The 3.3 million-year-old girl

[BRPORSCHE]

wait how can it be that old? Isn't the Earth only 4 billion years old? So it only took .7 billion years for everything to cool off and to have the first human species? Confused....

edit: ahhh 4.57 billion years. Hmm 1.3 billion years seems more likey. Really hard to think in BILLONS!

[WOODPIE]

Nevermind

[Britwrench]

Thought it was about my ex...........

Although she is older...........

[trekkor]

Dating methods are a sham and guesswork at best...

No humans existed prior to about 6,000 years.


KT

[cool_chick]

Originally posted by BRPORSCHE
wait how can it be that old? Isn't the Earth only 4 billion years old? So it only took .7 billion years for everything to cool off and to have the first human species? Confused....

edit: ahhh 4.57 billion years. Hmm 1.3 billion years seems more likey. Really hard to think in BILLONS!

3.3 million years....not billion


re: the OP, very interesting.....

[IROC]

Originally posted by trekkor
Dating methods are a sham and guesswork at best...

No humans existed prior to about 6,000 years.


KT

Trekkor, man...give it up. 6000 years? That's just incredibly silly.

[masraum]

Originally posted by IROC
Trekkor, man...give it up. 6000 years? That's just incredibly silly.

IROC, man...give it up. 3.3million years? That's just incredibly silly.

[imcarthur]

from a link from the article above:

She was kinda cute.

Ian



The ascent of man

6.5m years ago
Earliest human lineages split from chimpanzees and gorillas, but share many traits with the apes.

5.8m years ago
The oldest human ancestor, Orrorin tugenesis, emerges and is thought to walk on two legs.

4m years ago
Australopithecus arrives with a brain no larger than a chimp's. Makes home on the savannah and develops teeth for chewing tough food.

2.5m years ago
Homo habilis, right, the first modern human genus emerges. It has a brain half the size of humans today and begins to use primitive stone tools.

2m years ago
Homo ergaster arrives with a smaller face and teeth, but slightly larger brain. Develops hand axes and may have begun to harness fire.

1.8m years ago
Homo erectus or Java man, the first true hunter-gatherer settles in Asia.

600,000 years ago
Homo heidelbergensis lives in Africa and Europe. Its brain is similar in size to a modern human's.

230,000 years ago
Neanderthals arrive in Britain and Europe.

195,000 years ago
Homo sapiens appears, but it is a further 45,000 years before the first signs of speech emerge.

95,000 years ago
The diminutive "Hobbit" people, Homo floresiensis, is believed to emerge in Indonesia.

[Jim Richards]

is she hot?


j/k

[cool_chick]

Originally posted by masraum
IROC, man...give it up. 3.3million years? That's just incredibly silly.

How so?

[IROC]

While I'm not speaking for the people who dated this specimen, I guarantee that 3.3 million years is a lot closer to the actual age of this skeleton than 6000 years. :>)

Contrary to public opinion, dating methods are pretty good these days.

Mike

[Zendalar]

6k years is just biblical b-$hit

[RickM]

Originally posted by IROC

Contrary to public opinion, dating methods are pretty good these days.

Mike

I always hated dating....

[dhoward]

Originally posted by RickM
I always hated dating....

Especially carbon dating. It's so hard to clean up the mess sometimes....

[kang]

For those who doubt dating methods, take a look at this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dating_methods


There are many different dating methods, not just the carbon 14 method that we are all familiar with. Also, when one specimen is dated by different methods, they all agree with each other. This validates each method.

For more fun, read this as well:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_Earth

You can read about all the different ways they used to determine the age of the earth, and how they are all pretty close.

If you do some real basic research like this, you'll see how silly the 6,000 year figure really is.

[widebody911]

Dating? You could probably hit it if you just showed up with some banannas...

[trekkor]

The dating methods are guesswork because there is no "real" way to "prove" the age.

Always guessing, never proving. The usual...


KT

[dhoward]

Originally posted by trekkor
The dating methods are guesswork because there is no "real" way to "prove" the age.



KT

Well, not to you anyway...

[IROC]

Trekkor, you're just going to have to admit defeat on this one unless you can offer some sort of evidence to back up your claim. The scientific community has offered *alot* of evidence to support their claims.

I realize there are people out there that believe the Earth is only 10k years old or so, but they have offered nothing to substantiate their claim, so it's hard to take it seriously.

Mike

[Superman]

I am a Christian. I respect scientific dating methods. I do not deny that we evolved from apes. But I also do not respect folks who think the questions are answered and the issues settled. There are unsettling factoids. Something extraordinary happened. There is a gap. There is NOT a nice, smooth line of archeological evidence connecting us to apes. Something very recent, compared to these dates, happened. In the last 50,000 years, which is a blink of an eye in the scheme of these fossil records. In other words, if evolution accounts for everything, then we still have to explain how evolution went slowly for three million years, and then raced like a Porsche 917-30, almost instantly creating modern humans about 30,000 to 40,000 years ago.

And BTW, some of the fossil records outlined by imcarthur are not even suspected to be human ancestors. For example, we did not evolve from Neanderthals.