Giant stone-age axes found in African lake basin

PhysOrg.com ^ | September 10, 2009 | Unknown

[Scythian]

suggests that the region was once much drier and wetter than it is today

? much wetter and drier? anything of about 400 years old is crap shoot, the rest is utter nonsense like this story

[ApplegateRanch]

about a gut building his log cabin in Alaska

What does his obesity have to do with anything? That is offensively pejorative to Americans of a size!

[ApplegateRanch]

It was wetter, until the logs soaked up the water, and sank, making the area drier...until the logs dried out, refilling the lake and starting the cycle all over again. This went on for centuries...perhaps millennia...until the logs finally rotted to the point that they no longer functioned.

This is why logging is an environmental disaster that leads to global desertificational flooding; and why saw mills are always associated with ponds full of both floating and sunken logs.

You need a carefully controlled mix of both dry and waterlogged logs to maintain a mill pond, without it either flooding or drying out.

Obviously these Paleolithics hadn't yet discovered that fact.

[redhead]

"Seem too large to be useful. How does their size compare with that of other stone axes?"

It looks like they could have been used for breaking bones of large prey, like the massive woodland bison or early elephants, rhinos, or large grazers. The implements look like they range from twice the size of previously discovered axes to as much as six or eight times. Interesting.

[Nikas777]

lol = gut = guy. Who was more fit by the look of him in his 60s than I am in my youth right now.

[Lazamataz]

It was colder and hotter, and lighter and darker too.

[wxgesr]

They used to hide them there when invading armies would come to search for illgeal weapons. Kind of like Saddam did with his buried air force in the sand.

[SunkenCiv]

:’D

[Reeses]

also littered with tens of thousands of other smaller stone-age tools

Why would they leave thousands of unbroken tools scattered upon a field? It never occurs to modern academics that this might have been a battlefield. They cannot accept that humans are war makers by nature.

[decimon]

They used to hide them there when invading armies would come to search for illgeal weapons.

Maybe they didn't hide them so invading armies would change their minds.

[colorado tanker]

shown that the mega lake was filled with water on multiple occasions in the last 250,000 years

Call the global warming posse! Someone wandered off the reservation!

[OB1kNOb]

[GeronL]

lol.

I am sure that is correct

[SunkenCiv]

Evolution in Your Face
by Patrick Huyghe
Omni

Lake Victoria, Africa's largest lake, is home to more than 300 species of cichlids. These fish, which are popular in aquariums, are deep-bodied and have one nostril, rather than the usual two, on each side of the head. Seismic profiles and cores of the lake taken by a team headed by Thomas C. Johnson of the University of Minnesota, reveal that the lake dried up completely about 12,400 years ago. This means that the rate of speciation of cichlid fishes has been extremely rapid: something on average of one new species every 40 years!

[Natural Law]

"What were they doing out on the lake with big hand axes like that?"

These were two hand ax tools most likely used in the fabrication of dug-out canoes.

[SunkenCiv]

GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach	join list or digest view topics view or post blog bookmark post a topic subscribe
Just updating the GGG info, not sending a general distribution. Evolution in Your Face by Patrick Huyghe Omni Lake Victoria, Africa's largest lake, is home to more than 300 species of cichlids. These fish, which are popular in aquariums, are deep-bodied and have one nostril, rather than the usual two, on each side of the head. Seismic profiles and cores of the lake taken by a team headed by Thomas C. Johnson of the University of Minnesota, reveal that the lake dried up completely about 12,400 years ago. This means that the rate of speciation of cichlid fishes has been extremely rapid: something on average of one new species every 40 years! 12,400 years ago? Hydrologic cycle came to a screeching whoa for some reason, hmm, what could it have been? To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.