you must be mistaken
The earth's only 6000 years old so the poo can't be older than that
Native Americans arrived to find natives already there, fossil poo shows
The ancient people who have long been thought to be the first humans to colonise North America were actually johnny-come-latelies, according to scientists who have comprehesively analysed the ancient fossilised poo of their predecessor Americans. The new revelations come to us courtesy of Copenhagen university, where some of …
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Friday 13th July 2012 13:48 GMT Anonymous Coward
It's ironic...
that while nearly *half* (http://www.pollingreport.com/science.htm) of the US adult population believes Bishop Ussher's Young Earth creationism chronology, most of them are unwilling to accept his more important (and more mainstream) Christian theology. (Or, for that matter, the bishop's more plausible history describing unicorns, King Lucius, and the creation of a second-century Christian episcopate in Britain.)
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Friday 13th July 2012 14:41 GMT Mark Eccleston
Re: you must be mistaken
Actually the universe is only 7 years old and was created by the Great Zabu.. On that date we were all created in our current forms, complete with false memories, jobs, diverse cultures, religious beliefs, and complete back history.
Zabu has a sick sense of humour. All hail Zabu.
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Sunday 15th July 2012 05:29 GMT david 12
Re: school boards trying to push creationism
In the UK the school system is derived from the Thomas Huxley tradition. Him of the 'rather be descended from a monkey' debat with Bishop Wilberforce.
In contrast a crucial court decision in the USA held that science is not covered by constitutial restrictions on teaching religion.
It is important to understand that this is not a debate about the meaning of Science (History and Philosophy of Science), or about the meaning of Religion (Comparitive Religion), it is a debate about a Legal decision and the consequences that flow from it.
Huxley regarded Darwinism as part of an alternate explanation for the big existensial questions, and argued that the new English school system should allow space for it as a third religion, alongside Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism. This lead to the historic split between the govenment school system and the RC school system in England, since the Roman Catholic establishment insisted that the schools they sponsered had to include explicit RC indoctrination. He would have been appalled by the anti-scientific fundamentalism that Darwinisism descended to, but at least his school system allowed teaching competing systems of belief.
The court decsion in the USA holding that (with regard to the funding dispute) Drawinism is not Religion was perverse in itself, having no regard to modern ideas of the History and Philosophy of Science, or Comparitive Religion, the history of the development of kludges to try to fix up naive Darwinism, the dificulty getting theories like Contenential Drift or the development of single cell organisms accepted, the conflicting High School Biology theory of Evolution and the standard Palentological theory of Evolution, etc.
And, being perverse, has lead to the perverse outcome that since Science is not Religion, then (by the same standard) Religion is not Religion either.
But it is important to remember that this is a perverse Legal outcome, nothing to do with Science or Religion.
And of course it is perverse to try to use the courts to answer scientific or religious questions, but exactly the kind of thing that the courts do. As Dickens wrote -- the law is an Ass.
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Friday 13th July 2012 22:34 GMT asdf
Clovis
I had the misfortune of having to go there for a sporting event and wow what a dump. Being New Mexico its roads are very poorly maintained. Being very close to West Texas there is nothing to do and nothing around for miles. I went into the one convenience store in town and wanted to get some things for the road when I noticed a few local cops were reading the riot act to some dumb yocal teen who was caught shoplifting. I went to buy the things and the hick clerk freaked out when I tried to buy it with a credit card. He was like I'm sorry we don't take those (which in America is very very unusual). "You will have to go to ATM." I was like ok where? He told me the only one in town was in the bank which was closed because it was the weekend. Didn't get my food, never been back to that crap hole and haven't missed it a bit.
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Friday 13th July 2012 15:47 GMT Mike Flex
Re: DNA in poo
> and another scientist then ate that poo and ...
Don't say you haven't heard of Fecal Transplants?
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This post has been deleted by its author
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Friday 13th July 2012 13:04 GMT Aaron Em
Wait, wait, I'm confused! Does this mean the peaceful herbivorous aborigines, whom our ancestors slaughtered with smallpox and stole land from &c. ad nauseam, were in fact just as human as we are after all? The ramifications for your local university's Ethnocultural Studies department will be severe!
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Friday 13th July 2012 17:31 GMT fuggedaboutit
Puhleeze
You are naive. Native Americans were not peaceful, herbivorous aborigines. But, they were indeed human, i.e. they went to war with other tribes, enslaved their captives, and -- wait for it -- ate meat (yeah, buffalo most likely was not a vegetable even a thousand years ago).
Pop quiz: Name a country on this planet that was not formed by conquering those who were there before (queue Jeopardy! theme song).
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Sunday 15th July 2012 05:37 GMT david 12
Pop quiz:
That works well in the UK, but doesn't play so well in AUS, where your local university's Ethnocultural Studies department can point out that the local aboriginal community was NOT formed by conquering those who were there before.
Indeed, the equivilant debate in AUS is the question if first aboriginal settlers wiped out the mega-fauna (evil right-wing revisionist theory), or if the mega-fauna was wiped out by climate change (noble-savage/left-wing tree-hugger theory).
