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Oldest Homo sapiens fossils discovered in Morocco

CrazyDude

Member
Bones found in a cave in Morocco add 100,000 years to the history of modern human fossils. These bones are from ”early anatomically modern" humans — our own species, Homo sapiens, with a mixture of modern and primitive traits, an international team of anthropologists, paleontologists and evolutionary scientists report in a pair of papers published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Despite their primitive features, these ancient people could blend in with a modern crowd, study author Jean-Jacques Hublin of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, said in a news briefing Tuesday — particularly, he added, if hats covered their somewhat oddly shaped heads.

The oldest Homo sapiens bones known date to about 200,000 years ago, but the new analysis shows these bones are surprisingly old: 300,000 to 350,000 years old.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/06/07/oldest-homo-sapiens-fossils-discovered-in-morocco/?utm_term=.bef777dea921

Interesting how long humans been around, but how most of human progress happened in a very short amount of time.
 

MGrant

Member
Recorded history is about 5000 years old. Now imagine that the entirety of that timespan has happened over 70 times for people more or less like us.
 
Recorded history is about 5000 years old. Now imagine that the entirety of that timespan has happened over 70 times for people more or less like us.

This is why so many people are still stuck on tribalism. In the scheme of things, human societies have advanced at a frightening speed.
 

JordanN

Banned
Interesting how long humans been around, but how most of human progress happened in a very short amount of time.

Yeah. "Progress".

tHplzFU.jpg
 

Suikoguy

I whinny my fervor lowly, for his length is not as great as those of the Hylian war stallions
This is why so many people are still stuck on tribalism. In the scheme of things, human societies have advanced at a frightening speed.

Kinda like evolution really.
It took quite a while for things to get going from single cell organisms, and then things went at a relatively breakneck speed.
 
This is probably like the 5th time we have become advanced technologically as a species. We just keep fucking it up and almost wiping ourselves out. We will get it right eventually and reach a type 2 civilization.
 

akira28

Member
This is probably like the 5th time we have become advanced technologically as a species. We just keep fucking it up and almost wiping ourselves out. We will get it right eventually and reach a type 2 civilization.

Hopefully we can send off another group of colonists into space before civilization declines back to zero again.
 

Xe4

Banned
I have no problem imagining our species being dated 100,000 years older. What is really interesting is the fossil being found in Morocco, on the other side of the continent from most older fossils. They say this suggests that humans developed all over Africa, although this seems to contradict most studies I have seen on the issue. It will be interesting to see if they find more evidence of this.
 

Mivey

Member
This is probably like the 5th time we have become advanced technologically as a species. We just keep fucking it up and almost wiping ourselves out. We will get it right eventually and reach a type 2 civilization.
Nah, we are just the plaything of an even more advanced civilization that keeps us around until they can get to building that bypass for an intergalactic highway they keep delaying since a few hundred thousand years.
 
I have no problem imagining our species being dated 100,000 years older. What is really interesting is the fossil being found in Morocco, on the other side of the continent from most older fossils. They say this suggests that humans developed all over Africa, although this seems to contradict most studies I have seen on the issue. It will be interesting to see if they find more evidence of this.

Well, yes and no. It's already estimated that Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals split off 500,000 years ago - we just have a large hole in the physical evidence for it. And in this case, the evidence suggests that 'homo sapiens' - not necessarily the ancestors of modern populations, was spreading out sooner than we clearly knew about previously. That creates a potentially dramatic new context for migration models to consider, especially if there's a gap between homo sapiens spreading out through the rest of Africa, and then the whole planet. It's one thing for there to be a gap between Ethiopia and Canada in terms of habitation, it's another for Morocco and Iraq when Morocco is the one that's farther away.
 
Yeah collect your semen in a jar instead of spilling it on the ground.

Bible loopholes might be unhygienic, but they can save you from damnation.

I understand why you can't tell the difference between coitus interruptus and masturbation.

But here's something even more obnoxious.....the fact that every anthropological or astronomical discovery posted on this forum degenerates into an attack on Christianity on the first page.
 
Interesting how long humans been around, but how most of human progress happened in a very short amount of time.

Yes! I love pointing this out whenever I teach kids history. We only started living in cities around 7000 years ago, and only started farming less than 10,000 years ago. The other 190,000 years were spent living in small tribal communities. I now need to update that to 300,000 years, which makes civilization even WEIRDER for our species.

This is why village communities are so friendly, yet in towns we actively refuse to even look each other in the eye. We're just not designed to live in large groups, so our brains can't cope. It's also why gangs so easily form in cities. And also why escapism is so damn important to retain sanity given how many of us have to live in these over-crowded "communities".
 

Apt101

Member
Read various articles earlier. Really interesting, and a reminder that science is a process and sometimes these bombshells drop, textbooks change, and we move on.

But 300k years ago. Wow.
 
I understand why you can't tell the difference between coitus interruptus and masturbation.

But here's something even more obnoxious.....the fact that every anthropological or astronomical discovery posted on this forum degenerates into an attack on Christianity on the first page.
It's snark covering up frustration? I imagine there would be far fewer posts like the ones that've offended you if Christianity wasn't currently and historically antagonistic towards science and if the vast majority of posters on this forum weren't from a nation beleaguered and presently governed by anti-science Christian zealots determined to make this entire planet uninhabitable (and doing a good job at it).
 
Maybe Assassin's Creed was right with that first civilization nonsense. Going back so far I bet the our civilization could be totally wiped out and start from scratch again.

It's snark covering up frustration? I imagine there would be far fewer posts like the ones that've offended you if Christianity wasn't currently and historically antagonistic towards science and if the vast majority of posters on this forum weren't from a nation beleaguered and presently governed by anti-science Christian zealots determined to make this entire planet uninhabitable (and doing a good job at it).

Who on here is antagonistic to science though? It's just shitting up a thread about a really cool scientific finding.
 
Maybe Assassin's Creed was right with that first civilization nonsense. Going back so far I bet the our civilization could be totally wiped out and start from scratch again.



Who on here is antagonistic to science though? It's just shitting up a thread about a really cool scientific finding.
The Toba Catastrophe was a real thing 70k years ago that reduced humans to about 10k individuals globally.

Terra Atlantus.
 
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