Exactly How Old Are Homo Sapiens?

[StevenJay]

The natives share common characteristics across the face of the globe. Dark hair, dark eyes, dark skin. Commonly, when left to their own devices, these people live the same as their ancestors have for thousands of years. Good examples of these people live deep in the Amazon and remote African villages. Contrary to the "civilized" peoples who congregate in large cites and have creative, inventive minds, these native peoples remain static, unchanged and simple. They use the same tools and techniques handed down from generation to generation with no desire nor impulse to create new ways or ideas.

I think that maybe the old sayings: If it ain't broke, don't fix it, and Necessity is the father of invention might apply.

[nick c]

When did the first homo sapiens appear?
Very interesting question.
What is the scientifically established earliest date for homo sapiens and what methods, dating techniques, etc. led to the determination of that date?

DNA and fossil evidence indicates that modern humans originated in east Africa about 200,000 years ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human

How does DNA evidence give a date? or how does one deduce a date from DNA evidence?
Fossil evidence? are we talking about radiometric dating, stratigraphic dating? other?

nick c

[junglelord]

I for one believe we are far older then they claim and that we have origins that make the possibility we are from somewhere else a real option. That is probably too personal a viewpoint for this thread. But I did make a thread on the DNA and the sequence of our genome and that may be a good link for this line of thought. Mitochondrial Eve is most interesting.

The Head-scratching Discovery

Humbling was the prevalent adjective used by the scientific teams and the media to describe the principal finding that the human genome contains not the anticipated 100,000 - 140,000 genes (the stretches of DNA that direct the production of amino-acids and proteins) but only some 30,000+ -- little more than double the 13,601 genes of a fruit fly and barely fifty percent more than the roundworms: 19,098. What a comedown from the pinnacle of the genomic Tree of Life!

Moreover, there was hardly any uniqueness to the human genes. They are comparative to not the presumed 95 percent but to almost 99 percent of the chimpanzees, and 70 percent of the mouse. Human genes, with the same functions, were found to be identical to genes of other vertebrates, as well as invertebrates, plants, fungi, even yeast. The findings not only confirmed that there was one source of DNA for all life on Earth, but also enabled the scientists to trace the evolutionary process how more complex organisms evolved, genetically, from simpler ones, adopting at each stage the genes of a lower life form to create a more complex higher life form culminating with Homo sapiens.

It was here, in tracing the vertical evolutionary record contained in the human and the other analyzed genomes, that the scientists ran into an enigma. Thehead-scratching discovery by the public consortium, as Science termed it, was that the human genome contains 223 genes that do not have the required predecessors on the genomic evolutionary tree.

How did Humankind acquire such a bunch of enigmatic genes?

In the evolutionary progression from bacteria to invertebrates (such as the lineages of yeast, worms, flies or mustard weed which have been deciphered) to vertebrates (mice, chimpanzees) and finally modern humans, these 223 genes are completely missing in the invertebrate phase. Therefore, the scientists can explain their presence in the human genome by arather recent (in evolutionary time scales)probable horizontal transfer from bacteria.

In other words: At a relatively recent time as Evolution goes, modern humans acquired an extra 223 genes not through gradual evolution, not vertically on the Tree of Life, but horizontally, as a sideways insertion of genetic material from bacterial

An Immense Difference

Now, at first glance it would seem that 223 genes is no big deal. In fact, while every single gene makes a great difference to every individual, 223 genes make an immense difference to a species such as ours.

The human genome is made up of about three billion neucleotides (the letters A-C-G-T which stand for the initials of the four nucleic acids that spell out all life on Earth); of them, just a little more than one percent are grouped into functioning genes (each gene consists of thousands of "letters"). The difference between one individual person and another amounts to about oneletter in a thousand in the DNAalphabet. The difference between Humankind and Chimpanzee is less than one percent as genes go; and one percent of 30,000 genes is 300.

So, 223 genes is more than two thirds of the difference between me, you and a chimpanzee!

An analysis of the functions of these genes through the proteins that they spell out, conducted by the Public Consortium team and published in the journal Nature, shows that they include not only proteins involved in important physiological but also psychiatric functions. Moreover, they are responsible for important neurological enzymes that stem only from the mitochondrial portion of the DNA the so-called "Eve DNA" that humankind inherited only through the mother-line, all the way back to a singleEve. That finding alone raises doubt regarding that the "bacterial insertion" explanation.

