Head Lice

[Minimalist]

Beagle will volunteer, be given latrine duty, and make an important discovery while wading through shit.

He will discover that shit smells bad.


The Club will denounce him as a pseudoscientist and claim that shit smells like roses.

[Charlie Hatchett]

And Hueyatlaco, if 250k as posited is cool, but it is still 3/4 of a million years away from the head lice....................

What I find intriguing about the head lice data, is it's concordance with Berkeley Geochronology Center's dating of the Hueyatlaco bifacial spearpoint (1.1 Million B.P...Erectus and Sapien blurring here).

[Charlie Hatchett]

everytime i read this thread i feel itchy

Guilty conscience...

[john]

N.B.

The first rule I learned in the pursuit of scientific knowledge was

"Question Authority". Bigtime. And I tended that way, anyway, from an early age.

On both sides of the scientific and religious freakshow.


My 87 year old mother, who, due to interesting parentage in our family, is directly genetically related to a member of the original Plymouth colony, a priest no less, and to 1500 ish French settlers in Lousiana, once commented to me "I am one of the few who can lay legitimate claim to being both a member of the Daughters of the Republic and the Daughters of the Confederacy and I have not and will not give the time of day to either."

Which brings me to the existing archaeological civil war.

I am both a religious agnostic and scientific agnostic.

The questions I ask and the comments I make are not intended to limit questions or argument, but to open them.

Logic tells me that humans - or hominids - have existed a lot longer on the American continent than existing evidence would indicate. I have no problem, conceptually, with dates going back to 1.5m years BP. However, wishful thinking doesn't hack it. Having collected everything from Precambrian jellyfish to Pliocene/Holocene horizon bones, the absence of Very Old cultural remains (lithic, etc.) or skeletal remains in the Americas puzzles me. One can still go to the Badlands, walk up a wash, and find as many bits of Oreodont as you please. These from the Miocene.

Maybe a starting point would be to model the American continent as of 1.18 m years ago, and start searching likely hominid environments...........



john

[Cognito]

The questions I ask and the comments I make are not intended to limit questions or argument, but to open them.

Logic tells me that humans - or hominids - have existed a lot longer on the American continent than existing evidence would indicate. I have no problem, conceptually, with dates going back to 1.5m years BP. However, wishful thinking doesn't hack it. Having collected everything from Precambrian jellyfish to Pliocene/Holocene horizon bones, the absence of Very Old cultural remains (lithic, etc.) or skeletal remains in the Americas puzzles me. One can still go to the Badlands, walk up a wash, and find as many bits of Oreodont as you please. These from the Miocene.

Maybe a starting point would be to model the American continent as of 1.18 m years ago, and start searching likely hominid environments...........

I really don't give a rat's ass whether anything is found in the Americas a million years old or not. However, for people to state that nothing is there simply because nobody has looked makes no sense. Populations of hominids could have been sparse and remains rare, but I agree that searching in the right areas could yield results. Personally, I would start in the Lake Chapala area in Mexico where the H. erectus skullcap was found.

To this point, any ancient bones discovered were likely discarded since they wern't supposed to be anything special ... time to start the modeling project.

[Digit]

That makes sense Cog. As I suggested earlier, if Homo was in NA before the last ice age, then any evidence in the north at least may be totally lost to us, and his existence therefore may have to be by inference, such as the head lice, rather than by fossilized bones.
I can see no way of explaining the head lice scenario if you remove Homo from the equation. If someone one day finds a Model 'T' on Mars the conclusion would have to be that man was there.
I just wish people would junk the club wielding, dinosaur bashing, cave man from their minds.

[marduk]

If someone one day finds a Model 'T' on Mars the conclusion would have to be that man was there.

this doesn't neccesarily follow
there are already Rovers on Mars and man wasn't there

[Forum Monk]

A few things are unsettling to me about this. The head lice have apparently survived these 1.8 million years. This means they had hosts. Either they adapted to the blood of other species during the absence of humans and then readapted to humans or they had human hosts all along. IMO, the idea they adapted and then reverted is implausible. Fleas for example, can survive for quite a while without dogs or cats as hosts but will eventually die out for lack of hosts. The amount of time they survive (through sheer numbers of births) is not enough time to adapt to the local fauna. If all the dogs and cats (and any other hosts species) went extinct, the fleas would follow into oblivion.

For me the logical inference, if the lice survived, the hosts did also.

[Cognito]

A few things are unsettling to me about this. The head lice have apparently survived these 1.8 million years. This means they had hosts. Either they adapted to the blood of other species during the absence of humans and then readapted to humans or they had human hosts all along. IMO, the idea they adapted and then reverted is implausible. Fleas for example, can survive for quite a while without dogs or cats as hosts but will eventually die out for lack of hosts. The amount of time they survive (through sheer numbers of births) is not enough time to adapt to the local fauna. If all the dogs and cats (and any other hosts species) went extinct, the fleas would follow into oblivion.

For me the logical inference, if the lice survived, the hosts did also.

FM, the date of divergence was 1.18 million. Head lice can survive for up to 24 hours without a host, then they die. The logical inference is that there were two different populations of Homo, separated for about a million years.

[Digit]

Cog. I'm dieing to see how the experts explain this one. Should be better than a 3 ring circus!

[Charlie Hatchett]

FM, the date of divergence was 1.18 million. Head lice can survive for up to 24 hours without a host, then they die. The logical inference is that there were two different populations of Homo, separated for about a million years.

Let's see how the dating "saga" pans out at Hueyatlaco. If Berkeley ends up being correct about the dating of the artifacts, then we'll have bodies of
evidence from two completely different science fields agreeing humans inhabited N.A. about 1.1 million B.P., at least.

One good place to look: Deep alluvial deposits that are securely stratified.

This is the stratigraphy at Hueyatlaco and the central Texas site I'm investigating. I'm not familiar with Calico's geology. What's the scoop there, Pat?

[Cognito]

One good place to look: Deep alluvial deposits that are securely stratified. This is the stratigraphy at Hueyatlaco and the central Texas site I'm investigating. I'm not familiar with Calico's geology. What's the scoop there, Pat?

Charlie, a USGS scientist (Merdith Dunn) pulled a series of core samples from Lake Manix last year. One deep core hit bottom strata and luckily pulled up datable material. Most scientists believe Lake Manix is between 500-700,000 years old, but she'll be publishing her results later this year and the formation date of the lake should be determined with better accuracy.

There are many datable lacustrine deposits at Manix which dried out when the lake catastrophically drained about 16,000bce. Dunn is in the process of re-dating that event to 18-22,000bce. Those dates are important since we find tool assemblages above the shoreline but not below. So much for Clovis first.

Bottom line? We'll know more about the age of deep alluvial deposits this Fall when the Friends of the Pleistocene visit with Dunn. Christiansen will deputize me for crowd control and I might have the opportunity to shoot somebody. Life is good!:twisted:

[Cognito]

Cog. I'm dieing to see how the experts explain this one. Should be better than a 3 ring circus!

After Beags gets off latrine duty at Topper he'll have lots of cleaning up to do when the Clovis-first crowd craps in their pants!

[Minimalist]

Manix which dried out when the lake catastrophically drained about 16,000bce.

You've mentioned that before, Cogs. What's the speculation on the draining? Earthquake? Water diversion project for Las Vegas??

[Minimalist]

After Beags gets off latrine duty at Topper he'll have lots of cleaning up to do when the Clovis-first crowd craps in their pants!

The Club thinks that their shit doesn't stink, Cogs.

It's in their bylaws.