3.4-Million-Year-Old Animal Bones Appear to Have Been Butchered

The age of the earth isn't determined by the things we find.

Whether you believe the fundamentalist Christian dating of 4004 B.C or the scientific dating from Geologists, the age of the Earth is completely determined by the things we find
Cogito ergo sum

Well for millions of years, think there have been many civilizations that have come and gone, and even been cleaned up from above, and Mother Earth grinding things during pole shifts, geophysical shifts, rising/sinking of land masses, and miles high ice age, that moved like a grinder and scrubbed things quite clean. Some may have been space age.

originally posted by: Unity_99
Well for millions of years, think there have been many civilizations that have come and gone, and even been cleaned up from above, and Mother Earth grinding things during pole shifts, geophysical shifts, rising/sinking of land masses, and miles high ice age, that moved like a grinder and scrubbed things quite clean. Some may have been space age.

the geographical poles have not deviated by more than about 5° over the last 130 million years and your glaciers did an amazing job of putting all the mineral resources needed for a civilisation back underground

Probably would be a good idea if you knew about real geology before you go suggesting long debunked alternatives...

originally posted by: Unity_99
Well for millions of years, think there have been many civilizations that have come and gone, and even been cleaned up from above, and Mother Earth grinding things during pole shifts, geophysical shifts, rising/sinking of land masses, and miles high ice age, that moved like a grinder and scrubbed things quite clean. Some may have been space age.

If there was a prior civilization that reached space that's the most likely place to find evidence. Imagine finding a moon landing site intact but not by us? Would NASA show it?
One hominid bashing a bone to get meat off of it doth not make a civilization.

originally posted by: Ghost147
Really, not sure where to put this, So Ancient/Lost Civ's it is! in case there really was an ancient lost civilization that did this.

ATLANTA, GEORGIA—Marks on a pair of 3.4-million-year-old animal bones found at the site of Dikka, Ethiopia, appear to have been caused by butchering with stone tools, argue Jessica Thompson of Emory University and her colleagues in the Journal of Human Evolution.

The new study uses statistical analysis of marks on more than 4000 bones found at the same site to refute a claim made by other scientists in 2011 that the marks were caused by incidental trampling. The bones date to long before the emergence of the genus Homo and appear to significantly push back the evidence for the earliest known instance of large animal butchering.

If these marks are more than a coincidence, and they really are the result of tools used for butchering, this discovery is absolutely massive! It's not really possible for Humans to date back this far, according to all the evidence that shows the emergence of the Homo genus appearing about The genus is about 2.8 million years old. a 600,000 year gap is quite large, even for a genus.

"Our analysis shows with statistical certainty that the marks on the two bones in question were not caused by trampling," Thompson said in a press release. "While there is abundant evidence that other bones at the site were damaged by trampling, these two bones are outliers. The marks on them still more closely resemble marks made by butchering."

Source

Press Release

So we have a few possibilities

1) Our knowledge of the emergence of the Homo genus is inaccurate, and it actually emerged far before our current estimates

2) The Cut Marks just appear to resemble butchering, but were actually caused by something else

3) Another species in pre-history had the ability to make tools

What do you think?

I'm going 3.




I wouldn't be suprised at all if we had other Stone Age level cultures. Look at the vast span of time the dinosaurs ruled the planet! I think it's likely we've had multiple "intelligent" species. Some from totally different evolutionary trees. I just think we are the first to build cities.

a reply to: Ghost147

I have no doubts that the human race is much MUCH older than mainstream archaeology would have us think. To may finds indicate they are off by as much as hundreds of thousands of years on the current guesses. Ohh and lets not forget the out of place artifacts that should not even exist.

originally posted by: sycomix
a reply to: Ghost147

I have no doubts that the human race is much MUCH older than mainstream archaeology would have us think. To may finds indicate they are off by as much as hundreds of thousands of years on the current guesses. Ohh and lets not forget the out of place artifacts that should not even exist.

There are no "out of place artifacts that shouldn't exist."

These particular marks were made by a species different from our own.

The fact you attribute them to humans simply shows your bias toward your own species (speciesist!) or your ignorance of the available facts about what evidence we do have about the ancient past.

To test the other half of my recommendation that A. afarensis was also a precursor to Homo required the recovery of fossils in the two to three million year time period attributable to Homo. This was not an easy task because fossils in general were relatively rare in this span of time.

Fortunately in 1994 during a strategic survey within the Hadar Formation a well-preserved palate including partial dentition was recovered from 2.35 million year old deposits. A.L. 666-1 manifested classic Homo anatomy in its arch shape, dimensions and deeply arched palate. It was not possible to assign it to a species, nor did it have affinities with A. afarensis materials, but it did narrow the gap between A. afarensis and Homo to roughly 600,000 years.

Source

There is an outside possibility, of course, that the creatures that butchered this animal were of the genus Homo (not Sapiens, possibly Habilis, if not a precursor,) but fossils we have from that period tell a different story.

Harte