Humans Are No Longer Considered The New Kids On The Block
Edited and Note by Bill Knell
I have never been a supporter of the Theory of Evolution. Despite all the claims of modern science, they cannot show how it all fits together or why ancient human remains show no major Physiological differences from humans today. Now, there is archeological evidence that humans have been around much longer than previously thought. This all coincides nicely with human and dinosaur footprints found together in Texas. Unlike ‘Jurassic Park' speak which implied that dinosaurs and humans are separated (on the Evolution scale) by sixty million years, the truth is in plain sight. - B.K.
Archaeologists Found 115,000-Year-Old Human Footprints Where They Shouldn’t Be
A uniquely preserved prehistoric mudhole could hold the oldest-ever human footprints on the Arabian Peninsula, scientists say. The seven footprints, found amidst a clutter of hundreds of prehistoric animal prints, are estimated to be 115,000 years old.
Many fossil and artifact windfalls have come from situations like this special lakebed in northern Saudi Arabia. Archaeologists uncovered the site, deep in the Nefud Desert at a location nicknamed “the trace” in Arabic, in 2017, after time and weather wiped the overlying sediment away. It’s easy to imagine that a muddy lakebed was a high-traffic area in the Arabian Peninsula over 100,000 years ago.
When populations move on, these prints are left behind until they’re covered over. In the far, far older Burgess Shale event, some of the oldest organisms ever found were preserved intact because they likely fell into a mudslide and were killed instantly. An entire armored nodosaur was found in unprecedentedly good shape because it was encased in mud and in the cold of the ocean floor. If there were a finder’s fee for incredible archaeology, a lot of it would be paid to mud.
In their paper, the scientists actually examine why that ancient mud was so special at all:
“An experimental study of modern human footprints in mud flats found that fine details were lost within 2 days and prints were rendered unrecognizable within four, and similar observations have been made for other non-hominin mammal tracks.”
That means their special, tiny batch of preserved footprints were made in unique conditions that also form a kind of “fingerprint” for pinning them all to the same timeframe. From there, scientists started to look at who made the footprints. Homo sapiens weren’t the only upright humanoid primate in the game, but the evidence, the scientists say, suggests we were the ones traipsing through the drying lakebed:
“Seven hominin footprints were confidently identified, and given the fossil and archeological evidence for the spread of H. sapiens into the Levant and Arabia during [the era 130,000 to 80,000 years ago] and absence of Homo neanderthalensis from the Levant at that time, we argue that H. sapiens was responsible for the tracks at Alathar. In addition, the size of the Alathar footprints is more consistent with those of early H. sapiens than H. neanderthalensis.”
The lake that forms Alathar today was likely part of a prehistoric highway that drew all the large animals in the area, forming a corridor dotted by freshwater rest areas that living things could travel on as they migrated with the weather or the changing climate. In this case, scientists found very little of the other factors that accompany prehistoric human travel, like knife or tool marks on animal bones indicating hunting.
“The lack of archaeological evidence suggests that the Alathar lake was only briefly visited by people,” the scientists conclude. “These findings indicate that transient lakeshore use by humans during a dry period of the last interglacial was likely primarily tied to the need for potable water.”
These Homo sapiens could be the last ones on their way through a temperate place as an impending ice age descends. That would also explain why their tracks weren’t tracked over by another group.
Archaeologists find evidence of Europe’s oldest lake settlement
Archaeologists are convinced they have uncovered the oldest human settlement built on a European lake. The team from Switzerland and Albania, who are working on the shores of Ohrid Lake, believe they have found an organised hunting and farming community living up to 8,000 years ago.
Spending hours each day about three metres (9.8 feet) underwater, the team is painstakingly retrieving wooden stilts that supported houses, as well as collecting bones of domesticated and wild animals, copper objects and ceramics, featuring detailed carvings.
Albert Hafner, from the University of Bern, said similar settlements have been found in Alpine and Mediterranean regions, but the settlements in the village of Lin are half a millennium older, dating back between 6,000 and 8,000 years.