A Matter of Extreme Significance

Unless further scientific research can establish, beyond any doubt, that the only possible source of the extra genes are indeed bacteria, and unless it is then also determined that the infection (horizontal transfer) went from bacteria to Man and not from Man to bacteria, the only other available solution will be that offered by the Sumerian texts millennia ago.

Until then, the enigmatic 223 alien genes will remain as an alternative and as a corroboration by modern science of extraterrestrial civilizations, and their apparent genetic participation in the Human Genome.


http://www.thunderbolts.info/forum/phpB ... =10&t=1829

[MarcusDrake]

So, Junglelord, do you think that an outside influence was involved in the creation of Homo Sapien?

As I stated in an earlier reply that I see two distinct peoples on this planet. One is Homo Sapiens and the other is Homo Sapien Sapiens. The difference between the two is almost indistinguishable to all but highly trained anatomists. The biggest difference, in my opinion, lies in the brain. Size matters not, but structure is key. Take for example two modern people, one a genius, the other one developmentally challenged. For all intents and purposes their bones would appear to scientists as identical. But in reality the difference between the two is vast on an intellectual level.

I think that we are all products of the erath and we are by nature animals, but there exists within us the capacity to be more than mere animals. Unlike tigers or rabbits, we have the choice to act and react the way we want. We can change our instinctual nature and bend it to our will. Our consciousness has the ability to rewrite our programming. We can be an animal, or we can choose to be human beings.

Long ago, our ancestors came out of Africa with their dark hair, skin and eyes, and they spread all over the globe. But for some strange reason, from the middle east, right next to the equator where dark skin prevails, light skinned people with light eyes and hair began to spread. These people left a written record of what went on around them and the things they did. And they tell of how their giant gods came out of the heavens to dwell among them.

In the Book of Enoch, it is written that Lamech went to Enoch very upset because his son was born with the face of an angel and eyes that shone like the sun. Noah, was the child's name and he was different. Why would Lamech compare Noah to an angel unless he actually resembled one? Maybe there is something to the Sumerian writings?

Who were these people really, where did they go, and what did they do to our ancestors?

[flyingcloud]

In other words: At a relatively recent time as Evolution goes, modern humans acquired an extra 223 genes not through gradual evolution, not vertically on the Tree of Life, but horizontally, as a sideways insertion of genetic material from bacterial


http://www.thunderbolts.info/forum/phpB ... =10&t=1829

bacterial horizontal reproduction

http://www.thunderbolts.info/forum/phpB ... f=9&t=2097

it would be interesting to find bacteria genes that can back this up, Though I have felt it happen, that just doesn't convince people

I was just exploring the possibility of bacterial quantum entanglement in another realm

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 132450.htm

Bacteria belonging to the Wolbachia group are adapted to invertebrate animals such as insects, spiders, scorpions, and worms. These bacteria spread via the female's eggs from one generation to the next and manipulate the sex quotas among the infected animals so that more females are produced in the population. Mechanically speaking, the bacteria convert genetic males into females or kill male embryos that are then eaten by their sisters or make females lay unfertilized eggs that all become females. However, what happens most commonly is that the males cannot reproduce with non-infected females. This gives the infected females a great advantage, and the infection spreads rapidly among the population.

mitochondrial eve bacteria

bacteria creates fractal artistry

[flyingcloud]

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/517980/Late ... ransfer-HO


http://whyfiles.org/075genome/

* It's bacterial. The genome project found 223 genes in humans that match those in bacteria -- but are not found in intermediate organisms like fruit flies. Apparently, these genes jumped from bacteria to humans -- or vice versa -- but the mechanism of movement is not understood. This finding reflects the decoding of full picture of the genetic endowmentn, or genomen, of dozens of simple organisms.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/a ... 903?ck=nck

About 40 genes were found to be exclusively shared by humans and bacteria and are candidate examples of horizontal transfer from bacteria to vertebrates.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_o ... 1ee86edb32

