Oldest Stone Blades Uncovered, 500,000 years old

The existence of blades, a more complex stone tool working technique has been found, dated to 509,000-543,000 years ago.

it appears that more than 500,000 years ago, human ancestors living in the Baringo Basin of Kenya collected lava stone cobbles from a riverbed and hammered them in just the right way to produce stone blades. Paleoanthropologists Cara Roure Johnson and Sally McBrearty of the University of Connecticut, Storrs, recently discovered the blades at five sites in the region, including two that date to between 509,000 and 543,000 years ago. "This is the oldest known occurrence of blades," Johnson reported Wednesday here at the annual meeting of the Paleoanthropology Society.

The link

Not long ago, researchers thought that blades were so hard to make that they had to be the handiwork of modern humans, who had evolved the mental wherewithal to systematically strike a cobble in the right way to produce blades and not just crude stone flakes. First, they were thought to be a hallmark of the late Stone Age, which began 40,000 years ago. Later, blades were thought to have emerged in the Middle Stone Age, which began about 200,000 years ago when modern humans arose in Africa and invented a new industry of more sophisticated stone tools. But this view has been challenged in recent years as researchers discovered blades that dated to 380,000 years in the Middle East and to almost 300,000 years ago in Europe, where Neandertals may have made them

Verrrry interesting!

Great find!
star and flag

Interesting find, Hans. I imagine the evidence will now be looked at by their peers. Have you taken a look at the enlarged image on the link? Do you think all three examples look like blades?

reply to post by Kandinsky


I did a lot of lithics work, in obsidian, learning to duplicate different tool asssembles and to me they look like blades. Of course the definition of what a blade is a bit fuzzy

A blade

Towards the bottom of the page

"Blade" is arbitrarily defined by most archaeologists as a tool that is at least twice as long as it is wide, with sides roughly parallel. It would be reasonable to say that it is also a thin tool

By most is the key word, others define it as be struck from a core, etc

I think we are gonna keep finding evidence that humans have been active a lot longer then we thought.

My theory is that ancient egypt was actually middle civilazation, not ancient.

That stone core in the pictures would be the before and the other stones or "blades" would be flaked from the core. Those actually look like spear points....looks to small for hand blades.

reply to post by nixie_nox


It goes back to the definitions of what a civilization is.

As we get better at detection and do more digging, figuratively and in reality we should be able to push the boundaries back even further.

reply to post by Hanslune


True, but just what is the definition of civilization now?

(hee, this could be another pluto discussion)

reply to post by nixie_nox


That has been debated since the late 18th century - and is going on today

500,000 yrs old, that just goes against the grain.

I expect a new addition to the "black-balled" club :/

Wow so how long have humans been around?
500 000 years? More?

i too believe we will continue to find things that continue to distort the science that science had been pushing for many years now.........great find!!!

Originally posted by prjct
i too believe we will continue to find things that continue to distort the science that science had been pushing for many years now.........great find!!
!

Ah prjct

I was once a scientist and am still a keen amateur. This report is from scientists, the work was done by scientists

Science is constantly changing, theories come and go, new evidence is found. Science is a methodology and a concensus, nothing more - no monolithic evil present you have to 'fight' against.

Originally posted by nixie_nox
I think we are gonna keep finding evidence that humans have been active a lot longer then we thought.

My theory is that ancient egypt was actually middle civilazation, not ancient.

exactly i too believe we are going to keep finding these type of things pushing back what we thought were the dates

not sure about ancient egypt being middle civilization it is a interesting theory and i do believe egypt is definitely not ancient

I didn't see a dating method, was a method used?

Many other similar anomalies are covered in the following books:
The Hidden History of the Human Race : Major Scientific Coverup Exposed

Archeo logical Anomalies: Graphic Artifacts 1 - Coins, Calendars, Geoforms, Maps, Quipus

Wm. Corliss has many other books with similar anomalies on his website Science-Frontiers.com.

Still waiting for them to tell us that "Atlantis" did exist and it is currently locked under a mile of ice in what is known as Antarctica.

Good find, though.

reply to post by Hanslune
Hiya Hans, thanks for clarifying. I wasn't sure and don't have the knowledge to accurately judge for myself. I've only looked at N European, Siberian and Clovis blades and they use different materials. The article fascinated me in the light of recent expansions of our understanding of complex behaviors. Not only the timescales are being expanded, but our understanding of such behaviors in other species.

It may seem irrelevant to the notion of tools being created 500 000 years ago by early man, but I'd like to share this video...



It isn't unknown for chimps to use basic tools to extract ants from dead tree nests, but the video and this accompanying BBC article raises questions of premeditation. Furthermore there is a chimp called Santino that has been observed preparing small piles of stones at 10am to throw at zoo visitors at 11am.

There's a thread that discusses these ideas here. As usual, I'd appreciate your thoughts on the matter

The reason I feel it relates to the earlier dating of stone tools is that I imagine it's a reflection of how we came to use tools in the first place. The sudden leaps in hominid technology that are indicated in the archaeological record may have precursors much earlier. I wonder if our earliest ancestors were using very basic planning and tools? What do you think?

