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| How can he be transitional and fully modern at the same time? |
Easily -- the transitional fossil record goes from Home Erectus to Mungo Man (anatomically identical to Modern Australian) without recourse to being replaced in the way the Out of Africa theory demands.....
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| In other words Mungo is just, yawn, another Aborigine of the approved age for modern human entry into Australia. Note the importance of the second half of the sentence, which seems to indicate that only the Israeli finding is now holding the classical Out-of-Africa thesis together. |
Yes, the testing I referred to was done in 2001....It was redone in 2003 and as I said, estimated downwards -- but be aware that the new dating is just on the layers....(being carried out by a team headed by some guy called Bowler who believes that dating human bones is "notoriously unreliable") and worth noting the original teams stand by their figures...
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Well I don't have any specific ones....I just thought there were loads there.... |
Phew, I thought for a moment that my palaeolithic goose was thoroughly cooked. Here's the relevant quote from the link Claire provided
| In the southeastern quadrant of Alberta is a swath of lunar-like landscape known as the Canadian Badlands. This ancient seabed is home to some of the world's richest deposits of prehistoric fossils and dinosaur finds |
And where did the glaciation reach at its furthest extent? The south-eastern quadrant of Alberta. Were you to ask the Great Palaeological Theorist M J Harper to predict where Canada's enormous dinosaur population would begin to leave fossils that have come down to us, he would say, "Exactly where the glaciation finished, roughly the present US/Canadian border."
See the Palaeo-Geography thread for the identical situation in Norway.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I am hoping this is a typical example of 'careful ignoral'. It looks for all the world as if the whole of Canada heaves with fossils but I am prepared to bet that none of the examples cited is unambiguously inside the glaciation zone. However, Claire, as our resident expert, you are here to settle this momentous question. Remember, just one contrary example and the entire thesis falls! The fate of the world ('s true history) is in your hands!
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| I am hoping this is a typical example of 'careful ignroal'. It looks for all the world as if the whole of Canada heaves with fossils but I am prepared to bet that none of the examples cited is unambiguously inside the glaciation zone. However, Claire, as our resident expert, you are here to answer this momentous question. Remember, just one example and the entire thesis falls! The fate of the world ('s true history) is in your hands! |
But I don't want the entire thesis to fall! (And I don't even know what it is yet.)
Where are we hoping not to find fossils? ie what locations are inside the unambiguously glaciation zone? Would Nanavut be bad news?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I'm sure you don't but the thesis has to fall if it is not supported by the facts. And better now than after the book comes out and the bastards fall on it from a great height. Since the theory is "that all fossils are destroyed by later glaciation" it can very easily be shown to be false by the discovery of just one fossil surviving in an area that was recently glaciated. Given that there are millions and millions of square miles of such territory and fossils are (apparently) found anywhere and everywhere, this really should be a simple matter to resolve.
And should be because the theory is important for two reasons:
1. For me personally since my Out-of-Canada theory uses it for strong circumstantial support (we still await people's responses on this)
2. It will demonstrate to the entire world what a complete bunch of wallies the entire palaeontological community is because they haven't noticed this stupendous factor distorting their entire area of study, despite it staring them in the face.
Nanuvut may or may not be good news. It all depends whether it is in area that was glaciated. Do not be misled by how far north a particular place is, the relationship between 'north' and 'glaciated' is highly variable. You need to find out whether the (generally rather obvious) signs of recent glaciation are present in the part of Nanuvut where the fossils were found.
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Chad
In: Ramsbottom
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Here is a painting of Mount Thule on Bylot Island in Nanuvut... where fossils were found:
Doesn't look as though it was completely flattened by glaciation.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Very helpful Chad, but are mountains necessarily diagnostic? Those of us who went to school will remember armchair hollows, cwms/cirques/corries, eskers, drumlins (no obvious U-shaped valleys in your pic, Chad except isn't that a glacier making one?) and the rest. But for present purposes, we can probably rely on orthodox maps of known glaciated areas.
This came up some time ago in relation to Britain. It is interesting that the really classical finds like Swanscombe Man are found, as predicted, at the edge of the glaciation (the Thames Valley) and other stuff further north always turned out to be in, for instance, caves on the Welsh coast, or other possibly free-from-glaciation places. But again, one dinosaur bone from the Pennines will blow the whole thing out of the water.
