Phineas Flapdoodle

Not implying that evolution is my primary area either ... this is interesting, from:

http://www.mnh.si.edu/anthro/humanorigins/ha/sap.htm
The Smithsonian website...cool pics!

So, this is suggesting that homo sapiens were alive and "flourishing" somewhere between 90,000 and 130,000 years ago.

Kosh

Ehem... as the original coiner of the phrase "Ignorant Bronze Age Goatherders", I feel obligated to step in here.

Although CX is correct here (as his supreme knowledge of the topic always ensures), the phrase was coined as is due to the origins of the mythology in the bronze age, even though it did not get documented until the Iron Age (ref: Finkelsteins "The Bible Unearthed").

I did propose the question of whether it should be changed to "Iron", however all agreed that "Bronze Age" rolls off the tongue easier...and whenever I hear "Iron Age", all I can see is scenes of huge iron mechanisms with Will Smith playing Jim West....



<REFEREE: +10 points for Kosh since he managed to slip in a major kiss up to the moderators >

Vorkosigan

Writing in Harrapa dates to 3,500 BCE, about 5,500 years ago. See here. The oldest CHinese characters date to about the same time. The oldest Egyptian stuff goes back to 3,200 -3,300 BCE. All such systems necessarily imply a period of development. I strongly suspect that even older stuff will one day be found in China. Neolithic pottery dating from 4,800 BCE recently unearthed contains symbols that may be a form of writing, but there is not enough material to make a judgment, and it does not appear to be related to anything known (see here.

Of course, we should be aware that long before writing many materials were being used for decorative purposes. Here's an article on the use of red ochre.

"And there is more evidence in the archaeological record, says Watts. His
study of 74 sites in southern Africa dating from more than 20,000 years ago
reveals an explosion in the use of red ochre and other red pigments between
about 100,000 and 120,000 years ago. And, he says, new findings in Zambia
and the re-dating of the important Border Cave site in South Africa push the date of the earliest use back further still-perhaps to 170,000 years ago in
Zambia."

Hunter-gatherer societies are typically non-literate. Writing is the development of a settled civilization that can create a production surplus necessary for the support of a large class of mind-workers.

This is just wrong-headed. There are literally hundreds of thousands of archaeological sites and objects that date from prior to 6,000 years ago. Further, this wrongness is shot through with triumphalist phallocentric rhetoric. It's time we stopped with the gender-laden "man" usage, and shift to something like "humans" or "humanity."

Vorkosigan

Vorkosigan

I'm tossing this over to the E/C crowd.

Sparrow

Hey great, we're all right. Sorry to leeave the 'ignorant' off as well as your attribution, Kosh, but I didn't want anyone to think it was an ad hominem attack.

Jet Black

well I'm 25, but other humans are different ages, it depends mostly on when they were born. For example, a person born one year before me would be 26. There are however difficulties if a baby is born on the additional day in a leap year i.e. 29th of February, since their birthday only occurs once every four years, however it is common for them to celebrate their birthday on the 28th of february or the 1st of march. I am not sure what the system is in terms of legal and tax purposes.


this doesn't really answer the OP does it?

Claudia

For those who want more on Chauvet Cave:
http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/arcnat/chauvet/fr/

dmarker

Another thought about writing and record keeping, perhaps the reason that we haven't found earlier examples of writing is that the writing was done on mediums which could not stand the test of time in a particular enviroment.

I'm thinking of something paper like in a wet environment. The earliest examples of writing was either stone or clay mediums. If records were kept on sheep skin parchment and reused then discarded then we wouldn't have much left of the medium. Not only that but even stone and clay eventually degrade as well.

Right now, humanity is the equivilent of a thirty year old person who has had amnesia and forgotten the first twenty-two years of his/her life. We have evidence to show we've been around for this long; we just don't know what we've been doing all that time. Perhaps writing has waxed and waned with many other inventions.

Prester John

Maybe its just that writing happened to be invented 5/6000 years ago. It has to be invented at some time. There is thus a time 5/6000 years post invention, which we appear to have arrived at now.

There seems to be plenty of supporting archaelogical evidence that it was developed.

bfair2all

How many documents do we have that were written by native Americans in North America prior to the arrival of Europeans? Answer: zilch. Does that mean native Americans only came into being around 1600? Are they then the same species? Or just "created" later?

Do you see how the existence of writing does not reflect the existence of man?

Why did man sit on his ass for 6000 years without inventing light bulbs?