“A new find has muddied the waters on the origins of Homo erectus,” Nature confides. Hammered them to bits, actually.
Reid Ferring, an anthropologist at the University of North Texas in Denton, and his colleagues excavated the Dmanisi site in the Caucasus Mountains of Georgia. They found stone artefacts — mostly flakes that were dropped as hominins knapped rocks to create tools for butchering animals — lying in sediments almost 1.85 million years old. Until now, anthropologists have thought that H. erectus evolved between 1.78 million and 1.65 million years ago — after the Dmanisi tools would have been made. – Matt Kaplan, Human ancestors in Eurasia earlier than thought”, (6 June 2011)
Maybe Michael Cremo (the Forbidden Archaeology guy) is right. Or nobody is. But some suggest that we won’t get anywhere until the “assured results of modern Darwinism” find their way to the appropriate curio cabinet.
File under: How would we write known human history if we just forgot about evolution theory and told the history? Also: What factors prevented rapid technical advances in the past?