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These Tools Upend Our View of Stone-Age Humans in Asia
Long ago in what's now southern India, early humans showed a knack for disruption that would've made Silicon Valley tech wizards envious. Over time, the ancient innovators rejected bulky hand-axes and cleavers, instead opting for sleek flakes of stone meant for cutting and tipping spears.
Similar disruptions occurred in Africa among the forebears of modern humans around the same time. But the timing of the Indian transition, spotted in the soil layers of a site called Attirampakkam, is eye-popping. At 250,000 years old—and possibly up to 385,000 years old—this tool transition occurred far earlier than it did at other sites in India.
The discovery, described in Nature on Wednesday [DOI: 10.1038/nature25444] [DX], pushes back the start of what's called the Middle Paleolithic culture in the region by more than a hundred thousand years. That, in turn, could reshape how scientists view the global spread of hominins—humans and their ancient relatives—before modern humans migrated out of Africa some 60,000 years ago.
Also at The Verge.
Related: Earliest Human Remains Outside of Africa Discovered
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 04 2018, @10:40AM (1 child)
Solon (c. 638 BC - 558 BC)
That leaves about 8-1/2 millenia unaccounted for.
Ever play the game "Gossip" in school?
Wikipedia says it's also known as Chinese Whispers. [wikipedia.org]
The way that even a simple phrase being transmitted faithfully through a small number of people over a span of a minute fails repeatedly doesn't have me putting much faith in twice-told tales.
When there's something in writing that goes back about that far which corroborates the story, that will be a starting point WRT "proof".
In the meantime, I find the Carbon-14 evidence in Crete more compelling.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 04 2018, @02:50PM
Your thought process made sense until they found Gobekli Tepe, which informed us that mankind was a great deal more advanced in the deep past.
That megalithic site (which is enormous) was (according to the carbon dating) deliberately buried around 8000 BC, which means it existed before then.
There's more than enough room for Atlantis in history.
Furthermore, the megalithic site known as "Puma Punku" in Peru would sit nicely at the edge of lake Titicaca when its water level was higher... around 12 thousand years ago! Interestingly, that's the date to which certain Peruvian megaliths align astronomically.