How long have men walked the Earth?

Trishntek · Post by **Trishntek** » Wed Dec 22, 2010 9:30 pm

All I know for sure is mankind has walked upon the Earth my entire lifetime!

neon tetra · Post by **neon tetra** » Wed Dec 22, 2010 9:45 pm

The real answer is that there is no Earth. We are just a computer program, and everything that we experience is in our brains. There is no "out there".

ygmir · Post by **ygmir** » Thu Dec 23, 2010 5:44 am

does walking, mean "bipedal", and include "knuckle draggers"?

gyre · Post by **gyre** » Thu Dec 23, 2010 6:07 pm

"You're gonna Look Just Like A Monkey When You Get Old"

You're gonna look like a monkey when you get old
You're gonna look just like a monkey when you get old
I can tell 'bout your hair
You caught coconuts in the air
You're gonna look like a monkey when you get old

I can tell by eyes
You caught coconuts flying high

I can tell 'bout your knees
You been hanging from a coconut tree

I can tell by the way you hang
Your daddy was orangutan

I can tell by your shape
Your first cousin must be a ape

Nobody stays a monkey but you when you get old
Nobody stays a monkey but you when you get old
I can tell by your shoes
You just love to dance the blues
You gonna look like a monkey when you get old

You're gonna look like a monkey when you get old
You're gonna look just like a monkey when you get old
I can tell by your breath
You been lovin' a monkey to death
That's right Sam

I can tell by your face
You belong to the monkey race....

I can tell by your knees
You been a-climbin' these coconut trees....

I can tell by your jaw
That a monkey was your pa....

I can tell by your skin
That a monkey was your frien'....

I can tell by your hands
That you've got monkey glands....

I can tell by your hair
You got monkey in you somewhere

I can tell by your smile
you like to do it monkey style

I can tell by your nails
That your folks hung by their tails....

Old blues song.
Probably a lot more verses.
These are probably the cleaner ones.

Nobody's more competitive than blues singers.

goathead · Post by **goathead** » Thu Dec 23, 2010 6:12 pm

if there is no gutter, why am I crawling?

FaeTora · Post by **FaeTora** » Thu Dec 23, 2010 6:18 pm

3,000 years if you belive hard core bible thumpers, 3,300 years if you do their math for them and well over 50,000 if you follow historical writings.

Trishntek · Post by **Trishntek** » Thu Dec 23, 2010 11:28 pm

FaeTora wrote:3,000 years if you belive hard core bible thumpers, 3,300 years if you do their math for them and well over 50,000 if you follow historical writings.

Not sure where ya got yer info,,,, but most Bible scholars would say between 5 or 6k years. considering Adam allegedly lived over 800 years, Methuselah about 960 and Noah around 800 years, Abraham happened around 1800 BC, Moses around 1200 BC and David was king around 1000 BC.

Which means David was king 3000 years ago.

FaeTora · Post by **FaeTora** » Fri Dec 24, 2010 8:32 pm

there is a portion or sect of believers who belive the earth is only 3,000 years old. I kid you not. But its based on date created about 300 years ago and yet they never seem to understand the laps between now and then.

It's crazy, I know. But we can assume none of them have ever been to a chinese museum.

gyre · Post by **gyre** » Fri Dec 24, 2010 8:41 pm

I've been in a temple that has been in use longer than that.

Puts things in perspective.

can't sit still · Post by **can't sit still** » Fri Dec 24, 2010 8:43 pm

gyre, I hit a bunch of temples in lots of places. have you see this one?:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-a ... -tepe.html

FaeTora · Post by **FaeTora** » Fri Dec 24, 2010 8:44 pm

And I have seen Chinese documents from before then. BUt htey say that the scientists and dates are wrong. Naything to not show that they are wrong. They are the same people that boycotted Lucy when she was on loan to museums around the U.S.

Ignorance is contagious. Don't pass it on.

gyre · Post by **gyre** » Fri Dec 24, 2010 8:50 pm

No.
Sure looks interesting.

gyre · Post by **gyre** » Fri Dec 24, 2010 9:14 pm

I have visited an ancient graveyard of stones carved in runes top to bottom.
There are a lot of them.
There are various modern explanations for them, none convincing.

I talked to Barry Fell about them, and was surprised that he wasn't aware of them.
Turns out there are many more "anomalous" usa sites than he has written about.
Many aren't talked about for their protection.

Perhaps a lesson from Lawrence's discovering ancient history in plain sight?

I still wonder if the cities Gurdjieff wrote of, in Meetings With Remarkable Men, were real or fictional.

My father once asked about a natural outcrop that appeared to have been shaped at one time, but was now too weathered to tell, if there was any way to find out if it had been carved once.
He had had a very advanced geology teacher in college, almost teaching science fiction at the time, now boilerplate.
As far as I know, there is no way to tell.
But it makes me wonder.

theCryptofishist · Post by **theCryptofishist** » Fri Dec 24, 2010 9:15 pm

Wow, even Bishop Usher (Usser?) had 6000. Though why god would create the earth in October, rather than one of the solstices confuses me. Well, god confuses me.

FaeTora · Post by **FaeTora** » Fri Dec 24, 2010 9:18 pm

Which god?

theCryptofishist · Post by **theCryptofishist** » Fri Dec 24, 2010 9:20 pm

See, that confuses me.

The God Who Leaves Money in Parking Lots, perhaps.

