Oldest Remains of Modern Humans Are Identified by Scientists

New York Times (AP Wire) ^ | February 16, 2005 | AP Wire

[Alter Kaker]

NEW YORK (AP) -- A new analysis of bones unearthed nearly 40 years ago in Ethiopia has pushed the fossil record of modern humans back to nearly 200,000 years ago -- perhaps close to the dawn of the species.

Researchers determined that the specimens are around 195,000 years old. Previously, the oldest known fossils of Homo sapiens were Ethiopian skulls dated to about 160,000 years ago.

Genetic studies estimate that Homo sapiens arose about 200,000 years ago, so the new research brings the fossil record more in line with that, said John Fleagle of Stony Brook University in New York, an author of the study.

The fossils were found in 1967 near the Omo River in southwestern Ethiopia. One location yielded Omo I, which includes part of a skull plus skeletal bones. Another site produced Omo II, which has more of a skull but no skeletal bones. Neither specimen has a complete face.

Although Omo II shows more primitive characteristics than Omo I, scientists called both specimens Homo sapiens and assigned a tentative age of 130,000 years.

Now, after visiting the discovery sites, analyzing their geology and testing rock samples with more modern dating techniques, Fleagle and colleagues report in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature that both specimens are 195,000 years old, give or take 5,000 years.

Fleagle said the more primitive traits of Omo II may mean the two specimens came from different but overlapping Homo sapiens populations, or that they just represent natural variation within a single population.

To find the age of the skulls, the researchers determined that volcanic rock lying just below the sediment that contained the fossils was about 196,000 years old. They then found evidence that the fossil-bearing sediment was deposited soon after that time.

Paul Renne, director of the Berkeley Geochronology Center, which specializes in dating rocks, said the researchers made "a reasonably good argument" to support their dating of the fossils.

"It's more likely than not," he said, calling the work "very exciting and important."

Rick Potts, director of the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, said he considered the case for the new fossil ages "very strong." The work suggests that "we're right on the cusp of where the genetic evidence says the origin of modern humans ... should be," he said.

G. Philip Rightmire, a paleoanthropologist at Binghamton University in New York, said he believes the Omo fossils show Homo sapiens plus a more primitive ancestor. The find appears to represent the aftermath of the birth of Homo sapiens, when it was still living alongside its ancestral species, he said.

[VadeRetro]

I could use your impressions on my impressions in post 438. In short, Setterfield is computing stellar luminosities and cancelling increases in luminosity with increases in opacity. He's using a Chandrasekhar formula but I suspect "abusing" is the better word.

[VadeRetro]

If nuclear reactions emit redder photons, why don't hot gasses?

Why don't a lot more photons knock a whole lot less massive gas particles right out of the star? Everything is much less massive, the photons--I refer to apparent momentum--and the gas particles both.

The effective momentum of a photon is given by h/l. That clearly decreases in Setterfield's world, as h goes way down as c goes way up. l increases, but not enough to offset or even matter. But the mass of the gas has gone down comparably. It won't take much whack to accelerate it and "the energy flux is the same."

[Elsie]

Light, huh?

 

 

 

 

John 1

 

 1.  In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
 2.  He was with God in the beginning.
 3.  Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.
 4.  In him was life, and that life was the light of men.
 5.  The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood  it.
 6.  There came a man who was sent from God; his name was John.
 7.  He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all men might believe.
 8.  He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light.
 9.  The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world.
 10.  He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him.
 11.  He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.
 12.  Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God--
 13.  children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband's will, but born of God.

 

NIV John 3:19-21
 19.  This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.
 20.  Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed.
 21.  But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God."

 

NIV John 8:12
   When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, "I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life."

 

 

NIV John 12:36
   Put your trust in the light while you have it, so that you may become sons of light." When he had finished speaking, Jesus left and hid himself from them.

 

 

NIV John 12:46
   I have come into the world as a light, so that no one who believes in me should stay in darkness.

 

 

NIV Acts 26:13-20
 13.  About noon, O king, as I was on the road, I saw a light from heaven, brighter than the sun, blazing around me and my companions.
 14.  We all fell to the ground, and I heard a voice saying to me in Aramaic,  `Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? It is hard for you to kick against the goads.'
 15.  "Then I asked, `Who are you, Lord?'   "`I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,' the Lord replied.
 16.  `Now get up and stand on your feet. I have appeared to you to appoint you as a servant and as a witness of what you have seen of me and what I will show you.
 17.  I will rescue you from your own people and from the Gentiles. I am sending you to them
 18.  to open their eyes and turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.'
 19.  "So then, King Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the vision from heaven.
 20.  First to those in Damascus, then to those in Jerusalem and in all Judea, and to the Gentiles also, I preached that they should repent and turn to God and prove their repentance by their deeds.