When the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium (IHGSC) published its draft of the human genome in February 2001, several genes were identified as possible bacteria-to-vertebrate transfers (BVTs). These genes were identified by their highly significant sequence similarity to bacterial genes in BLAST searches, and by their lack of matches among non-vertebrate eukaryote genes. Many were later rejected as BVTs by several methods, including recovery of probable orthologs from the genomes of incompletely sequenced eukaryotes. Whereas the BVT issue has received considerable attention, there has been no compilation of all potential BVTs considered to date, nor any proposal of a single comprehensive method for rigorously establishing the veracity of a putative BVT. In reviewing the work to date, we list all of the proteins examined and propose systematic tests to investigate whether a vertebrate gene proposed as a BVT is indeed of bacterial origin. We use the proposed strategy to test – and reject – one of the BVTs from the original IHGSC list.

[Grey Cloud]

This article puts humans in the 400,000 to 250,000 years ago timeframe.
Early Human Hunters Had Fewer Meat-Sharing Rituals
http://uanews.org/node/26794
Usual nonsense.

[junglelord]

Hobbits walked out of Africa

THE identity of the tiny human-like creature discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2004 has become clearer -- and more astonishing -- thanks to a new analysis by Australian and Indonesian scientists.

According to a team led by Australian National University doctoral student Debbie Argue, not only is Homo floresiensis, nicknamed the hobbit, not a deformed modern human, as a handful of critics claim, but the small-brained, long-armed biped was the first human-like creature to walk out of Africa.

And it did so nearly two million years ago, roughly 100,000 years before a species most scientists believed was the first migrant. That was a somewhat more modern hominin -- a member of a group including humans and their ancestors -- that was discovered in Dmanisi, Republic of Georgia, variously identified as H.georgicus, H. ergaster or H. erectus.

"We're looking at a very archaic being indeed, one that appears to have gone its own evolutionary way long before our species emerged," Ms Argue said.

She noted that a population of hobbits lived on Flores from roughly 76,000 to about 13,000 years ago, seemingly unbothered by the emergence and expansion of modern humans.

"I think it's incredible that it lived until so recently," Ms Argue said. "Humans came down through Asia but missed Flores. It's lucky that Flores was hard to get to."

The findings, recently reported in the Journal of Human Evolution, back a similar argument made in the journal Science in 2007 that the hobbit's unique wrist anatomy suggested the 1m-tall creature came from a lineage that lived long before the common ancestor of people and Neanderthals.

Previously researchers suspected hobbits descended from H. erectus but had shrunk because of their confinement on an island.

In her study Ms Argue collaborated with discovery team co-leaders Mike Moorwood at the University of Wollongong in NSW and Thomas Sutikna at the Jakarta-based Indonesian Centre for Archeology. With ICA colleagues they compared 60 skull and skeletal features obtained from two individual hobbits to those of hominins, chimps and gorillas.

The technique, cladistic analysis, revealed hobbits probably took one of two evolutionary paths from Africa to Flores. One began 1.66 million years ago, the other 1.9 million years ago.

Three years ago a group headed by the University of Sydney's Richard Wright, including Ms Argue, reported complementary results in Journal of Human Evolution. They used a separate procedure, multivariate analysis, to determine which species the hobbit most resembled, not to tease out evolutionary relationships, as did Ms Argue's team.

Professor Wright said: "Before I did my analyses, I had an open mind about whether H.floresiensis was a deformed modern human or an early hominin.

"My analysis forced me to concluded that H.floresiensis was an early hominin in shape, like well-known fossils of H.erectus.

"So different methods and different data lead to the same result (ancient hominin, not deformed human).

"That's compelling science."

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/st ... 32,00.html

[MarcusDrake]

Hobbits, eh?

Seems to me that the dwarves, elves, and other faerie creatures mentioned in folklore may have been more firmly based in fact than we give credit. Like all old myths and legends, they are not based upon the fancies of primitive fiction writers, but rather upon factual events and peoples that have long since passed beyond the shrouds of time.

[junglelord]

So Hobbits left Africa before us and somehow made a boat and sailed to this island?
Wild...

[atpcliff]

Hi!

From what I understand, the animal ancestors of humans originated in East Africa about 5 million years or so ago. That is supported by archeological fossil dating techniques. I also understand that DNA evidence, gathered from many peoples throughout the world, shows that humans originated in Africa.

