9 million year old homonin teeth from...............GERMANY?

As an archaeological tour director for ten years, and having traveled all over the world looking at archaeology.... I'm here to tell you that I know....nothing.

Even after having traveled with major archaeologists I don't have a very good grasp of things. I honestly get more from watching ancient aliens.

Don't laugh. That show is willing to speculate, take wild leaps, shake up the dynamic, try odd puzzle pieces.

Archaeology has been hijacked by acedemia. After Schliemann found Troy it's been all downhill from there. Gerald Diamond is a bit more mainstream---but he's often chastised by his colleagues.

And the state of archaeology isn't good. Not enough funding, downsizing of university programs and budgets. The New World doesn't give a darn about the past.

The past is a scary thing to them----the general population might learn too much! Rather than being the dynamic, ever-changing, mind-blowing field of study that it is---it's dry, hidden, under-funded, fails to grasp the attention of the general public in a truly remarkable way. The average person has no understanding of archaeology and what kind of questions we are asking of it.

We need an Indiana Jones! We need new life blood in this science.

Right now it's infested with gate keepers. And archaeologists are left to fundraise through corporations to get projects off the ground.

originally posted by: peter vlar
a reply to: hombero

Except that there's no evidence that this is actually a hominin let alone a hominin ancestral to HSS. It's a couple of teeth that one group believes could be a hominin. Beyond that there is no crania or post cranial remains that would allow paleoanthropologists to make a more accurate determination. Deciding for yourself that they're an early ancestor of humans doesn't actually make it so.

ETA- after digging around and finding some pictures to make a comparison against, the molar appears to be a primitive catarrhine like Anapithecus while the alleged canine may not actually be a hominin tooth at all. Really S#tty media hype over something that only exists in the imaginations of reporters and not anthropologists.

I present to you a gatekeeper.

a reply to: Tempter

A gatekeeper? Why, for pointing out facts and how hyperbolic and conjecture laden the source material is because people casually reading it will think, wrongly at that, that 2 teeth taken out of context somehow rewrite the entire history of hominid evolution?

If I'm wrong, please feel free to describe what I am in error about instead of a one line ad hominem that violates the T&C of this site. But unless you've got some sort of evidence beyond one tooth that looks like a 10 Ma Hungarian Ape and one that doesn't resemble any hominids, that's all you've got is ad hominem tripe and that doesn't do anything to further the conversation. I'm always open to new evidence and overturning dogmatic views in regards tim anthropology and Archaeology. But an extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence and two teeth with no cranial or postcranial context is not extraordinary evidence of anything except a potentially new species.

Again, were talking about 2 teeth here. In comparison, we've got a fairly significant amount of A. Ramidus post cranial remains and we can't determine with any degree I feel veracity if they are a direct ancestor of our Genus so how exactly is 2 teeth going to rewrite scientific paradigms? It's not.

Science doesn't work this way: one finding is not going to undo the thousands upon thousands of findings which originate in the same layer of earth, presenting a pretty consistent timeline of the evolution of hominins. In other words, just because apes on the verge of becoming hominins evolved in Europe, doesn't at all imply that these apes went on to evolve into humans, which is what seems to be implied by so many articles commenting on this finding.

Take these facts into account: Apes evolved 30 million plus years ago during an epoch called the Oligocene. During the Miocene (starting 20 million years ago) the Iberian peninsula and north Africa were connected, which helps explain how it is ape fossils are found throughout Africa as well as Europe. In addition, genetic studies of chimps and Humans show that we likely diverged from a common ancestor 13 million years ago, which suggests that prior to 13 million years ago there were apes throughout Africa and Europe which were capable of evolving further.

The findings thus make plenty of sense within the existing scheme of continental drift and paleontology - so not as "transforming" as the article claims it is.

That said, it is far more difficult to move from hominin into human, and there is no evidence that any apes in Europe evolved into humans, so it would be wrong to attempt to localize human evolution to the European continent.

All the evidence shows hominins evolved into Humans as a function of pendulum type oscillations between wet periods and dry periods in East Africa starting around 2 million years ago.

The anthropologist and climate scientist Mark Maslin explains this situation very well be correlating fossil finds, tools finds and a study of the effects of the Earths relation to the sun, and the phenomena of "orbital forcing", to show that the region of East Africa changed dramatically, and with it, forced the evolution of hominins to not only become bipedal (which existed in Apes for many millions of years) but to move through water, which is a likely candidate for the reason humans are hairless and walk upright.

originally posted by: MRuss
After Schliemann found Troy it's been all downhill from there.

Well actually he didn't. When he got to that area of modern Turkey he found an archaeologist named Calvert siting on the site, but unable to purchase the site as he was too poor. With his money Schliemann was able to excavate. He however ID the wrong level of the site (which had multiple levels) as 'Troy'. This was corrected later but not by him.

He did however say he found Troy and people have been repeating his mistake for a long time.

en.wikipedia.org...

a reply to: TobyFlenderson

havent they already found teeth and jaw bone from our earlier ancestors in the Balkans pushing back the date of sapient humans, and throwing a spanner at the out of africa theory

phys science

science daily

originally posted by: Phage
a reply to: TobyFlenderson

Maybe. Or it could just mean that hominins appeared earlier than thought and had a wider range.

The evidence is pretty strong that the branch which led to us was in Africa for a good long while. That would apply even if they started in Europe 9 million years ago.