 

 

NIV 2 Corinthians 4:4
   The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.

 

 

NIV 1 John 1:5-8
 5.  This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all.
 6.  If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth.
 7.  But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all  sin.
 8.  If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.

 

 

NIV Revelation 21:23-25

 23.  The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp.
 24.  The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it.
 25.  On no day will its gates ever be shut, for there will be no night there.

[infocats]

"homo erectus...think about it"

Trust me, I was when I posted but I wasn't going to bring it "up"...Oops, there I go again :-)

[VadeRetro]

I found a nice little lecture on stellar internal dynamics and where opacity fits in. Stellar Structure. Here's a part of it, but I recommend visiting the site for the whole thing.

The structure of stars is determined by 5 relations or physical concepts:

1. hydrostatic equilibrium - Most stars, like the Sun, are not expanding nor contracting. They are stable in size. Therefore, this fact means that the internal pressure must balance the weight of the material above it (self-gravity)

   gravity compression is balanced by pressure outward

   

   Greater gravity compresses the gas, making it denser and hotter, so the outward pressure increases

2. thermal equilibrium - the amount of energy generated in the core of a star by thermonuclear fusion must equal the amount radiated away (the only place for the energy to go is outward)
   

3. opacity - how fast energy is radiated is determined by the resistance of the stellar envelope to the flow of photons. If a star has low opacity, it can radiate its energy fast and its temperature and pressure will be lower = smaller radii
   

   At a star's surface the energy is released to form the spectrum of the star.

4. energy transport - how energy is transported from the core to the stellar surface determines the surface temperature of a star (its color)

   There are three ways to transfer energy; conduction, convection and radiation. Conduction, the collisional transfer of energy between atoms, only occurs between solids (such as a hot pan and your hand), so is not found in stars. Only convection and radiation transfer are important in stars and the opacity determines which method is used. When the temperature is high and all the atoms are stripped of their electrons, the opacity is low and radiation transfer is dominant.

   

   When the temperature drops, such as in the outer layers of a stars interior, the protons and electrons recombine to form atoms and the opacity goes up. High opacity slows the transfer of energy by radiation, so bubbles form. These bubbles are hot and low in density, thus starting a convective flow.

   

   Whether convection or radiation transport is used depends on the temperature make-up of the stellar interior. When the changes in temperature are sharp, convection is used. Think of the photons as grains of sand on a pile. If the pile is low, radiation is used. If the pile is high, the sand tumbles down, convection is used.

When you play with opacity, you mess with the stellar radius and the surface color, yes. Opacity makes a star's surface even redder (and bigger). It's a red-shifting agent, not a blue-shifting agent.

It looks very like what I was imagining. The radius increases when you increase opacity because the radiation pressure on the opaque, energy-absorbing gas pushes the gas out and swells the star. Convection currents carry hot pockets to a boiling, seething surface.

I don't see this helping Setterfield at all, as his light is already too red.

[PatrickHenry]

Found an article debunking Setterfield at Talk.Origins: The Decay of c-decay. With some good links.

[Messianic Jews Net]

VSL has really matured since I first learned it. Instead of a simple statistical observation of history, it has become a robust predictive model. The key to this change was Setterfield's simplifying the theory, at the top of Implications to the statement that 'all "constants" which carry units of "per second" have been decreasing since the beginning of the universe. Constants with dimensions of "seconds" have been increasing inversely.' ("Decreasing" means as a trend.)

This first seemed fuzzy to me; for example, why would atomic rest mass vary? Well, because mass is measured by acceleration, which requires s^-2, a temporal factor. Now I can see this is the crux and simplicity of the theory.

The reason this step is ingenious is that math is based on reality and so all math formulas end up with precisely correct units that precisely cancel. The first time we ever heard of kg-m^2/s^2 we all sneered, but it works because of the math, which means the explanatory narrative will follow. C is ultimately inverse with t, atomic time, with ct the real constant in case you miss constants. All measurements of time vary together, so all cancellations will work out.

