Pass the Sorghum, Caveman

ScienceNOW Daily News ^ | Thursday, December 17, 2009 | Cassandra Willyard

[SunkenCiv]

Credit: Daniel Georg Döhne/Wikimedia

Conventional wisdom holds that early humans survived on a diet of meat, fruits, vegetables, nuts, and the occasional tuber. Our love affair with cereals supposedly came later, about 20,000 years ago. But a new study hints that wild cereals were part of the human diet more than 100,000 years ago. Making cereals palatable is hard work. They have to be roasted in a fire or pounded into flour and cooked. Because the process is energy-intensive and requires specialized tools, many archeologists assumed that humans didn't begin consuming mass quantities of cereal until the advent of farming about 10,000 years ago. Then in 2004, researchers reported finding a residue of barley and wheat on a 23,000-year-old grinding stone in Israel. The new study indicates that cereal consumption is "a lot older than that," says author Julio Mercader, an archeologist at the University of Calgary in Canada. Two years ago, Mercader and colleagues excavated a cave in Mozambique called Ngalue. They uncovered an assortment of stone tools in a layer of sediment deposited on the cave floor 42,000 to 105,000 years ago.

[SunkenCiv]

• Stone Age Pantry: Archaeologist Unearths Earliest Evidence of Modern Humans Using Wild Grains and Tubers for Food

[SunkenCiv]

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[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

Few Americans are familiar with the pseudo-grain Amaranth. Varieties have long been cultivated around the world, and it has some rare nutritive properties that make it a valuable crop. No idea when it first became a popular food plant.

[ChildOfThe60s]

Sorghum “molasses” is delicious. It is not molasses, but is often referred to as such.

Heat it a little so it pours more easily and it is yummy on pancakes or waffles.

[redangus]

Or mix some butter into it and spread it on bread, uuuummmmm.

[dangerdoc]

Which means beer was not too far behind.

[wendy1946]

I do not know of a decent way in which anybody could claim that modern humans were doing ANYTHING 1000,000 years ago. There is no applicable dating scheme or process which works within that range. RC dating even in theory is only valid to around half that and there is no believable evidence of modern humans even on the planet that long ago.

You could talk about neanderthals and hominids doing something 100K years back but DNA studies indicate that we are not related to them and there is further evidence that most if not all of the dates which you read about regarding neanderthals highly suspect. Gunnar Heinsohn (Univ. of Bremen) notes that:

Mueller-Karpe, the first name in continental paleoanthropology, wrote thirty years ago on the two strata of homo erectus at Swanscombe/England: "A difference between the tools in the upper and in the lower stratum is not recognizable. (From a geological point of view it is uncertain if between the two strata there passed decades, centuries or millennia.)" (Handbuch der Vorgeschichte, Vol I, Munich 1966, p. 293).

The outstanding scholar never returned to this hint that in reality there may have passed ten years where the textbooks enlist one thousand years. Yet, I tried to follow this thread. I went to the stratigraphies of the Old Stone Age which usually look as follows

modern man (homo sapiens sapiens)

Neanderthal man (homo sapiens neanderthalensis)

Homo erectus (invents fire and is considered the first intelligent man).

In my book "Wie alt ist das Menschengeschlecht?" [How Ancient is Man?], 1996, 2nd edition, I focused for Neanderthal man on his best preserved stratigraphy: Combe Grenal in France. Within 4 m of debris it exhibited 55 strata dated conventionally between -90,000 and -30,000. Roughly one millennium was thus assigned to some 7 cm of debris per stratum. Close scrutiny had revealed that most strata were only used in the summer. Thus, ca. one thousand summers were assigned to each stratum. If, however, the site lay idle in winter and spring one would have expected substratification. Ideally, one would look for one thousand substrata for the one thousand summers. Yet, not even two substrata were discovered in any of the strata. They themselves were the substrata in the 4 m stratigraphy. They, thus, were not good for 60,000 but only for 55 years.

I tested this assumption with the tool count. According to the Binfords' research--done on North American Indians--each tribal adult has at least five tool kits with some eight tools in each of them. At every time 800 tools existed in a band of 20 adults. Assuming that each tool lasted an entire generation (15 female years), Combe Grenals 4,000 generations in 60,000 years should have produced some 3.2 million tools. By going closer to the actual life time of flint tools tens of millions of tools would have to be expected for Combe Grenal. Ony 19,000 (nineteen thousand) remains of tools, however, were found by the excavators.