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Sunday 15th July 2012 23:44 GMT bep
Re: Pop quiz:
Well it just so happens there was a program on Sunday about this very thing. Their conclusion: not climate change, not the Aborigines actually eating the beasties, but the 'fire stick farming' they used changed the vegetation mix and indirectly killing off the megafauna. The lesson here is, it doesn't pay to be a fussy eater.
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Saturday 14th July 2012 18:38 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Petrified Poo
"Frankly, I can't imagine petrified poo flowing well at all."
Judging by the chod I had to deliver the other night you'd be quite right. Like a superglued pine cone it was. And the bastard woke me up at 2.00am.
Sadly I flushed it away, and only now realise that I should have laid it to rest in a cave for future generations.
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Friday 13th July 2012 13:24 GMT Another Fiction Writer
Hooray! New Textbooks on the Way!
It's interesting that it's time to roll back the scientific Who's First Canon, once again. We've been involved in trading with the Hopi Indian people of Northern Arizona since 1985, and their own traditions say they have been there for forty thousand years. So I guess that listening to the ones who probably have a better idea of history might begin now among academics.
Clovis? It's just the name of a Town in Southern New Mexico again, where some people passing through dropped some arrow heads and forgot to pick them up.
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Friday 13th July 2012 14:03 GMT Pen-y-gors
Re: Hooray! New Textbooks on the Way!
It's always interesting to listen to local legends, but don't take them as historical fact - there's a bunch of people in the Middle East who tell tales of how they're descended from one bloke and his rib.
Another interesting and related report suggests that first wave of immigrants snuck into Merkinland from Ruskiland about 15000 years ago. Where are Homeland Security when you need them?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18770963
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Friday 13th July 2012 14:48 GMT NozeDive
What about Captain Picard?
About 15 years ago, I received an issue of Discover magazine that made me wonder "Why is Patrick Stewert's head on the cover?" (This was before his knighthood, so I purposefuly ommited the 'sir')
The article told of some science guys taking a super old skull (these are technical terms) that predated Clovis, and handed it over to one of those guys who does forensic reconstruction of faces with clay. The result was a very anglican face that even the author of the article likened to Sir Patrick Stewert.
I didn't follow up on it at all, but unless it has been refuted, it lends some cred to those poop poker's ideas.
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Friday 13th July 2012 16:00 GMT Miek
Re: "unless it's been refuted"
I think it is safe to say that it is part science and part guess work. You can scientifically analyse bones to deduce musculature structure, but cannot deduce the skin overlay by doing this. Features such as the nose, ears, skin colour, skin texture and eye shapes cannot be deduced without some of the original muscle and skin tissue being present, see "Feathery Tyrannosaur". Although we also find out such details from fossils such as the Archaeopterix in the following picture :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Archaeopteryx_lithographica,_replica_of_London_specimen,_Staatliches_Museum_f%C3%BCr_Naturkunde_Karlsruhe,_Germany_-_20100925.jpg
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Friday 13th July 2012 15:11 GMT Dave 32
Paisley Peoples
So, does this mean that I'm free to propose the theory that there were people earlier than the Paisley People who were cave-trained, such that they didn't sh*t in their caves, but went outside to do the number two? Sadly, the rains have washed away all evidence of these Dave People (Hey, I proposed the theory; I ought to get to name them!).
Dave
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Friday 13th July 2012 15:19 GMT Fred 4
This whole 'Clovis first' thing has been hogwash for years:
excerpt from a 2004 article:
"Topper is the oldest radiocarbon dated site in North America," Goodyear says. "However, other early sites in Brazil and Chile, as well as a site in Oklahoma also suggest that humans were in the Western Hemisphere as early as 30,000 years ago to perhaps 60,000."
<http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/11/041118104010.htm>
excerpt from another article, talking about cave/rock art:
"It shows that about 11,000 years ago, there was already a very diverse manifestation of rock art in South America, so probably man arrived in the Americas much earlier than normally is accepted," Neves said.
<http://www.livescience.com/18602-horny-man-rock-carving-giant-phallus.html>
again 1 more excerpt:
What are the artifacts and ecofacts from Monte Verde?...[snip]...
An even bigger problem was the radiocarbon dates placing the site at over 13,500 years oldø older than nearly all the North American evidence and a millennium before Clovis. A much earlier layer that even Dillehay was unwilling to consider a cultural zone, but could have been, was dated to between about 33,000-34,000 years ago.
warning - very long -
<http://www.indiana.edu/~arch/saa/matrix/saa/saa_mod02.html>
So... we have multiple sites across the America's showing human habitation Long before Clovis. So why was Clovis still considered to be "First"???