Setterfield is no longer playing the game of which plates to keep spinning and which need to go the other way and which are about to fall. All the plates are spinning smoothly in one stack. When I started I made the same mistake as you, of describing it in narrative to try to explain what is essentially mathematical: this led me to mistake photon energy levels. However, if you track down the equations for whatever phenomenon looks anomalous in VSL, you will find why the cancellation is appropriate. So it would be wrong for me to start pontificating about decreased momentum in photons versus decreased momentum in gases, instead we need to look up the equations.

This also effectively shuts down additional arguments based on cancelling factors. It does invite a different criticism, that the system is now too neat and pat and untestable. I think you can see the problem with that without my belaboring. The prior errors in theory are gone, so if there are no errors in observation in the multiple independent confirmations and multiple enigma resolutions, let's at least encourage others that VSL really is robust now.

Elsie, thank you so much for that encouragement! Have you considered this direct application of the above: the Light who gives Light in John 1:9 is also God and with God in John 1:1-2. "With" is "pros", meaning "facing", which in Hebrew is "lifne": in both cases it is a tactile, personal presence before someone. Now the Ten Words (which are also a creationist screed around #3-4) say you shall have no other gods "before" God, "lifne". Literally, it is: "No other gods for you can stand and face me." But God is the one who can stand and face himself, as John discovered! So here's another Messianic proof for you from the Torah: No god can stand before God, and if one ever does it proves he is God himself. Shalom.

[El Oviedo]

I will admit that I am dumb about the carbon dating and that's why I am asking questions.

I have a friend who can challenge you and your sources. He is offering $10,000. He is looking for someone who can provide scientific evidence, that is objective, valid, reliable, and calibrated.

Care to look and read at his challenge? Please visit http://www.csulb.edu/~jmastrop/prize.html.

Then let me know.

[VadeRetro]

Here's how it looks to me tonight. I had two merlots with dinner so tomorrow I may see it differently.

So it would be wrong for me to start pontificating about decreased momentum in photons versus decreased momentum in gases, instead we need to look up the equations.

When I look at how opacity got introduced, I see that Setterfield simply pulls in extant physics equations for computing the current opacity in a relatively static star at equilibrium. He has one equation for opacity from this source, one for opacity from that source, etc. Then he adds them up.

As the sources I have posted make clear, opacity has consequences he is not modeling. Opaque stars are bigger and cooler on the surface. I don't see that in his paper.

The radiation pressure on the opaque gasses push the gasses outwards. The surface is cooler because, with constant energy, a larger surface is a lower per unit of area energy surface.

Play with the opacity and you make the radius bigger. That makes the surface bigger and cooler.

It is said that when the Sun becomes a red giant (gets bigger and cooler for reasons that include increases in metal content and thus opacity) it will eat the Earth by expanding right out to our orbital radius. Setterfield with his 11-million-times boosts in c and opacity does the same thing in spades for the 6,000 year old Sun and Earth.

Only he doesn't notice. He just grabs what he wants and ignores what he wants. He blocks the light with his lightweight but opaque gas. That he incorporates into his paper. However, the blocked energy doesn't do anything to the gas. It's quite unclear where it goes. It's unaccountable. It doesn't seem to go anywhere.

Furthermore, the effect of opacity on surface-radiation wavelength is to redshift it further. I was already pretty sure the light was too red. Boosting opacity just makes it a lot redder yet. But if the Earth is well inside the solar radius, we'll be warm enough not to care.

Bad model. Bad theory.

[VadeRetro]

Found an article debunking Setterfield at Talk.Origins: The Decay of c-decay. With some good links.

That paper is on the other front, the historical data points which supposedly justified all this in the first place. I mostly don't look hard at that stuff, but in retrospect the Ichneumon presentation I borrowed was waved away rather feebly.

Within error? That handy chart from Ichneumon does show most measurements are within error (but it should be logarithmically scaled to keep pace with the increasing accuracy).

A concession and a quibble on presentation.

However, the measurements outside error have been shown to be statistically significant at 99% levels. E.g. 1657: 307600 +/- 5400; 1738: 303320 +/- 310; 1861: 300050 +/- 60.

And all of them are very early, horse and buggy technology. Trying to measure the speed of light with a badly ground telescope and only a crude idea of the size of the solar system.

Further data-point evidence is always being added.

All the new data indicates we are converging on better measurements of a true constant.

When we come to today Ichneumon says 299792.4358 is constant within 4 places (.00005?). But another source says 299792.4586 +/- .0003 in 1983.

On my calendar, 1983 was when I was 33. Not exactly 6,000 BC, but not yesterday either.