I have read a lot about reincarnation. The first book that helped me understand was written by a therapist who did not believe in reincarnation. He was trying to help his patients by regressing them to problems that they had in their past, so that he could help them overcome them. But, what often happened, was that they regressed BEYOND this life, into a time before they were born. At first, he did not understand/believe what was happening. But, after it happened over and over again, and he was able to help people, buy working through problems that they had encountered in past lives, he came to believe.

From what I have read about reincarnation, God needed to wait until the human animal was advanced enough to achieve God's objectives. So, about 100,000 years ago, God began changing human animals into humans. This approximate date is associated with the oldest evidence that has been found showing the first burials/funeral rites.

atpcliff
Nairobi

[Total Science]

Not from Africa: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/scien ... 83861.html

Experts believe fossilised bones unearthed at the medieval village of Dmanisi in the foothills of the Caucuses, and dated to about 1.8 million years ago, are the oldest indisputable remains of humans discovered outside of Africa.

But what has really excited the researchers is the discovery that these early humans (or "hominins") are far more primitive-looking than the Homo erectus humans that were, until now, believed to be the first people to migrate out of Africa about 1 million years ago.

The Dmanisi people had brains that were about 40 per cent smaller than those of Homo erectus and they were much shorter in stature than classical H. erectus skeletons, according to Professor David Lordkipanidze, general director of the Georgia National Museum. "Before our findings, the prevailing view was that humans came out of Africa almost 1 million years ago, that they already had sophisticated stone tools, and that their body anatomy was quite advanced in terms of brain capacity and limb proportions. But what we are finding is quite different," Professor Lordkipanidze said.

"The Dmanisi hominins are the earliest representatives of our own genus – Homo – outside Africa, and they represent the most primitive population of the species Homo erectus to date. They might be ancestral to all later Homo erectus populations, which would suggest a Eurasian origin of Homo erectus."

[soldeed]

Hello to all this is my first post here. I just stumbled across this site 2 weeks ago and was absolutely astounded at finding an alternative cosmology! I never suspected such a thing existed-!! Have been furiously reading blog posts, POD's and I am convinced; The universe IS electric! As to this present discussion I would like to add a data point that may shed some light on the mysteries of the origins of man. Have a look at these illustrations

http://www.atlan.org/images/articles/ch ... m/fig1.jpg
http://www.atlan.org/images/articles/tr ... /fig2.html

These images come from http://www.atlan.org/ and I don't want to drag this thread off to a discussion of Atlantis. (I am not entirely sure which section on the forum is appropriate for that. I am disappointed the comparative mythology section is not up because the late Prof. Arysio Nunes dos Santos, author of the site, used that as one of his tools to find it.)

Now, the maps show areas which are less than 100 meters deep. At the end of the ice age 11,600 years ago, a global catastrophe which the professor theorizes was a super volcano induced chain reaction setting off more volcanoes, earthquakes, tidal waves, all kind of really bad stuff including electrical phenomenon no doubt- in the end caused the sea level to rise about 100-150 meters. Besides what is shown in the map, anywhere there is a continental shelf was also inundated.

So you see the Earth used to have a lot more real estate, and what prime real estate it was! There smack dab at the equator a huge expanse of fertile volcanic soil. during the ice age, it would certainly have been a lot more pleasant for it's residents than the poor schlubs who were freezing their butts off in Europe and elsewhere.

[moses]

Hello and welcome to the alternative section. Indeed no discussion of the origins of humanity would be complete without considering Atlantis. But it is not something that we much agree about, around here. And Atlantis is more history or mythology than the human question.
Perhaps my basic issue is whether there was Arctic or Antarctic ice in the Saturn System. And so was Antlantis - if it existed, during the Saturn System or more recent. If one puts Atlantis with the lower sea level of an ice age then the going down of land could be attributed to interplanetary interaction of Venus, for example, and Earth. However if the lower sea level was due to there being less water on Earth in the Saturn System, then the cause would be something unusual happening in the Saturn System.
Most here think that Atlantis was a myth, and the layout of the city of Atlantis suggests the old planetary arrangement. Personally I feel that land went down sometime, and advanced civilization could have lived alongside more primitive humans. There are many mysteries to discover.
Mo

[Total Science]

Perhaps my basic issue is whether there was Arctic or Antarctic ice in the Saturn System.

