this is because they view religion as a moral guideline, not and absolute this or nothing mindset.
For crying out loud, the bible wasnt even written until a few centuries BC, before then it was an oral tradition, like the Iliad or the Norse sagas, it was written by a bunch of nomads trying to give reason and structure to there world around them, yet here we are 5000 years later with people trying desperatly to find any justification in their particular beleif structure. What gives this religious creationasm any more credit than older religions like Hindu or Zoroastrianism?
Zues and Diana were fervently worshiped for centuries, then fell by the wayside, for all we know one day Jesus will be replaced by Elvis.
On Transitional animals
http://www.actionbioscience.org/evolution/benton2.html
Here’s another link, with this quote from the late Stephen Jay Gould:
"Stephen Jay Gould : The supposed lack of intermediary forms in the fossil record remains the fundamental canard of current antievolutionism. Such transitional forms are sparse, to be sure, and for two sets of good reasons — geological (the gappiness of the fossil record) and biological (the episodic nature of evolutionary change, including patterns of punctuated equilibrium, and transition within small populations of limited geographic extent). But paleontologists have discovered several superb examples of intermediary forms and sequences, more than enough to convince any fair-minded skeptic about the reality of life’s physical genealogy. "
Here’s the link–if you read it you will see it explains perfectly why there are many examples of transitional animals but not the ones you want to see.
http://darwiniana.org/transitionals.htm
You asked before about why there is no fossil record of a “rat-bat:” Here is your transitional bat:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7243502.stm
And again:
http://vyoma108.blogspot.com/2008/02/bat-transitional-fossil-intermediate.html
and here, with what could be the money quote:
http://www.theologyweb.com/forum/showthread.php?t=90561&page=8
"Nancy Simmons of the American Museum of Natural History, and lead author of the Feb. 14 Nature article in which it is described explains:
“When we first saw it, we knew it was special. It’s clearly a bat, but unlike any previously known. In many respects it is a missing link between bats and their non-flying ancestors.”"
Vic, what standard must something meet to be accepted as scientific PROOF, as opposed to theory or hypothesis?
People often misunderstand the nature of scientific claims–science never offers the level of certainty that, say, believers in the literal truth of the Bible offer. Instead, it offers theories which attempt to explain natural facts. We don’t exactly know what gravity is, but we have theories about it. Theories are accepted in science to the degree that they work–that the explain natural phenomena well. What does “well” mean? It means in ways that are repeatable, and that apply across different subjects (evolution works from bacteria to humans); it means that the theory makes sense and works in light of other observable data (for example, the age of the earth or the science of genetics); it means that the theory can be openly tested and examined. The theory of evolution is extremely well supported by evidence, which is why it’s generally accepted.
Creationism does not meet these criteria–it assumes the existence of an active creator, which cannot be proven or even tested
Vic,
every religion has its fundamentalist followers, from Jews (ultraorthodox), Muslims, christians, Sikhs, Hindi, Catholics, Protestants. At one time they all practiced, or continue to do so, seemingly unbelievable acts of faith and doctrines, all in the name of god. It was thought, at one time, that those of another religion who refused to submit to the will of god, would be miraculously converted at the stake at their moment of death, or that people would be executed for thinking that the earth was not the centre of the universe. These were intelligent human beings who followed their teachings ver batim. I have not included the more extremist ‘religions’ as they are strictly fundamentalist, with no capacity for leniency.
There are two types of people to not get acquianted with in the workplace. First is reformed smokers who give up the practice after many years and then become increasingly intolerant of those around them who still smoke, constantly abusing and telling them to stop polluting 'their' environment and secondly, reborn christians. It seems that the rebirthing makes them ever fervent to press upon all around them the wonders of their new found faith and are seemingly oblivious as to the intrusion they make on others' lives. One wonders why they switched faiths in the first place as god is god. Maybe the 'new' god is more consumer friendly?
What has this got to do with 13,000 year old tools found in Colorado, well, probably nothing, but no doubt those inhabitants practiced a form of religion to explain their existence? The god they worshipped was most likely nature, like the sun, seasons, rain, etc., something that was of use to them and their survival.
Orthodox Jews are still awaiting the coming of the messiah. They see Jesus, as do the Muslims, as simply another prophet in the long line of servants sent by god to educate his people.