In one study, computer models and hundreds of 3D X-ray measurements of the fossils suggested that numerous features of the face, jaw and teeth were almost indistinguishable from those of modern-day humans. "This material represents the very root of our species - the oldest specimens ever found in Africa or elsewhere." They looked like us We realized this site was much older than anyone could have imagined," Hublin told Live Science. "These dates were a big 'wow,' I would say. Those individuals date back about 285,000 to 350,000 years - much older than 40,000 years. The new analyses revealed that all of the fossils recovered from the site came from at least five individuals - three adults, one adolescent and one 7- to 8-year-old child, Hublin said. In addition, before the 1980s, any human fossils that were about 40,000 years old and had primitive features, such as strong brow ridges, were often labeled as Neanderthal, whereas they might not be labeled that way today, said Jean-Jacques Hublin, a paleoanthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and co-lead author of one of the new studies. For example, the excavations that collected the fossils did not make it clear which layers of earth the bones were found in, which makes their age uncertain, said Shannon McPherron, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and a co-author of one of the new studies. However, subsequent research cast doubts on whether those fossils were 40,000-year-old Neanderthal bones. (Image credit: Shannon McPherron/MPI EVA Leipzig) In our case, technological development has been accompanied by widespread extinctions and rapid environmental changes, so those are red flags as well.The excavation area is visible as a dark notch a little more than halfway down the ridge line sloping to the left in this image of the archaeological site of Jebel Irhoud in Morocco. Using human technology as their guide, Schmidt and Frank suggest zeroing in on plastics and other long-lived synthetic molecules as well as radioactive fallout (in case factions of ancient lizard people waged atomic warfare). Modern humans have been around for just 100,000 years, a thin sliver of time within the vast and spotty fossil record.įor these reasons, Frank and Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist at Goddard and the paper's co-author, focus on the possibility of finding chemical relics of an ancient terrestrial civilization.
Sleestaks NBC / NBC via Getty Imagesįinding fossilized bones is a slightly better bet, but if another advanced species walked the Earth millions of years ago - if they walked - it would be easy to overlook their fossilized skeletons - if they had skeletons. And no one should count on finding a Jurassic iPhone it wouldn't last millions of years, Gorilla Glass or no. Any comparable cities from an earlier civilization would be easy for modern-day paleontologists to miss. “Our cities cover less than one percent of the surface,” he says. The discovery of physical artifacts would certainly be the most dramatic evidence of a Silurian-style civilization on Earth, but Frank doubts we’ll ever find anything of the sort. By the same token, if some earlier civilization existed on Earth millions of years ago, we might have trouble finding evidence of it. If humans went extinct today, Frank says, any future civilization that might arise on Earth millions of years hence might find it hard to recognize traces of human civilization.
“We’ve had an industrial society for only about 300 years, but there’s been complex life on land for nearly 400 million years.” “Do we really know we were the first technological species on Earth?” asks Adam Frank, a professor of physics and astronomy at Rochester and a co-author of the paper. In a mind-bending new paper entitled “The Silurian Hypothesis” - a reference to an ancient race of brainy reptiles featured in the British science fiction show "Doctor Who" - scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the University of Rochester take a critical look at the scientific evidence that ours is the only advanced civilization ever to have existed on our planet.
0 kommentar(er)