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Chad
In: Ramsbottom
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| Easily -- the transitional fossil record goes from Home Erectus to Mungo Man |
No...the fossil record goes from Homo erectus beyond Mungo Man to the fossil remains of modern Aboriginals (the samples were compared to those from 8,000 BP).
The term transitional suggests a form, somewhat intermediate between the two extremes...as in this orthodox palaeological definition:
| Transitional fossils are the fossilized remains of intermediary forms of life that illustrate an evolutionary transition. |
And it was orthodox palaeologists (albeit not of the mainstream) who were making these claims.
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Chad
In: Ramsbottom
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| no obvious U-shaped valleys in your pic, Chad except isn't that a glacier making one? |
The valleys are glaciated, so I wouldn't expect to find many fossils there...but the peaks don't seem to have taken much of a rub.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I suppose we ought to consider the theoretical underpinning of all this. My original assumption is that if you stick,. let's say, two miles of ice on top of anything, that anything will be squeezed out of any recognisable shape. After all, isn't it a fact that even glaciers (which aren't the least bit thick) turn the underlying rock into mush so they can glide merrily along?
This is so obvious that I would have thought it would be taught during the first week of Palaeontology 101. But I don't think I've ever seen it even referred to as a systematic factor in the survival of the fossil record.
On the other hand very ancient rocks, in very deeply embedded rock strata, would presumably survive. Let's hope so because since the earth is four billion years old and life (in the form of stromatolites) is three point five billion years then clearly glaciated ice hasn't destroyed everything.
Fortunately though we don't know when SLOT started so that's all right then.
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| The term transitional suggests a form, somewhat intermediate between the two extremes...as in this orthodox palaeological definition: |
I'm no longer sure what we're arguing about. My use of the word transitional bothers you now?! Whatever.
My original question to Mick was about how we date older than 40 000BP. He preferred to directly date the remains rather than the layers but would judge cases individually. His concerns about dating layers were:
| That's the rub. The Aladdin's Lamp rub. Once a bone is in tuff then you are reliant (once again) on a palaeo-anthropologist digging and reporting. And these people are not to be trusted. Not because they are dishonest but because they are Defenders of The Paradigm. |
I have sympathy with his view. And he's right here. Mungo Man was directly dated to about 60 000BP by three approved scientific dating methods and the layers were later dated back to 40 -- 45000BP by the Out of Africa crowd.
But our interest here is surely in arguing against Out of Africa -- aren't we on the same side? In this case it may be that Mick is happy dating the layers over the direct dating. That's fine -- but dating layers opens up other early humans beyond 40 000BP...
Meanwhile the case against Out of Africa is helped by Mungo Man. You contended this isn't Modern man -- but only because his mtDNA is of an older type than 'eve's. I don't agree that this is good logic -- nor do I think it helpful to an Out of Canada theory. Regardless, the argument that Mungo Man provides against the Out of Africa theory is worth noting. This from Alan Thorne (well known multi-regionalist):
"What our evidence shows is that the situation is much more complicated than any of these supporters of Out of Africa would have imagine. They were arguing that because the earliest forms of this particular genetic sequence in living people was found in Africa, that meant that all people must have come from Africa. Well, logically, that's not true anymore because we now have an older form of indisputably modern human that comes out of Australia."
I don't know how it might fit with Mick's theory beyond that though!
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Claire wrote: | | This is a silly question I know but someone needs to ask it: Canada has plenty of dinosaur fossils... why wouldn't human fossils survive in the same way? |
I'll take a stab at it.
So far as I know, glaciation in Canada was confined to the Canadian shield (a central region). The vast majority of dinosaur bones come from the Alberta badlands, well outside the zone of glaciation.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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97% of Canada was glaciated. "Thousands of" fossil finds occur mainly in the Yukon basin, a refugium or ice-free region. The fossil remains include camels, horses, lions, sloths as well as the usual woolly mammoths, bison, etc. but not, oddly, polar bears; the lack of polar bear fossils has been ascribed to the corpses being destroyed by other animals or, even more bizarrely, as a result of falling to the bottom of the Arctic Sea seeing as how bears live on the ice.
[Polar bears are considered a "relatively new species", an offshoot of the brown bear, dating back a mere 70,000 years, until a jawbone unquestionably that of a polar bear was discovered in the Svalbard archipelago, about mid-way between Norway and the North Pole, and dated to c130,000 years; this was the period when the coast of Norway was ice-free. Happily, scientists are now assuring themselves and us that the polar bear can survive 'climate change'.]
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