EDIT to add...My first post was also going to underline the fact that people keep claiming 'scientists' are ignoring or burying new findings. It demonstrates how wrong they are that a dramatic extension of the timescale is so easily accepted for debate. The belief in cover ups because of dogmatic convention and a 'fear of the unknown', is soundly dismissed by the article's existence. Still they will complain and accuse

[edit on 4-4-2009 by Kandinsky]

Originally posted by Hanslune

Originally posted by prjct
i too believe we will continue to find things that continue to distort the science that science had been pushing for many years now.........great find!!
!

Science is constantly changing, theories come and go, new evidence is found. Science is a methodology and a concensus, nothing more - no monolithic evil present you have to 'fight' against.

Great article. I believe prjct was commenting on diehard "scientists" that only adhere their old theories and dismiss anything new or different as an anomaly to their traditional beliefs and that any anomaly must be thrown out when analyzing historical records.

You are correct that science is constantly changing. I find it amusing that some people claim all science to be the absolute "truth" when the "truth" we know today, might be wrong tomorrow.

Originally posted by Hanslune
As we get better at detection and do more digging, figuratively and in reality we should be able to push the boundaries back even further.

You are right about that, but is it not so that there are many things found already that has pushed those boundaries back even much, much further back then those 500,000 years.

Only because those finds does not fit and contradicts with the unbendable views of our scientists back then as they are today, they has done nothing more then ignored those finds and ridiculed those who found them for many years now.

By the way, what is your opinion on the work of Michael A Cremo.

FORBIDDEN ARCHEOLOGY: The Hidden History Of The Human Race
by Cremo, Michael A

ISBN: 0892132949
Item Type: Hardback
Publisher: Atlas Books

Forbidden Archeology is a remarkably complete review of the scientific evidence concerning human origins. It carefully evaluates all the evidence, including the evidence that has been ignored because it does not fit the dominant paradigm.

Anyone can learn a great deal from the authors` meticulous research and analysis, whatever one concludes about their thesis regarding the antiquity of human beings. --

Dr. Phillip E. Johnson, University of California, Berkeley, author of Darwin on Trial I perceive in Forbidden Archeology an important work of thorough- going scholarship and intellectual adventure. Forbidden Archeology ascends and descends into the realms of the human construction of scientific `fact` and theory: postmodern territories that historians, philosophers, and sociologists of scientific knowledge are investigating with increasing frequency....With exacting research into the history of paleoanthropological discovery, Cremo and Thompson zoom in on the epistemological crisis of the human fossil record, the process of disciplinary suppression, and the situated scientific handling of `anomalous evidence` to build persuasive theory and local institutions of knowledge and power. -- Dr. Pierce J. Flynn, Department of Arts and Science, California State University, San Marcos Forbidden Archeology, written primarily for the layman, provides a critical review of evidence relevant to human evolution. In addition, the book will serve as a valuable resource of forgotten literature, which is usually not easily accessible. If it stimulates professional reinvestigation of reports not fitting the current paradigm on human evolution, Forbidden Archeology will have contributed to the advancement of knowledge of the history of mankind. -- Dr. Siegfried Scherer, Institute for Microbiology Technical University of Munich, Germany" OVER THE PAST TWO CENTURIES, researchers have found bones and artifacts showing that people like ourselves existed on earth millions of years ago. But the scientific establishment has suppressed, ignored, or forgotten these remarkable facts. Why? Because they contradict dominant views of human origins and antiquity. Evolutionary prejudices, deeply held by powerful groups of scientists, have acted as what Michael A. Cremo and Richard I.. Thompson call a `knowledge filter.` And the filtering, intentional or not, has left us with a radically incomplete set of facts for building our ideas about human origins. According to Cremo and Thompson, we have come to accept a picture of prehistory that is largely incorrect. Forbidden Archeology is a call for a change in today`s arbitrarily rigid mindset. Deploying an unexpectedly great number of convincing facts, deeply illuminated with critical analysis, Cremo and Thompson challenge us to rethink our understanding of human origins, identity, and destiny. In Forbidden Archeology, we accompany the authors on a fascinating intellectual expedition. We take part in the literary excavation of a vast store of hidden knowledge that adds a new dimension to our understanding of the history of our species. This journey of exploration takes us across five continents to key archeological sites -- some long forgotten, some the center of ongoing research. Along the way, we encounter many famous and infamous pioneers of prehistoric research, all with secrets to share. Forbidden Archeology is bound to inspire controversy, challenging as it does one of the most fundamental components of the modern scientific world view. Meticulously researched and carefully written, Forbidden Archeology takes us to a crossroads of knowledge and invites us to take a courageous first step in a new direction of truth. MICHAEL A. CREMO is a research associate of the Bhaktivedanta Institute specializing in the history and philosophy of science. His persistent investigations during the eight years of writing Forbidden Archeology documented a major scientific cover-up. RICHARD L. THOMPSON, a founding member of the Bhaktivedanta Institute, received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Cornell University. He is the author of scientific books and articles on evolutionary biology. In 1984, he initiated the intense research effort that culminated in the publishing of Forbidden Archeology. The Bhaktivedanta Institute, founded in 1975, is a center dedicated to the advanced study of the nature and origin of life and the universe in light of ancient India`s Vedic literature.

www.insight-books.com...

www.forbiddenarcheology.com...

Oops sorry double post.

[edit on 4/4/2009 by Melyanna Tengwesta]