You are missing the point of this discovery. There is no need for an "out of Africa" THEORY if it is true that hominids existed already in Europe long before Lucy. Rather than homo sapiens sapiens descending from Lucy, it indicates that Lucy could have been merely an offspring of a hitherto unknown species of hominid that eventuall migrated into Africa, creating the bogus impression (merely because it was the oldest bones found up till then) that humanity originated in Africa.
Evidence is only good as long as there is no other evidence that is either inconsistent with it or makes it redundant as evidence of a paradigm or hypothesis ("out of Africa"). This is no longer the case now we have evidence of a hominid species in Europe millions of years before Lucy.

a reply to: Astrocyte

Science doesn't work this way: one finding is not going to undo the thousands upon thousands of findings ...

I wonder a lot about that statement.
And it's commonly made.

Not that I argue it has, but surely if proof is found, even just one time, then all the other thousands of findings are wrong.

You can't say science works by consensus - thousands of people say this therefore it is true.

That's actually what impartial science should not be.

originally posted by: halfoldman
a reply to: Astrocyte

Science doesn't work this way: one finding is not going to undo the thousands upon thousands of findings ...

I wonder a lot about that statement.
And it's commonly made.

Not that I argue it has, but surely if proof is found, even just one time, then all the other thousands of findings are wrong.

I'm failing to see the logic in a random anomaly overturning 1000's of pieces of hard evidence.

You can't say science works by consensus - thousands of people say this therefore it is true.

I totally see your point, but science doesn't work on consensus per se. The scientific method operators under the axiom of testable and repeatable data. If 5000 anthropologists and geneticists look st the same information and reach the same conclusion independently then your early mentions one time instance doesn't have the weight to overturn that mountain of evidence.

In this particular find, it's disingenuous and a leaning towards pandering, to make claims such as those in the cited article in the OP. We are talking about 2 teeth and one of them doesn't resemble and hominin tooth I've ever seen but looks very much like Miocene Apes known to have lived in Hungary and Austria which geographically are fairly close to where these teeth were found in Germany.

Thst doesn't mean that there isn't a potential relation to hominids lurking in Europe,'just that a determination of that nature can't be made on a couple of teeth, one of which doesn't resemble any known hominin.

I think it's also important to note that dentition is often determined by diet and how the organism adapts to its particular ecological niche. In Europe, the lush forests that Miocene apes called home, changed to a very different ecosystem much earlier than similar forests in South and East Africa changed to open Savannah. This would certainly seem to indicate that we would find similar dentition at an earlier point in time in Europe where the local eco-niche changed a few million years earlier prompting the inhabitants of these areas to adapt or die off, which is exactly what we see in the fossil record for these areas. In short, it's an incidence of convergent evolution where similar organisms develop similar dentition in response to similar ecological niches in different parts of the globe.

That's actually what impartial science should not be.

I agree, science shouldn't be about hand holding and consensus. It should however hinge on repeatable and testable evidence. That doesn't exist currently with these fossils. As I mentioned earlier, we have complete or near complete crania and post cranial remains for a multitude of early African Hominids. Some of them we can say with a high degree of veracity that they are our ancestors or within our lineage. Others, despite the amount of remains we have in evidence, Like Ardipithecus Ramidus for example, and there's no way yet to prove whether they are or are not an direct ancestor of ours. To make a claim that we are rewriting the evolutionary history of our own Genus based on a couple of teeth just doesn't pass the smell test. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Teeth are not up to that task until we develop a method of extracting and preserving genetic material and sequencing it without contaminants. Just my 2 cents for what it's worth.

Its one point of data in a large field of other data, while interesting it is in sufficient to alter OOA. To do that you'd need to find skeletons like the ones from the Caucasus that would predate Lucy and the other very old hominids found in Africa.

In that period of time. The artificial division of the main continent, that we later made into Africa, Asia and Europe would have been less as the Mediterranean was greatly reduced at that time.

originally posted by: halfoldman
Funny, humans share teeth with other species (long before Lucy).

But what happened to the male penile bone in humans (which other primates retain), nobody can really explain.
en.wikipedia.org...

But it seems not even the creationists want to touch that glaring subject.

Apparently !

God seen that the Homo Sapien Female , cant take it like a champ!
in a Long Duration ! upon Hours .. so He Shortened the Duration and
took out the Bone , ,

Then The Female was displeased and lost interest as she wasn't Getting off!!
and not being Happy Satisfied ! and was attempting on lusting with other Species

Then God seen this was not good ...
God then Placed Girth and lengths , a bigger package into Some Males.
for the Females that were not Pleased!

God seen this Pleased the Human Females

and Then God make a Big Mistake!
for telling His Creation to be!
Be fruitful and multiply

LOL!!

Sorry I just had too say give in!


any how ! 9.7 million years old hominid Teeth !

in Germany , well Im not surprised.

Humans Originated from Europe ALSO ..

just the Great Apes and Most Hominids
came from Africa ,and migrated to Europe
and Asia

seems like Germany is a also Hotspot
for the Beginning of Early Man ,
just as where Neanderthals were first discovered
in Germany , and the Oldest known Figurine a
Lion head Humanoid that is 40,000+ years old


time look at other sites about it

Great find and thanks for the post!!!

I always like seeing the new things we are discovering as we are getting better at looking

a reply to: badw0lf

I think thats the most beautiful way ive heard it explained. Thank you for that!