There seems to be no way out but to cut down the age of Neanderthal man at Combe Grenal from some 60,000 to some 60 years.

I applied the stratigraphical approach to the best caves in Europe for the entire time from Erectus to the Iron Age and reached at the following tentative chronology for intelligent man:

-600 onwards Iron Age
-900 onwards Bronze Age
-1400 beginning of modern man (homo sapiens sapiens)
-1500 beginning of Neanderthal man
between -2000 and -1600 beginning of Erectus.

Since Erectus only left the two poor strata like at Swanscombe or El-Castillo/Spain, he should actually not have lasted longer than Neanderthal-may be one average life expectancy. I will now not go into the mechanism of mutation. All I want to remind you of is the undisputed sequence of interstratification and monostratification in the master stratigraphies. This allows for one solution only: Parents of the former developmental stage of man lived together with their own offspring in the same cave stratum until they died out. They were not massacred as textbooks have it:

monostrat.: only modern man's tools

interstrat.: Neanderthal man's and modern man's tools side by side

monostrat.: only Neanderthal man's tools

interstrat.: Neanderthal man's and Erectus' tools side by side

monotstrat.: only Erectus tools (deepest stratum for intelligent man)

The year figures certainly sound bewildering. Yet, so far nobody came up with any stratigraphy justifiably demanding more time than I tentatively assigned to the age of intelligent man. I always remind my critiques that one millennium is an enormous time span--more than from William the Conqueror to today's Anglo-World. To add a millenium to human history should always go together with sufficient material remains to show for it. I will not even mention the easiness with which scholars add a million years to the history of man until they made Lucy 4 million years old. The time-span-madness is the last residue of Darwinism.

The key statement in all of that might be "A difference between the tools in the upper and in the lower stratum is not recognizable".

Our tools would be unrecognizable to George Washington, much less Julius Caesar. and that's just 200 - 2000 years; how could anybody believe that 60K years could go by and even neanderthals would not improve their tools noticeably??

[ChildOfThe60s]

Or mix some butter into it and spread it on bread, uuuummmmm.

Sounds interesting. Used to do that with honey when I was a kid. Have to give it a try.

[Tainan]

and thus.....beer.

Ogg like beer. Man cave need beer. meat on fire, popcorn in bowl and beer in hollow rock. Ogg have happy night.

[SunkenCiv]

That *might* explain the surviving cave art...

[SunkenCiv]

Thermoluminescence works from zero to 500,000 years; Uranium series disequilibrium works zero to 400,000 years. Amino acid racemization works 500 to 300,000 years. Electron spin resonance works 1000 to 1 million years.

• Radiometric Dating, A Christian Perspective -- Dr. Roger C. Wiens

There's another new topic about Neandertal genome, but those studies are garbage in, garbage out. I remain mystified that anyone objects to being related to Neandertal on religious grounds anyway.

[SunkenCiv]

Health food stores have stocked that for years, sometimes for various claimed health benefits. Amaranth is easy to grow, and like another American weed, Quinoa, will produce at high altitude.

[SunkenCiv]

Great, now I want pancakes. I’m going to order it without my usual side of bunny though.

[wendy1946]

Neanderthal DNA is now described as about halfway between ours and that of a chimpanzee. That eliminates the neanderthal as a plausible human ancestor, and all other hominids were further removed. We are not related to any of them.

[wendy1946]

The religious problem with RC dating arises in Genesis 7, i.e. a global flood eliminates the assumptions RC dating is based on. Other than that I don’t see any evidence in the article here that any of the other methods you mention were involved.

[ApplegateRanch]

Don’t forget to blend in the peanut butter.

Butter, peanut butter, honey/sorghum/molasses: whip together and spread on bread. Preferrably, fresh, hot bread. Or toast.

[ApplegateRanch]

Amaranth AKA “pigweed”. Leaves are supposed to be a good spinach substitute or pot herb, too.

Huge family, and some surprises as to family/subfamily member generas, one of which is beta (beets)...that takes us to Swis chard, and many other common (and some not so common) garden veggies.

[Tainan]

Ogg tag cave wall. Ogg artist.

[bert]

Across Texas they grow Sorghum (milo) in fields that seem as big Delaware. I don’s know what they do with it all

[SunkenCiv]

Cattle feed, plus parts of the plant can be made into brooms. :’)