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Friday 13th July 2012 15:43 GMT Miek
"So... we have multiple sites across the America's showing human habitation Long before Clovis. So why was Clovis still considered to be "First"???" -- I'm quite positive that this article relates more to the sore-point that the Europeans went over to the new found land and embarked on a cruel eradication of the then sole occupiers of said country. Similar happened when Europeans, primarily the English went to Australia. The "Aboriginal Christmas Pudding" is a highlight of Human disgrace: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornet_Bank_massacre
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Tuesday 17th July 2012 08:12 GMT Mike VandeVelde
hip hip hoor... wait what?
Yes, because the hairy pale people from Europe during the renaissance are no different from cave men back in the stone age (excepting the magnitude of their brutality), right? Is that what you are trying to celebrate?
They were first as in here before France, England, Spain, etc. What part of that can you not understand? The guy who won the gold medal in the 100m dash isn't really first because you saw that guy training cross the finish line *days* earlier??
So in 50 years when the Chinese come to save us from wage slavery and topple our ridiculous sham of a democracy for us, you will kiss the ground in front of whatever mandarin the emporer appoints and be happy to have your offspring lifted from savagery, right? After all, people are people, progress marches on, and so on and so forth. If they wage horrible biological warfare on us, outlaw speaking English, forcibly take our children off to be civilized in boarding schools, make only token efforts to prosecute crimes against us and execute whole towns upon simple accusation of a crime by one of us, and all around treat us as sub human, well that will all be water under the bridge right? Nothing that hasn't happened before, who would we be to complain? Gah.
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Friday 13th July 2012 23:00 GMT Droid on Droid
Re: @naked as a JaylikeBird
The problem is that there is no proof for your claim. All this is, is another bit of evidence that the theory that the Americas were first inhabited around 11,000 years ago is wrong. There has been evidence for over 3 decades that humans have been in South America for at least 20,000 years, it's just not talked about in "PC" society. Probably because it would give a kick in the goolies to the theory that humans caused the extinction of the American mega-fauna and thereby upset a lot of enviro-nutters.
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Sunday 15th July 2012 04:10 GMT J 3
Re: @naked as a JaylikeBird
Good point, and given human nature, not a stretch at all that it might have happened.
On the other hand, we know pretty well what happened in the past 500 years, but there is no evidence (yet) that any of the newer waves of humans killed off the previous ones. There are other possibilities:
- the older ones died before (more likely if their numbers were low) without other humans being involved;
- the older and newer populations did not meet in significant numbers then, and both genetic lines should be around today (apparently a study just came out showing three such different genetic lines are indeed present in the "native" populations till today, but I haven't read it yet so I might be misremembering);
- the older and newer populations mixed (mostly) without trouble -- I know, hard to believe these being people, but who knows.
I actually suspect we'll never know with enough certainty to be satisfied, but I'm fine with that fact of life.
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Saturday 14th July 2012 19:19 GMT Dave Bell
Re: not that much of a stretch
There's probably genetic evidence too, even if it has been messed up by randy Europeans over the last few hundred years.
Since sea levels were much lower, the likely migration routes at the end of the last Ice Age are well under water. With the example of the Inuit, it's not impossible that human populations were getting into the Americas before the end of the last Ice Age, and thus before Clovis, and leaving no clues we can expect to find.
If the DNA can be analysed, we might find the traces of an older population, with the sorts of differences consistent with pre-Clovis isolation. Be careful that such things as mutation rates aren't being set by what could becaome a circular argument. The differences might support Clovis first because the date assumed for the isolation is derived from Clovis.
I don't find it hard to find room for 10 kY of pre-Clovis pre-history. And Clovis is a long way inland, even today. Making Clovis the First Americans doesn't make much sense. But as early inland North Americans, it's still significant. It's well south of the glaciers. Even with the conventional theory, it must have taken time for humans to have crossed from Asia. There is a gap in time and space.
We just don't know enough to be sure of anything.
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Saturday 14th July 2012 03:35 GMT JeffyPooh
Prediction
These Pre-Clovis batch that are now "first" will eventually be deposed by a completely different batch of Pre-Pre-Clovis that will become the next "first".
When any of these archeologist types say something about what happened thousands of years ago, they're probably more or less correct (assuming they have evidence). But when they imply that something plausible DIDN'T happen (based on LACK of evidence?), one should keep in mind that it's difficult to prove a negative and THEREFORE THEY REALLY DON'T KNOW.
An example of their defective logic would be claiming that Clovis were "first", because that implies that many plausible circumstances didn't happen.
The error of their logic is revealed by the next "first" (sic), these Pre-Clovis.
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Saturday 14th July 2012 20:16 GMT Realiti Czech
Re: Prediction
"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." Fact is, it's very hard to find things that are 10,000+ years old - they've been plowed over, cities have been built on top, etc. The Clovis-firsters were so strident because they built their careers on it, and could not tolerate dissent. See the Meadowcroft Rockshelter for an example.
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Sunday 15th July 2012 02:19 GMT edwhy
Those pushy Danes
Surprised no one mentioned Kennewick Man, earliest remains ever found in North America, discovered just up the road from the Paisley Caves in Washington in 2004. The American Indian mafia took charge of the body and it went down the memory hole, never again to be discussed. Science follows politics and money, in every case.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