We're looking at wave-away science that puts Chuck Missler in a list of scientific citations. (Sorry, MJN! But you had to know better.)

[VadeRetro]

Care to look and read at his challenge? Please visit http://www.csulb.edu/~jmastrop/prize.html.

That link 404s for me. Did your buddy lose his money already?

[VadeRetro]

On my calendar, 1983 was when I was 33. Not exactly 6,000 BC, but not yesterday either.

Like I said, two merlots. The 1983 number reports more precision. Got your point. (Still a lawyerly nitpick.)

And so to bed.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the additional information!

[Alter Kaker]

I will admit that I am dumb about the carbon dating and that's why I am asking questions.

I'm not going to say dumb, but yes you are clearly ignorant about even the most basic concepts in science. So my question to you is, if you acknowledge you're ignorant about a subject, why do you presume to opine on it? Let your friends do it for you. I have friends who are great theologians. However, I am not one and I'll them argue theology for me. So either do some learning, or shut up, but don't spout ignorantly.

Care to look and read at his challenge? Please visit http://www.csulb.edu/~jmastrop/prize.html.

His challenge is inherently dubious, because he doesn't name who the judge will be. He picks a creationist superior court judge, and all subsequent arguments are irrelevent. Its just silly dishonest grandstanding.

[Messianic Jews Net]

And here's my quick takes.

Gas clouds are redshifted to the same degree as nearby stars (0-14), but unlike the Hubble model the shift (from today's observed values) is instantaneous, not Doppler. There is no issue of all useful light being lost by redshift. But to correctly describe the considerations of opacity, gas, and star structure to answer your implied concerns would require more study rather than a flip answer. Thanks again for your patience.

Yes, I waved the chart away quickly because it's an old view of the data. 1) The data was shown not to fit a flatline with 99% confidence, as three data points evidence. This is sufficient for most scientists to admit a tenable start hypothesis. To dismiss some data as "horse-and-buggy" is not scientific whether you or Setterfield does it. 2) We have two modern measurements off from each other by .023 which claim to have only .0003 error; one or both was wrong. This is sufficient for most scientists to admit modern technology does not always measure up to its claims and cannot be relied on for 10 significant figures. 3) Those are just quick examples pulled from web skims. The 1993 report strengthens statistical confidence that the flatline model is, well, flatlined. Quick links:

Setterfield Papers
Response to criticism of 1987 report
Montgomery-Dolphin 1993

Alas, PatrickHenry's article from talkorigins really hurts his case. Suffice to say that if the article is copyright 1997-2003; if it includes a link to its unaddressed rebuttal copyright 2000; if article objects to early 1980s versions of a paper without once mentioning its peer-reviewed 1987 status; and if article objects because the prepublication paper abuses sources: this is what psychologists call projection, combined with inability to retract anything rebutted. There is nothing to rebut that is not rebutted by Setterfield 2000 or Setterfield-Norman 1987 or Montgomery-Dolphin 1993. Embarrassing for Bob Day.

[ApesForEvolution]

LOL

I was gonna say Helen Thomas...bwahahaha.

[tang-soo]

After reading another thread with a similar theme, I wonder if some day, this discovery will also be termed a "dating disaster".

[El Oviedo]

Correction - URL should have read

http://www.csulb.edu/~jmastrop

Please try again.

[VadeRetro]

OK, in the cold light of this morning it doesn't look like my after-dinner to-glasses-of-wine sleepies hurt my thought processes much. The opacity objection stands.

But it also hits me I still have much of my original heartburn, even if there's a lot of new material to sift through. I'm still trying to see where I got my answers.

What were original reaction rates on Sun and Earth? How many photons and alpha particles did they respectively generate?

Never mind Setterfield's almost impenetrable paper for the moment. I spent a lot of time looking at earlier versions of it years ago but it seems mostly new and wondrous. Let's look at what I have from you.

1) Sunlight: First VR correctly observes that over time, the energy of a photon is conserved (except at quantum leaps, which can be ignored here)

I was worrying about across quantum leaps only. Because of the hc = constant balancing act, the per-photon changes are a wash. I assume that nothing happens to wavelength for in-flight photons since space is not expanding in a Setterfield universe. That's all you have to play with. E = hc / l doesn't give you anywhere much to hide anything.

The per-photon energy changes are a wash.

Again, yes. A green photon stays green forever and has the same energy forever.

Then VR correctly observes that in the past, the total energy from all photons should have been much lower: The energy of each photon has to go a lot lower or Adam is in trouble.