"Because it is underwater, the organic material is well-preserved, and this allows us to find out what these people have been eating, what they have been planting," Hafner said.
Multiple studies show that Lake Ohrid, shared by North Macedonia and Albania, is the oldest lake in Europe, at over one million years.
The age of the findings is determined through radiocarbon dating and dendrochronology, which measures annual growth rings in trees. More than one thousand wood samples have been collected from the site, which may have hosted several hundred people.
It is believed to cover around six hectares, but so far, only about 1 per cent has been excavated after six years of work.
Hafner said findings show that people who lived on the lake helped to spread agriculture and livestock to other parts of Europe.
The team, from Switzerland and Albania, spends hours each day underwater (LIN3/Kristi Anastasi via Reuters)
"They were still hunting and collecting things, but the stable income for nutrition was coming from agriculture," he said.
Albanian archaeologist Adrian Anastasi said it could take decades to fully explore the area.
"(By) the way they had lived, eaten, hunted, fished, and by the way the architecture was used to build their settlement, we can say they were very smart for that time," Anastasi said.
Human Footprints Found in Saudi Arabia May Be 120,000 Years Old
If confirmed, the footfalls would represent the oldest evidence of Homo sapiens’ presence on the Arabian Peninsula
Seven footprints pressed into the parched sediment of an ancient lake bed in northern Saudi Arabia may testify to humans’ presence in the region some 115,000 years ago, reports Maya Wei-Haas for National Geographic.
Archaeologists scouring the Nefud Desert spotted the impressions while examining 376 footprints left in the mud of the bygone body of water by such animals as giant extinct elephants, camels, buffalo and ancestors of modern horses.
Now, a new analysis published in the journal Science Advances argues that anatomically modern humans created the seven footprints between 112,000 and 121,000 years ago. If confirmed, the footfalls would be the oldest traces of Homo sapiens ever found on the Arabian Peninsula, notes Bruce Bower for Science News.
The find could help reveal the routes ancient humans followed as they pushed out of Africa into new territory, according to National Geographic.
Most non-African people alive today have ancestors who departed the continent en masse some 60,000 years ago. But some researchers think that smaller groups of Homo sapiens ventured outside of Africa thousands of years prior to this mass migration, journeying across the Sinai Peninsula and into the Levant. Other scholars propose a route centered on the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula.
In addition to the footprints, the lake bed—nicknamed Alathar (Arabic for “the trace”)—yielded a trove of 233 fossils, reports Issam Ahmed for Agence France-Presse (AFP). Though the peninsula is now home to arid deserts, it was likely greener and wetter at the time the footprints were cast, boasting a climate similar to that of the African savanna.
“The presence of large animals such as elephants and hippos, together with open grasslands and large water resources, may have made northern Arabia a particularly attractive place to humans moving between Africa and Eurasia,” says study co-author Michael Petraglia, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for Science and Human History, in a statement.
Though the site may have once been a fruitful hunting ground, researchers found no stone tools or animal bones bearing the telltale marks of butchery. Per the statement, this dearth of evidence suggests the humans’ visit to the lake was likely just a brief stopover.
As Ann Gibbons reports for Science magazine, the team identified the fossilized footfalls as human by comparing them with tracks known to be made by humans and Neanderthals, a related but separate species of hominin. The seven footprints featured in the study were longer than the Neanderthal tracks and appeared to have been made by taller, lighter hominins.
The team can’t completely exclude Neanderthals as the potential authors of the footprints. But if the dating proves correct, such an attribution is unlikely, as the sediments just above and below the impressions date to a period called the last interglacial, when the climate in the region was relatively warm and wet.
“It is only after the last interglacial with the return of cooler conditions that we have definitive evidence for Neanderthals moving into the region,” says lead author Mathew Stewart, a biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology, in the statement. “The footprints, therefore, most likely represent humans, or Homo sapiens.
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