The Western Hemisphere. General term for the Americas following their discovery by Europeans, thus setting them in contradistinction to the Old World of Africa, Europe, and Asia.
Digit wrote:True, but you will have noticed that Min and I can argue without it getting nasty.
Same with politics.
Roy.
Yes, it's very impressive. This seems like a comfortable place where people can argue their points of view as far as they feel the need without it getting taken personally.
I particularly like how you're all looking for truth beyond academic canon/authority but you do it in a rational way. Intellectual courage and openmindedness - this is what the internet if for.
Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.
Only a mere Prince?
Anyway Bob, it's be nice to Roy day today on the orders of Mrs Digit, it's my birthday, again, Damn!!
But I have to agree, this is a very friendly place, the best forum I know of.
What you don't know JS is that two years ago I was dignosed with a prosate cancer and these guys were, I was gonna say gold plated, but I'll changes that, solid gold!!
Roy.
First people deny a thing, then they belittle it, then they say it was known all along! Von Humboldt
Congratulations, my friend. Tell the Missus that we'll handle it.
Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.
Or maybe not jw. HSN were a regional development, in theory I can see no reason why the Americas could not do the same if Erectus got there. Time will tell!
I was just considering the fact that levallois technology is most often associated with HN, although it can be found at other HE sites. But, yes, HN was a regional development in Europe and western Asia, although there recently was a discovery of HN farther east in Asia than previously found.
BTW, I've no OOA axe to grind. I tend toward multi-regionalism myself, but will follow wherever the evidence leads.
One of the problems with using stone tools as a form of nomenclature jw is that frequently similar needs must result in similar solutions. This means to me that just because that type of tool is associated HSN and is found miles from known HSN sites that HSN must have been there.
Take a simple hand axe, once the need for firewood became established some means of cutting it had to be developed, just how many designs can be developed as the most effective?
Roy.
First people deny a thing, then they belittle it, then they say it was known all along! Von Humboldt
Digit wrote:One of the problems with using stone tools as a form of nomenclature jw is that frequently similar needs must result in similar solutions. This means to me that just because that type of tool is associated HSN and is found miles from known HSN sites that HSN must have been there.
Take a simple hand axe, once the need for firewood became established some means of cutting it had to be developed, just how many designs can be developed as the most effective?
Roy.
You're preaching to the choir on this point. I'm the one who doesn't accept similarities between Solutrean and Clovis points as evidence that Solutrean tool makers were in North America. But, that's largely because the similarities are so broad while there are a number of specific differences.
I'm not making a case for HN in Tennessee. I just tossed it in into the mix as an oddity, along with the possibility of "some very early HSS" since the discovery of levallois in the US is an oddity itself. I could just as easily suggest HE, a regional N. American variation of HE, or some later HSS who used a levallois technique without making innovations on it. At the very least, the discovery reveals a technique not previously found in this part of the world, as far as I know. Levallois simply refers to a method of knapping using a prepared core and striking platform.
(Slightly off-topic [Levallois], but close enough for government work)
Given the abundance of evidence (most of it either destroyed or sequestered, but well-enough attested) that there was no need to populate the Western Hemisphere from elsewhere, it is a minor marvel that das club continues to devote such energy and attention to doing so.
An anecdotal account, for whatever it may be worth (assuming anything) : in 1965 I was attending school in Woodstock, Virginia. An insurance agent there had an office there in what had apparently once been a little store building, with various antiquities in its display window. These caught my eye one day and, noticing me looking at them, the proprietor invited me in for a chat.
After I'd apparently scored well enough on some preliminary test questions he posed about various fossils in the window, he went back to the rear and came out with a fossilized cranium. It was virtually identical to the one Leakey found and named Zinjanthropus (later Australopithecus) Boise, which had been prominently featured in National Geographic not long before that. The heavy brow ridges and pronounced saggital crest were unmistakable.
He said it had been found in a coal mine in Western Virginia. It was of a grey-green chert common in artifacts from the region where Virginia, West Virginia and Kentucky meet.
Having held it in my hands, it is not at all difficult to accept as probably "legit" the parallel accounts of similar discoveries elsewhere (one from Shenandoah, Pennsylvania comes to mind).
Make of it what you will.
Last edited by uniface on Fri Sep 25, 2009 7:28 am, edited 1 time in total.
uniface wrote:
He said it had been found in a coal mine in Western Virginia. It was of a grey-green chert common in artifacts from the region where Virginia, West Virginia and Kentucky meet
A Zinjanthropus cranium in western Virginia? Made of green chert? "Sculpted"? In the sixties? Before Leakey found his real one?
What size?
Not sculpted (manufactured). Fossilized. I don't know geology, so as to tell you why silica and not calcium or whatever. Probably the same way that petrified wood fossilises.
I recognised it because Leakey's discovery had been publicised in National Geographic. Not before that.
I didn't measure it, and memory of size can play tricks ("the one that got away" syndrome). I'd guess roughly chimp size.
You probably don't know, but the next question is of course: where is it now?
uniface wrote:
He said it had been found in a coal mine in Western Virginia. It was of a grey-green chert common in artifacts from the region where Virginia, West Virginia and Kentucky meet.
Having held it in my hands, it is not at all difficult to accept as probably "legit" the parallel accounts of similar discoveries elsewhere (one from Shenandoah, Pennsylvania comes to mind).
Make of it what you will.
What I will is that it is true. Because that wouldn't surprise me. In fact I expect it: we know HE had already reached Java and Peking/Beijing, 800,000 years ago. And I fully expect HE to have marched on. Along the coastlines/waterlines. To America. We only still need to find him there. Which will be difficult as the coastlines of that era are now under water, far out at sea. On the edge of the precipice of the continental plane.
Zinjanthropus Boisei lived from about 2.6 until about 1.2 million years ago. I.o.w. for at least a half million years simultaneous with HE. So it's at least possible, if not probable that they did the same things (insofar ZB was capable; but he could mirror HE's example), and migrated along the same routes.
To America...
Last edited by Rokcet Scientist on Fri Sep 25, 2009 12:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.