Only if the Sun is 6,000 years old but looks 4.5 billion because of incredibly boosted reaction rates in the past. Setterfield puts a reaction rate into several of his formulas in recognition of this change. I don't see where he puts numbers in here but the original rates have to be incredibly cranked. If you just take the two numbers 6,000 and 4.5 billion, one is 750,000 times the other one. But that's very misleading, because Setterfield's decay curve flattens dramatically early on, inverse cosecant squared or whatever. By far the lion's share of the work has to get done in the first five hundred years or so, then, because only negligle amounts of the total are getting done once the c-curve decays to the neighborhood of modern values. For that early period the ratio then looks more like nine million to one, which is why I suspect the actual multiplier will turn out to be Setterfield's c-boost of 11 million. And if the nuclear fuel burn rate is that high, there will be that many more photons and that many more alpha particles.

Here I must admit being mistaken about the cancellation coming from lower individual photon energy in the past, because I confused the present low value of old photon energy with its past high value, which does appear identical to the present high value of new photon energy.

I do not understand what you are saying you confused. What is the present value of an old photon? We agreed I think that a photon is a photon and its energy will be proportional to its wavelength, other differences cancelling.

An old photon would have much less energy now, but be emitted much more often, than a new photon, but in both cases the energy is conserved.

I think you're trying to say there were more photons then, but redder. That's what Setterfield said in at least one paper. The problem is that energy is not conserved if the redshifts are small. Vastly too many photons, only a tiny redshift. We need a factor of 11 million (only you can't do that and not go blind). We have less than two.

Where is the cancellation? The opacity computation doesn't do it for me. That hides nothing. OK, it puts in some extra redshift. But you can't do enough redshift without going blind. And the Earth becomes a red giant before you do enough.

That means the photons observed now from the remote edge of the universe have much less energy than the photons from our sun now. However, the cancellation must come from the totality of photons if it exists, rather than from individual photons.

... Setterfield's solution to this objection in 6.2 is to calculate the overall luminosity of the star to see if it is truly greater with c or if factors cancel...

And the answer is in Setterfield's luminosity calculation. I feel this to be deeply flawed, a shell game with cherry-picked formulae rather than a consistently applied model stepped through stages of time and change. In particular, he abuses stellar opacity, taking only what he wants. I assume he does the same everywhere with everything else he's doing.

You truly have 11 million times more photons back then, so far as I can still tell. They aren't very red-shifted, although yet another problem is that it's far from clear why not. The hydrogen nuclei fusing in the Sun back then have masses only a tiny fraction of the masses of modern hydrogen nuclei. A tiny fraction. That the photons emerge with a z of only 1.5 sort of beggars understanding, E = mc², and conservation of energy in general. They have almost the same energy of modern solar photons, and where did that come from?

But take it as a gimme that they emerge with almost the same energy as now but there are 11 million of them for every single modern photon. The cancellation is the Sun's opacity, 11 million times greater then than now? Did you think about this?

[VadeRetro]

I think you really meant to link this page. A kinesiologist (jock who can read) associate professor with ICR offers a very fishy looking bet. To whit:

Rules for the Life Science Prize
1. The evolutionist puts $10,000 in escrow with the judge.
2. The creationist puts $10,000 in escrow with the judge.
3. If the evolutionist proves evolution is science and creation is religion, then the evolutionist is awarded the $20,000.
4. If the creationist proves creation is science and evolution is religion, then the creationist is awarded the $20,000.
5. Evidence must be scientific, that is, objective, valid, reliable and calibrated.
6. The preponderance of evidence prevails.
7. At the end of the trial, the judge hands the prevailing party both checks.
8. The judge is a superior court judge.
9. The venue is a courthouse.

Debate Dodgers List as of November 2004
A debate dodger is a creation basher who declines “to put money where the mouth is.”
This list is kept by public school creationist, Mr. Karl Priest (kcpriest@aol.com).
1. Dr. Massimo Pigliucci. Atheist and science professor, Tennessee University. (3-11-02)
2. Mr. Andre H. Artus. Atheist. No credentials provided.
...

You can certainly include me out, too. It might be different if I get to pick the judge, but that's one term I don't see.

And why a courtroom and not the Internet? After all, we have these debates on the web all the time. It's lovely how we can link web sites with the evidence for evolution--sure is a lot of stuff on that one link there!--rather than trying to compress an explanation of same into some kind of 15-minute opening statement or whatever ... Oh, wait! That WAS the idea, wasn't it?