Posted on 09/02/2011 2:05:06 PM PDT by Red Badger
Early humans were using stone hand axes as far back as 1.8 million years ago. Credit: Pierre-Jean Texier, National Center of Scientific Research, France
Study co-author, Craig Feibel, is among the team of researchers that returned in 2007 to West Turkana to put dates on hand axes excavated earlier. Credit: Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
GGG Ping!........
Very interesting, I thought my 70,000 years-old Neanderthal hand axe was old!
Interesting. A lot of the same crowd would say the opposite is true today — changes in climate, vegetation or animal life are caused by shifts in human biology and behavior.
Heck, it’s relatively MODERN!............
Look closely at that bottom picture. You can see the martian rover’s shadow at the bottom!
They had more technology than we do now, there is just little left from the era before they put leftists in charge.
And subhumans use them todaya to lop off heads in the name of Allah, wont some things ever change?
The Mars landings are fake!!
/s/
No, silly! That's the Viking lander!..........
He was charming and colorful and appreciated the fact I knew who he was and what he was doing. Near the end of the interview he fished into a battered leather bag and pulled out a crudely-fashioned quartzite chopper from a find at Olduvai. He plopped it into my hand and said: "You're now holding the oldest tool ever fashioned by man."
Even then I knew that his comment had as much to do with fund-raising publicity as anything, and that older tools would probably be found in the future. Still, I'll never forget the feeling I had when I held it, the very strong connection with a long-ago time when our ancient forebears' survival depended on such necessities. RIP Dr. Leakey!
Leakey was the Carl Sagan of Paleontology........
disappeare 70,000 years ago - just about the time they converted to Islam - coincidence?
So, was this before Adam & Eve??
Ah-hum.
This was described in the amazing book by Bill Bryson, “A Short History of Nearly Everything” in 2003.
Apparently, an entire civilization in East Africa spent their lives shaping hand axes. They hauled rocks from miles away to their village, and spent their time shaping stone axes, for no any apparent reason. They did this for up to 1 million years before they disappeared.
And the hand axes never improved in quality - they were the same for all that time.
Their brains never evolved past that of a young child.
Very eerie. Can you imagine? One million years of this?
That book by Bill Bryson is one of the best books on history you will ever read. And you should have your children read it as well.
The Sagan comparison is very apt. Both knew how to “work a room” to generate publicity and funding. I think Leakey’s kids are better at it than the Old Man though...
lol
Obviously, they weren't walking the landscape; they were driving their SUVs on it to cause all that climate change.
On a more serious note, I wonder why it took humans so long to develop any form of written language. More than a million years between inventing tools and inventing writing seems like a huge lag time.
Didn’t Homo Erectus migrate to San Francisco??????
Simple, it would make their baggage overweight, incuring a steep fee.
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