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85,000-year-old Finger Bone Complicates Understanding of African Migration
- warent 9y agoNot to be excessively cynical or downright insulting, (also, my knowledge of archaeology is feeble) but is there any way to verify that they found the bones there in the desert? > The discovery is “a dream come true, because it supports arguments that our teams have been making for more than 10 years,” Ten years of debate could be motive enough for some people to fabricate the finding. EDIT: All that aside, assuming it is legitimate and we can trust the discovery, I definitely agree an absolutely phenomenal discovery
- make3 9y ago"Finding a human bone in the Nefud Desert—a windswept oval patch of sand dunes the size of Kentucky—is perhaps the world’s most impressive example of an unlikely find" I wonder how you can test that a fossil wasn't just discovered elsewhere and moved to a convenient place, if the ground composition is sufficiently similar
- stevenwoo 9y agoCan't they do destructive testing of a part of the fossil using some isotope with a longer half life than carbon 14? It's described as being in a field of bones sticking out of sand so it's the only possible way it could have been accurately dated - no surrounding sedimentary rock formation to do additional testing upon.
- make3 9y agoDoes this address the problem of knowing if the bones were moved?
- jonhendry18 9y agoA nearby hippo bone was also tested. It seems rather unlikely that a human bone and a hippo bone of similar age would have been stumbled across somewhere else compared to this site which appears to be a dried up body of water.
- jonhendry18 9y agoThey didn't use carbon-14. "Groucutt and the rest of the team used a number of dating methods to confirm the likely age of the Al Wusta finger. For the finger itself and the tooth of an ancient hippopotamus found nearby, they applied U-series dating. Like radiocarbon dating, the method works by looking at radioactive decay in the preserved materials. The age of the sediments around the bones was calculated using optically stimulated luminescence—a technique that reveals the last time rocks and sand were exposed to sunlight."
- shard972 9y agoI'm not an expert in archeology but from my understanding, we can gain alot of information from bones that could lead such a finding. For instance, carbon dating and analysing the ethnic origins of the skeleton could lead you to say that you have an Australian (Australoid) fossil from 20,000 years ago. If you found that in Northern America that would raise serious questions about where exactly it was found and if it was moved since it doesn't fit within any of our current understandings of migration patterns.
- jonhendry18 9y agoUm, why wouldn't it have been useful to describe it as being found in the original location, in that case? It'd still be noteworthy.
- scottie_m 9y agoThe odds that you could perfectly pull off such a stunt are very low, approaching zero asymptotically as time passes and scrutiny grows. For the thing to work everyone involved would need to be perfectly able to keep a secret and consistent with their stories. All of the forensic evidence down to carbon dating of dust particles would need to be consistent, and you’d need to foresee decades of developments in archeological techniques which might uncover your plot. The moment your scam is uncovered your reputation is irreparably destroyed, you become a pariah and your professional life ends. Given that it seems wildly unlikely to be an outright scam, although anything is possible.
- braythwayt 9y agoYou would think that kind of thing would be such a strong disincentive that nobody would try it, but then again... Andrew Wakefield: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine_controversy That being said, it is extremely improbable.
- scottie_m 9y agoOoh, good point with Wakefield, what a piece of work! The harm he did will almost certainly outlive him, so I guess that’s a legacy?!
- Steko 9y agoAnother example from archaeology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_Paleolithic_hoax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_Paleolithic_hoax
- provost 9y agoAnother example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_Man https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_Man
- horsecaptin 9y agoCould someone have moved it 45000 years ago as a joke like how Tesla launched a car for the aliens to scratch their heads in perpetuity?
- davegardner 9y agoWell probably not as a joke, but it's within the realm of possibility that it was moved there at some point in the past. This is pure speculation of course, but perhaps it was identified as a sacred object and carried there by a traveller sometime within the last couple of thousand years. However the likelihood of that is probably quite slim.
- jonhendry18 9y agoThat would leave signs of the soil having been disturbed.
- downer63 9y ago"as a joke" There's no need to project motive onto such a premise. One needs only to question the possibility of movement. Religious rituals are just as likely, as well as being deposited with ani al droppings after becoming an unfortunate snack for some scavenger or carnivore. Also flood runoff, why not?
- gus_massa 9y agoThey are not dating the bone, they are dating the mud around the bone. To be more precise, they are dating the last time the mud around the bone received sunlight. (And from the patterns in the mud they are sure that nobody dig a hole at midnight to put the bone there.)
- jonhendry18 9y agoThey also dated the bone.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- aetherspawn 9y agoNot to be that guy, but I’m really starting to question the accuracy of dating techniques when they publish finds like this. This finding is only significant because of the age, but have we ever verified our dating techniques over 5k years? 10k years? What’s to say that the hot desert sun and strange weather patterns, radiation or whatever couldn’t skew the dating and mean this bone is just some traveller from a mere 1-2k years ago. It seems further unlikely that such a bone from, 85k y/ago as they say, would be so close to the surface. Ftn In mechanical engineering we don’t ever “trust” the calculations until they are thoroughly validated with ie strain gauges. And more often than not we discover our assumptions were wrong. So I suppose a similar thing applies here in dating science, except, it’s impossible to validate for another thousand centuries. It seems backwards to hinge all our science on it when (AFAICT) it hasn’t even been validated itself!
- Xeoncross 9y agoAs a developer, I see the absolute broken processes and driving forces in the software world and assume that it's not just unique to us. Apparently every other field is also overloaded with bugs, improper testing, and bad assumptions.
- dwaltrip 9y agoIf our knowledge is so incorrect, how did you manage to send your comment to me from across the world? The sentiment you are expressing is very tempting, but it doesn't give credit to the knowledge we have actually acquired. It's difficult to discern between the many levels of partial knowledge (as all knowledge is partial), but it's what we must do.
- chiefalchemist 9y agoWhat if the bone was left there? Say by a bird? Or another human. It's a single small hand bone. It feels fair to question how else it might have arrived at where it was found.
- megaman22 9y agoSo much of paleontology is wild-ass guesses extrapolated out from miniscule, fragmentary evidence. In any other field, it'd be wildly irresponsible to generalize in such fashion on such slim evidence.
- jonhendry18 9y agoA bird probably wouldn't have carried it far, which would be evidence of human presence nearby. If dropped by a human, then that would still be evidence of the presence of humans. Unless you're suggesting that the bird or human buried the finger in the soil without creating any signs of the soil having been disturbed.
- lurquer 9y agoWhere's the rest of the skeleton?
- Abishek_Muthian 9y agoIt's worrying to see research into land migration hypothesis is itself becoming extremely difficult to confirm; I wonder whether the southern exit hypothesis (crossing red sea) or other water-route migrations would see new facts soon.
- DaveSapien 9y agoThis seems likely as there are increasing findings of human activity that go much before 60,000 around the world. One that recently comes to mind is a sight in Cambodia where there are traces of human activity dated around 71,000 years ago. (https://phnompenhpost.com/national-post-depth/peeling-back-layers-prehistory-battambang https://phnompenhpost.com/national-post-depth/peeling-back-l...)
- ccvannorman 9y agoor, "Remnants of Prehistoric Adam's Family Production Gives The Finger To Paleontologists"
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ericnyamu 9y agowhat is was a pink toe finger that is derailing history as we know it ?