World's Oldest Human Footprints

Gorbie writes "An article on Yahoo tells about the discovery of 350,000 year old human footprints found in Italy."

Well

[GigsVT]

This is obviously wrong, the earth is only a little more than 5000 [creator-creation.com] years old.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

You think he is nuts

[Lord_Of_The_Beer]

Did you read the flat earth link a couple of days back...

At least these people belive the earth is round.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Well

[jsse]

This is obviously wrong, the earth is only a little more than 5000 [creator-creation.com] years old.

This is a series of science paradox which show one scientific estimation is in contradiction with another. They may look very funny at the first glance, but they actually help us reconsider the validity of commonly adopted scientific assumptions.

I can't really comment on the earth rotation part as I'm not expert in this field, but his comment on electromagnetic decay is already answered by recent(not re

In related news...

[tchdab1]

The Onion reports the oldest evidence ever found for athlete's foot.

Re:In related news...

[Icculus]

I must be just as twisted as you because that's the very first thing I thought.

and beside the footprints...

[MarvinMouse]

They found a strange building they've called "the worlds oldest Chinese Mann's Theatre", and also in the ground they found the cryptic words:

"Charles Heston"
and two handprints.

Scientists are trying to decode this strange oddity.

Charles Heston?

[barakn]

Perhaps if you had said Charlton Heston [thecattbox.com], it would have been funnier. Don't forget the footprints.

Actually ...

[Quixotic Raindrop]

The article points out that footprints in the 3.5 million years old range have been found, these are just the oldest footprints of Stone Age humans.

Re:Actually ...

[Quixotic Raindrop]

oops. Make that the oldest footprints ... my mistake! They were 3.5M yo., but of a pre-human species.

Re:Actually ...

[reverseengineer]

Well, they're footprints of a recent precursor to modern humans, Homo heidelbergensis, which is believed to be the forerunner of both H. neanderthalensis and H. sapiens There are some paleoanthropologists, however, who think that H. heidelbergensis (I just love that name) might only be the direct ancestor of Neanderthals and that the break between H. neanderthalensis and H. sapiens occurred earlier.

It is also interesting to note that these footprints indicate that they were made by beings which were approximately 4.5ft (1.5m) tall, though H. heidelbergensis remains suggest that adults of the species may have been as tall as 6 feet (1.9m). Thus, as the article suggests, these footprints may have been made by children- or they made be from a completely different hominid species.

Re:Actually ...

[smithmc]

There are some paleoanthropologists, however, who think that H. heidelbergensis (I just love that name)

Do you think they were great swordfighters? I mean, if they all went to Heidelberg...

For a picture...

[tellurian]

see here [gnome.org].

Those kids...

[gnovos]

I TOLD them to keep off the lawn...

This is really...

[ivanandre]

...the equivalent of the first post!

Who can argue with that?

prehuman?

[Jayson]

How do they know it is from a prehuman species? Is that just speculation taken from the when they are believed to have been formed? There is nothing in the print that points to this, right?

Re:prehuman?

[Bonker]

You can tell a lot from the footprints, such as the shape of pelvis bones, relative age and weight of the print maker, frequently the gender of the print-maker... all from the angle of the foot prints. If the prints are the correct proportions for 'human' and have the correct angles for a human walker, then scientists can probably narrow it down to being human prints with great accuracy.

From what I have read...

[Jayson]

They said that the prints are probably of children about 4-foot-6 using the standard ratio of foot size to height. The prints done appear of good enough quality to tell any more.

Re:prehuman?

[PyroMosh]

For more on this, may I suggest any of Tom Brown Jr's books [barnesandnoble.com]? He's written both manuals (which, as you'd expect are rather dry, but highly informative) and biographical story books, which are just as educational, but also very entertaining.

If you've never heard of him (and most people haven't) Tom Brown Jr [trackerschool.com], is one of the foremost experts on the lost art of tracking. He first started to learn the art as a young boy from his best friend's grandfather, who was a displaced Apache scout.

Today, he's a world re

Proof positive

[Enrico Pulatzo]

They knew they age of the footprint by the age of the dog crap that was stepped in.

This always happens.

[yo303]

You go and pour some fresh concrete or volcano mud, and some idiot goes and writes their initials in it, or steps there. It was the same then as it is now.

Who left the 56 footprints is not clear. But their discoverers suggest either late Homo erectus or Homo heidelbergensis -- two early human species found in Europe during the Paleolithic era, also known as the Stone Age.

When they find the guy that did it, they're going to be MAD!

yo.

Re:This always happens.

[GigsVT]

They should check all the bathhouses.

Too bad Steve's been debunked

[Anonymous Coward]

Yawn. Look here [talkorigins.org] troll.

Re:How old are they?

[Anonymous Coward]

whole rock K-Ar dating on rocks only 10 years old is NEVER going to give you interpretable results.

1) whole rock dating is, as it sounds, dating a rock without regard to the specific mineral phases within it. this is a major point because different minerals have different diffusivities (and therefore closure temperatures) with respect to loss of radiogenic 40Ar.

2) K-Ar dating, while useful, gives results with large uncertainties. for example, a 10 million year old K-Ar date typically has uncertainties o

Re:How old are they?

[young-earth]

The key point, which seems to have been missed, is that when rocks of known ages are radiometrically dated, the results are extremely wrong. As a simple double-blind calibration of experimental methodology, this shows that radiometric dating methods currently in use are fatally flawed.

If you run a double-blind test in medicine and prove something is completely ineffective, the medication never sees the market (well, that's how it's supposed to work; thalidomide and other examples indicate that even that p

Re:How old are they?