The answer is quite obviously no.

If, as Pythagoras claimed, the sea is a "tear of Saturn" then the answer is no.

"Certain things he [Pythagoras] declared mystically, symbolically, most of which were collected by Aristotle, as when he called the sea a tear of Saturn...." -- Porphyry, philosopher, 3rd century

More importantly, Antarctica was located in a temperate latitude in the time of Kronos so you have serious and irreconcilable chronology issues with such a belief.

We know exactly when Atlantis thrived because Sonchis of Sais, Solon of Salamis, and Plato of Athens tell us specifically in the Timaeus.

"She [Venus] founded your city a thousand years before ours, receiving from the Earth and Hephaestus the seed of your race, and afterwards she founded ours [Sais], of which the constitution is recorded in our sacred registers to be eight thousand years old." -- Sonchis of Sais, priest, 6th century B.C.

So that places the end of the Atlantean Empire at the beginning of the Holocene, namely ~ 9500 B.C.

The time of Kronos was much earlier than 9500 B.C.



And Antarctica was not in a polar latitude at that time. The climate of Antarctica was temperate.


Warm water coral in Antarctica.

"And immediately there is the problem of the climate. There were ancient climates that were very different from what they are today. If those corals grew where they were found, certainly the Earth was not travelling with the same elements of rotation and revolution which means not in the same orbit, not with the axis directed in the same position as it is today. If you don't believe it, try to cultivate corals on the North Pole." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1966

Via The New York Times 1984:

FOR years a few imaginative authors have argued, based on 16th century maps, that the ice-covered continent of Antarctica was discovered and mapped by an ancient civilization, perhaps one from another planet. The latter proposition was dismissed by most geographers and historians as preposterous.

Nevertheless, a careful comparison of information appearing on the maps with what is now known of the continent has led a leading geologist and polar specialist to propose that the outlines of Antarctica may, in fact, have been known long before Columbus reached America.

Sullivan, W., New Analysis Hints Ancient Explorers Mapped Antarctic, The New York Times, Sep 1984

Via Science News 1986:

The new find of roots and stems of wooden plants and of pollen in an area stretching about 1,300 kilometers along the Transantarctic Mountains means not only that the ice retreated but also that the climate was warm enough to support a shrublike beach forest. "The presence of the wood means that there was deglaciation on a major scale, with conditions radically different than they are today," says David Elliot, chief scientist of the recent National Science Foundation polar expedition, of which Webb's group was part. "This is a very significant find." Webb thinks the forest region a few million years ago must have resembled the present-day fjords of Chile and Norway.

According to Webb, before the forest developed, the region was covered by a considerable amount of ice. So an important question is where the forest and pollen came from. "Had the forest been living there all the time, and are we overestimating the severity of the earlier glacial record?" he wonders.

Weisburd, S., A Forest Grows In Antarctica, Science News, Volume 129, Number 148, Mar 1986

Via Terra Antarctica Reports 1999:

The [Antarctic] ice sheet has resulted in one of the most extreme environments on the planet - mean annual temperature in the interior is between -50oC and -60oC - and yet in the distant past 200 million years ago the Antarctic was a continent of forests and plains with temperatures of around 10oC or more. Here we review evidence from the Antarctic continent of changes in climate that have taken place over the last 100 million years, a period that has seen the formation of a mountain range across the middle of the continent, and its change from an ice-free to an ice-covered state.

Barrett, P., Antarctic Climate History Over The Last 100 Million Years, Terra Antarctica Reports, Volume 3, Pages 53-72, 1999

Via Science Daily 2008:

ScienceDaily (July 29, 2008) — A snapshot of New Zealand’s climate 40 million years ago reveals a greenhouse Earth, with warmer seas and little or no ice in Antarctica, according to research recently published in the journal Geology.

The study suggests that Antarctica at that time was yet to develop extensive ice sheets. ...

“This is too warm to be the Antarctic water we know today,” said Dr Catherine (Cat) Burgess from Cardiff University and lead-author of the paper. “And the seawater chemistry shows there was little or no ice on the planet.”

Snapshot of Past Climate Reveals No Ice In Antarctica Millions of Years Ago, Science Daily, Jul 2008