Human settlement in America just got pushed back 1,500 years.

[Rain Man]

http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/14/us/flo...ica/index.html

Mastodon bones offer clues of earliest humans in North America

By Faith Karimi, CNN
Updated 9:10 AM ET, Sat May 14, 2016

(CNN)It's a discovery that could rewrite the story of southeastern United States.

Stone tools and mastodon bones found at the bottom of a Florida river point to humans living in the region 14,550 years ago. That's more than 1,500 years earlier than previously believed, scientists say.

"This is a big deal," said Jessi Halligan, one of the study's authors and an assistant professor of anthropology at Florida State University.

"It's pretty exciting. We thought we knew the answers to how and when we got here, but now the story is changing."

The discovery on the Aucilla River was reported Friday by the journal Science Advances.

Butchered bones, knives

The four-year study included sending divers to the Page-Ladson site, a deep hole 30 feet underwater in the Aucilla River, researchers said.

There, divers excavated artifacts such as butchered bones of extinct animals, a mastodon tusk and a biface, which is a knife fragment with sharp edges.

Divers excavated bones and tools from the Page-Ladson, which is 30 feet underwater in the Aucilla River

"At Page-Ladson, hunter-gatherers, possibly accompanied by dogs, butchered or scavenged a mastodon carcass at the sinkhole's edge next to a small pond at ~14,550," the authors said in Science Advances.

What was once a pond was buried beneath the murky waters for a series of reasons, including centuries of civilization, rising sea levels and layers of sediment.

"These people had successfully adapted to their environment; they knew where to find freshwater, game, plants, raw materials for making tools, and other critical resources for survival."

The scientists used radiocarbon dating techniques to find out how old the artifacts are.

What about the Clovis?

Until that point, researchers had believed the Clovis people were among the first inhabitants of the Americas about 13,000 years ago, according to the study. Page-Ladson is the first pre-Clovis site documented in the southeastern part of North America, it said.

"The new discoveries at Page-Ladson show that people were living in the Gulf Coast area much earlier than believed," said Michael R. Waters, director of Texas A&M's center for the study of the first Americans. Waters was one of the study's lead authors.

In the 1980s, other researchers had retrieved several stone tools and a mastodon tusk from the site, but their discovery did not make much news.
Halligan and her colleagues returned to the site in 2012 and expanded on the previous research and archaeological finds. In one of the instances, a mastodon tusk recovered earlier had deep grooves. They concluded the grooves were made by humans during the tusk's extraction.

[tmw4h5]

Boom, roasted.

[Rain Man]

I blame poor diets on the decline in human life span from 900 years in that link to our current level.

[Zebedee DuBois]

After the last hadrosaur was eaten, longevity started decreasing.

[Rain Man]

Originally Posted by Zebedee DuBois

After the last hadrosaur was eaten, longevity started decreasing.

Interesting theory. Maybe there was something in dinosaur meat that prevented aging. It seems logical to me given the facts.

[ThaVirus]

Originally Posted by GloucesterChief

No. Homo Neanderthalis and Homo Denisovan were still around. They both interbred with Homo Sapien Sapien (and each other). Creating the Caucasian and East Asian types of Homo Sapien Sapien respectively.

Word.

I read that black Africans are the only pure homo sapien sapiens. Whites can have up to 5% Neanderthal DNA.

Interesting stuff. I wonder what the "next step" will look like..

[Rain Man]

Originally Posted by ThaVirus

Word.

I read that black Africans are the only pure homo sapien sapiens. Whites can have up to 5% Neanderthal DNA.

Interesting stuff. I wonder what the "next step" will look like..

I for one am proud of my Neanderthal heritage.

[GloucesterChief]

Originally Posted by ThaVirus

Word.

I read that black Africans are the only pure homo sapien sapiens. Whites can have up to 5% Neanderthal DNA.

Interesting stuff. I wonder what the "next step" will look like..

Yes. Same with East Asians and Denosiva DNA. Then there are the Aborigines which are East Asians but pretty isolated letting some recessive genes become common like blonde hair and lack of the shovel teeth that many East Asians have.

[loochy]

Originally Posted by jjchieffan

http://timeline.biblehistory.com/per...rst-generation

I'm still looking for where it says that in the bible. All of the verses that they linked provide no time reference.

Edit:

Ok, so they apparently pieced this together by trying to use lifespans and peoples' births and deaths. I think that it's safe to say they missed something.

The bible doesn't say that earth is 6000 years old. Some dudes say that.

[Bowser]

Originally Posted by tmw4h5

The Earth is only 6,000 years old. Idiots.

[BlackHelicopters]

The Bible references events from 6,000 years ago. The Bibke does not state the world is 6,000 years old.

[gblowfish]

This should have been in the Important Florida News thread!

[tmw4h5]

http://www.icr.org/article/how-old-e...cording-bible/

"However, lest we be too concerned, every honest attempt to determine the date, starting with a deep commitment to the inerrancy of God's Word, has calculated a span of just a few thousand years, most likely close to 6000 years, since creation."

[tmw4h5]

Where Did a Young-earth Worldview Come From?
Simply put, it came from the Bible. Of course, the Bible doesn’t say explicitly anywhere, “The earth is 6,000 years old.” Good thing it doesn’t; otherwise it would be out of date the following year. But we wouldn’t expect an all-knowing God to make that kind of a mistake.

God gave us something better. In essence, He gave us a “birth certificate.” For example, using a personal birth certificate, a person can calculate how old he is at any point. It is similar with the earth. Genesis 1 says that the earth was created on the first day of creation (Genesis 1:1–5). From there, we can begin to calculate the age of the earth.

Let’s do a rough calculation to show how this works. The age of the earth can be estimated by taking the first five days of creation (from earth’s creation to Adam), then following the genealogies from Adam to Abraham in Genesis 5 and 11, then adding in the time from Abraham to today.

Adam was created on day 6, so there were five days before him. If we add up the dates from Adam to Abraham, we get about 2,000 years, using the Masoretic Hebrew text of Genesis 5 and 11.3 Whether Christian or secular, most scholars would agree that Abraham lived about 2,000 B.C. (4,000 years ago).

So a simple calculation is:

5 days
+ ~2,000 years
+ ~4,000 years

~6,000 years

At this point, the first five days are negligible. Quite a few people have done this calculation using the Masoretic text (which is what most English translations are based on) and with careful attention to the biblical details, they have arrived at the same time frame of about 6,000 years, or about 4000 B.C. Two of the most popular, and perhaps best, are a recent work by Dr. Floyd Jones4 and a much earlier book by Archbishop James Ussher5 (1581–1656). See table 1.

[Rain Man]

Originally Posted by gblowfish

This should have been in the Important Florida News thread!

As far as I know, the mastodon didn't publicly masturbate or try to chew off the caveman's face.

[Rain Man]

Didn't some prominent Biblical guy in the 1800s actually set forth an exact date and time of creation?

Wait, maybe this is it: October 23rd, 4004 BC. https://answersingenesis.org/bible-t...rn-in-4004-bc/