[fluffy666]

But given that K-Ar dating is typically used for age ranges in the 10s or 100s of millions of years, these results show that the uncertanty due to primordial argon is small, and hence the method is accurate. Thanks for demonstrating that radiometric dating is reliable.

Re:How old are they?

[young-earth]

Your assertion

But given that K-Ar dating is typically used for age ranges in the 10s or 100s of millions of years, these results show that the uncertanty due to primordial argon is small, and hence the method is accurate.

does not agree with sources that believe in K-Ar dating. For example, from here [palomar.edu] you see

Potassium-argon dates usually have comparatively large plus or minus factors--they may be on the order of ¼ million years for a 2 million year old date. In addition, this dating technique usually is

Re:How old are they?

[pyr0]

However, none of those sources agree that you could date a rock 10 years old.

Re:How old are they?

[young-earth]

Quite true none of them claim that. But since the confidence intervals in both Dalrymple's results and Austin's results are in the 300K+ range, that's still awfully inaccurate. Would you accept measurements off by four orders of magnitude in something else?

Re:How old are they?

[svyyn]

The problem here is simple. If you believe that the Earth is only 5000 or so years old, then any test that relies on the rocks in question being an order of magnitude or two older is invalid. Such people have no concept of 'geological time', since they cannot understand that the beginning of history does not mean the beginnig of time.

This argument is futile -- no matter how scientific creationists try to sound, their world view is so dramatically different from the agnostic scientific model that a conce

Re:How old are they?

[pyr0]

"The key point, which seems to have been missed..."

I think *YOU* have missed the key point in this case, and that is that radiometric dating does not work for very young rocks. I believe the parent post's point 3 accounts for the problem that you seem to have. I'll even cut and paste it so you can read it again:

"3) THE SAMPLES ARE ONLY 10 YEARS OLD!!!! that is (by a long shot) not enough time to accumulate radiogenic 40Ar in the sample. the half-life of 40K is just too damn long and given the state of t

Re:How old are they?

[young-earth]

Allowing for the sake of discussion that everything you state is absolutely true, the problem that I originally stated still exists. Yes some of the samples were ten years old (Dalrymple's were older); yet when samples of UNKNOWN age are tested, it is not possible to screen out "too young to be tested" rocks as unknown age rocks are of, well, unknown age.

The point being that if you submit using double-blind techniques both known and unknown age rocks, you will get results which invalidate the radiometric

Re:How old are they?

[Bowling Moses]

I took a slightly extended lunch break today and went down to the university library to grab the original paper. There's some truly interesting things about your citing of Dalrymple. First off, you (or whoever your source is--in my experience creationists rarely read the original) didn't read the table right. The numbers that you present are actually the concentration of Ar-40 found in the sample, in 10^-12 mol Ar-40/g sample. The apparent age is in the third column of table 2 on page 51--I won't give th

Re:How old are they?

[pyr0]

Exactly!! And in fact, most radiometric dating techniques become far more robust as the age of the rock increases. Also, I don't think that people realize that +- a few million years isn't that much compared next to 4.6 billion years of Earth's history. We're also always coming up with ways to decrease the error. One example is separating out the mineral of interest, and then abrading the edges of that mineral away to get to the core of the mineral. If that mineral ever had undergone weathering or alt

Re:How old are they?

[young-earth]

Of course the problem with the anomalous dates is excess Ar, what else could it be? But knowing the cause of a ratio being incorrect in a rock of known age does not justify greater accuracy to be assigned to unknown age rocks. The topic of this /. story is about footprints found in volcanic material which was dated to be roughly the same as the Mt. St. Helens rocks. So my point is that there could be just as much anomalous Ar in the Roccamonfina samples as there was in the Mt. St. Helens samples. There

Re:How old are they?

[Bowling Moses]

"Of course the problem with the anomalous dates is excess Ar, what else could it be?"

Interestingly three of Dalrymple's samples have lower levels of Ar40 relative to Ar36 than expected producing dates that are too young. You (our more likely your source--whichever) completely failed to mention this. Indeed a major point of the article was to investigate the range of Ar40/Ar36 ratios and to give us an idea of the error bars that a K-Ar date may give us. This renders your "point" about there being as muc

Re:How old are they?

[young-earth]

I have made no accusations of dishonesty on geologists; read the evolutionists' posts about Steve Austin if you want to see vitriolic attacks. I have questioned the accuracy of certain methods; that's not attacking individuals.

The idea that radiometric dating methods are unrealiable is not limited to creationists, there are evolutionists that have real problems with it as well. For example, William D. Stansfield, Science of Evolution (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1977), p.84:

"It is obvious that ra

Re:How old are they?

[Bowling Moses]

You claim "I have made no accusations of dishonesty on geologists..." but yet earlier you said: "What justification can there be for continuing to use a method known to be wrong? Aside from preserving the jobs and income of those whose livelihood depends on maintaining the intellectual status quo, none occurs to me - anybody out there got a less uncharitable idea? "--meaning geologists who work at radiometric dating are nothing more than charlatans and a clear personal attack. You then present me with a s

Re:How old are they?

[Graspee_Leemoor]

"whole rock dating is, as it sounds, dating a rock"

I dated a rock once. It was a pet rock. It raised many issues.

The worst thing was the rock never paid for itself in restaurants.

Next time I'm going to try computer dating.

graspee

Oldest human footprint?

[sethaw]

Slashdot title:
World's Oldest Human Footprints

From the article:
Other scientists said that while the prints appear well-preserved, they add little to knowledge about human evolution, since footprints of far older human ancestors have been found.

Seems like a contradiction to me.

Re:Oldest human footprint?

[TummyX]

World's Oldest Human Footprints



Other scientists said that while the prints appear well-preserved, they add little to knowledge about human evolution, since footprints of far older human ancestors have been found.