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Thread: 300,000 year old skulls that look shockingly like ours

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    300,000 year old skulls that look shockingly like ours

    Precisely when and where did our species emerge? Anthropologists have struggled with that question for decades, and scattered
    clues had suggested the answer lay somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa about 200,000 years ago.

    But new evidence challenges that hypothesis. Recently discovered remains that suggest the first Homo sapiens showed up more
    than 100,000 years earlier than we thought in a place many experts didn't suspect.

    The fossils could represent the earliest known examples of H. sapiens ever found (if confirmed by further research), and they
    serve as evidence that members of our species lived beyond sub-Saharan Africa.



    Anthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin showing off one of the finds, a crushed human skull whose eye orbits
    are visible just beyond his fingertip.



    Skulls in the dust

    In 1961, a crew of miners was plowing into a dense wall of limestone in a hilly region west of Marrakesh when they struck a soft patch. The hardened beige surface gave way to a mound of cinnamon-colored dirt. Peeking out of the earth was a sliver of human skull.

    A bit more digging revealed a nearly-complete skull, which the miners turned over to their field doctor. As word about the discovery spread, researchers flocked to the area. They uncovered more remains, including several pieces of jaw bone and a fragment of an arm. At the time, scientists pegged the fossils as roughly 40,000 years old, a few thousand years before our extinct European relatives, the Neanderthals, were thought to have vanished.

    But they hadn't dug deep enough.


    The Jebel Irhoud site in Morocco.



    Roughly 40 years later, anthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin and his team from the Max Planck Institute excavated the half-dozen layers of soil beneath the land where the skull and arm bones had been discovered. There, the team found remains that they say belong to at least five individuals, along with a set of flint blades which had likely been burned, perhaps by nearby cooking fires.

    Using a dating technique that measures how much radiation had built up in the flint since it was heated, Hublin and his team say the ancient bones belong to people who lived roughly 300,000-350,000 years ago.

    These dates were a big wow but the biggest discovery didn't come until the team looked more closely at the skulls.

    A striking resemblance

    When Hublin peered into the cavernous eye sockets of one of the skulls, he was astonished.

    Instead of the robust features he was accustomed to seeing on the faces of an ancient human ancestor like Homo erectus or Homo heidelbergensis, this face bore a striking resemblance to his own. Where an erectus skull had a single, protruding brow ridge, these individuals had smaller, separated ones. Rather than a large face and a flattened skull, these people had small faces and rounder skulls.

    "The face of these people is really a face that falls right in the middle of the modern variation," said Hublin. "They had a skull that is more elongated than most of us, but I'm not sure these people would stand out from a crowd today."

    Their braincase (shown below in blue) also seemed to fall somewhere between what one might expect in an ancient human ancestor and a modern human, albeit slightly more similar to those of our archaic ancestors.




    This unique combination of advanced and archaic features suggests something profound, Hublin said — he's convinced the Moroccan specimens "represent the very root of our species."

    In other words, all of the Homo sapiens ever found — including those uncovered far beyond Africa — may trace their ancestral linkages to the land that is today's Morocco.

    That suggestion contradicts the prevailing anthropological logic that our species evolved somewhere deep in sub-Saharan Africa, in what some researchers have referred to as a "Garden of Eden," then gradually moved out to other parts of the world. Instead, Hublin and his team argue that Homo sapiens could have been living in terrain across Africa.

    "There is no Garden of Eden in Africa, or if there is, it is all of Africa," Hublin said.

    According to Sonia Zakrzewski, an associate professor of archaeology at the University of Southampton, Hublin's discovery could encourage other archaeologists to change the way they think about human origins. "It really sets the world alight in terms of the possibilities for understanding the evolution of Homo sapiens," she said. "It certainly means that we need to rethink."






    Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/disco...origins-2017-6


    peace...

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    this is kind of exciting really...though everything is subject to interpretation, this kind of thing is possible.

    I was reading a book on Mayan culture and the indigenous author talks about how badly misinterpreted the 'continent' has done on indigenous culture.

    I tend to think that it is cultural overcompensated pride but the author suggests that pre year 1 scholars reference visits from the Mayans...who knows...but if true it suggests that there is much unknown about our history...no revelation there...but the possibility that there was a dispersion of knowledge predating the Eurasian spread is certainly interesting.
    Last edited by Emil El Zapato, 9th May 2018 at 22:21.
    “El revolucionario: te meteré la bota en el culo"

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    Quote Originally posted by NotAPretender View Post
    this is kind of exciting really...though everything is subject to interpretation, this kind of thing is possible.

    I was reading a book on Mayan culture and the indigenous author talks about how badly misinterpreted the 'continent' has done on indigenous culture.

    I tend to think that it is cultural overcompensated pride but the author suggests that pre year 1 scholars reference visits from the Mayans...who knows...but if true it suggests that there is much unknown about our history...no revelation there...but the possibility that there was a dispersion of knowledge predating the Eurasian spread is certainly interesting.

    A decidedly unmaori carving (Mayan to me) found in a cave near Waverley, South Taranaki. NZ.

    A place in which the old people's name translates as the people of birds. Or bird people. The whole of the region has old place names which are also found on Easter Island.
    The most important places here are very hard to even find out about, let alone find. One recently is finding out the name of the main village for pre maori tribes going under the name Te kahui Maunga, a place called Karakatonga. Such an important link, but only 25 words across 3 entries seem to exist. How can one hope to trace lines 300,000 years when even 2000 is filled with people walking in circles lost in the bush?
    So, yep plenty of buggery in tracing history. Often folk know there is more than meets the eye but choose to not dig too deep.
    Probably for the overcompensated pride as you mention, and in modern times just out of pure emotional fatigue perhaps.
    It is said for instance that NZ was part of Lemuria, an often unvisited spiritual region of the epoch, in which records and treasures of the age were placed in caves.

    Modern human research feels like one hand writing with chalk while the other hand rubs it out.

    I do also see some link for this info being released 'now', with the sharpening of the evidence of those with elongated skulls.

    The topic of how long humans have been on the planet is almost as stifled as the question of if in an 'infinite' universe only Earth has intelligent life.

    If we could get some kind of floating consensus, then the more enquiring impossible questions like, has human consciousness evolved only once? Or has it had memory schisms and started over a few times? could be seriously considered.
    And then the question of consciousness could be asked, in that, does the consciousness belong to the planet, and vessels to carry the consciousness have evolved. I have met a few who feel their very very first incarnation on the planet was as, for instance, an amethyst tower.
    Last edited by enjoy being, 10th May 2018 at 01:34.

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