FaeTora · Post by **FaeTora** » Fri Dec 24, 2010 9:24 pm

Can he come to my house instead of santa?

can't sit still · Post by **can't sit still** » Fri Dec 24, 2010 9:32 pm

gyre, the REALLY interesting stuff is from temporal anomalies. There are all kinds of man made objects found in lumps of coal and stuff like that. There were lots of discoveries in English coal mines. Silver chains and silver pitchers embedded in boulders of coal. There have been lots of discoveries found in hundred million year old strata and sediment;
http://www.bibleufo.com/embed.htm
I've see a couple of these things in the natural history museum in London.
There are human bootprints embedded in sandstone along with dinosaur prints. Various cement walls, tools, etc.
There is just too much for it all to be faked.
Fascinating stuff.

pizzamancer · Post by **pizzamancer** » Sat Dec 25, 2010 5:31 am

Man? I would say about 39 years. Or 37 or so, as I couldn't walk for the first few. Up til then they were just boys.

SUCK IT!

Elorrum · Post by **Elorrum** » Sat Dec 25, 2010 7:53 am

has anyone made it all the way around?

ygmir · Post by **ygmir** » Sat Dec 25, 2010 8:05 am

I've always felt there were "ages" of human ( or whatever) habitation here. Probably separated, by global catastrophe (natural or other) which pretty much erased the previous information..........and, that, we get glimpses of it, like CSS points out.

ygmir · Post by **ygmir** » Sat Dec 25, 2010 8:11 am

I've always felt there were "ages" of human ( or whatever) habitation here. Probably separated, by global catastrophe (natural or other) which pretty much erased the previous information..........and, that, we get glimpses of it, like CSS points out.

gyre · Post by **gyre** » Sat Dec 25, 2010 10:11 am

There is a tendency to re-use indestructible materials, while others disintegrate.
And often one culture deliberately destroys the record of another.

We know there were large civilizations in the usa using stone buildings, yet little remains.
There is even one at Mesa Verde.
The vast mound builder culture in the southeast has even had most of their mounds flattened, at great cost of labor.
They are still not fully explored or explained.

can't sit still · Post by **can't sit still** » Sat Dec 25, 2010 11:52 am

I traveled around Egypt by road and Felluca. When I was in the valley at Giza, I was trying to imagine what the pyramids looked like before they had their smooth, white limestone sides removed. Imagine the great pyramids all shiny white in the rising sun.
I went to see the sunrise at the Taj. Pretty cool.
That whole mound-builder culture has some fabulous tales to tell.

Anthropology shows a pretty good progression from apes to proto-man to "modern man during the last 40? million years. It is reckoned that the small creatures who survived the age of the Sauropods were our direct ancestor. [Doing this all from memory]
There is speculation that bi-pedal hominids arose before the age of the sauropods. There is a general lack of artifacts to support this. Considering the time involved, it's not too surprising.
There could have been warm-blooded creatures way back that haven't yet show fossil evidence. Warm blood is thought to be a recent development. There is also the possibility of some kind of "Roanoke" group that found themselves here and decided not to return to their home planet. Or, even a "Pitcairn" group that like this planet.
The universe is full of surprises.

gyre · Post by **gyre** » Sun Dec 26, 2010 5:39 am

Didn't they top them with polished metal too, copper or gold?

I wish they would finish Mt Rushmore.
The original plan is far more impressive than the incomplete version we have now.

Hominid or not, one theory is that what is needed for culture didn't exist earlier, for technical reasons.
That urge to teach, to pass on knowledge didn't exist, and maybe couldn't be passed on for other reasons too.
Communication and the urge to leave a mark are thought necessary.
Neanderthal may have been superior in every other way.

Is all this why humans with a surplus of essentials start building stuff?

can't sit still · Post by **can't sit still** » Tue Dec 28, 2010 7:41 pm

A very interesting discovery in israel;
"suggest that modern man did not originate in Africa as previously believed, but in the Middle East."
They found "modern teeth" that are 400,000 years old.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... z19T6am6cZ

^Rhino! · Post by **^Rhino!** » Tue Dec 28, 2010 7:58 pm

"The earth has gone through many periods of seas rising and falling. The Mediterranian is only fed by a few rivers. I read that it had dried up 3 times and then reflooded past the Pillars of Hercules. That would definitely start a flood story.
This was surmised from analysing strata. "

The Mediterranean was once a big desert, just like the playa where it leveled out. This was proven by Leg 13 of the Deep Sea Drilling Project, and chronicled in a wonderful book entitled "The Mediterranean was a Desert" by Kenneth Hsu, who was one of the co-chief scientists on the voyage, and a geologist and Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Prior to its drying up, it was a giant salt lake. It took several hundred thousand years for it to dry up.

All of this occurred in the Miocene Epoch of geologic time, prior to humans.

geekster · Post by **geekster** » Wed Dec 29, 2010 1:41 am

During the last ice age, the sea levels were 120 meters lower than they are now (roughly 400 feet lower). Some of the prime real estate where people would have been living at the end of the last ice age is now under water.

Three primary examples:

The Caspian Sea
The Persian Gulf
The Adriatic Sea

All of these places would have been very fertile flat valleys with massive rivers flowing through them. I also have a hunch that is where all the flood stories come from. Nearly every culture has one. An example would be Meltwater Pulse 1A which happened over a course of 500 years. Sea level rose 44mm/year which is about 1.73 inches PER YEAR or about a foot every 7 years. For a broad flat valley, the sea rising a foot is a major big deal.

The Adriatic would have been watered by what we call the Po river. The Persian Gulf by the Tigris and Euphrates. If someone lived to be 49 years old, they might have seen the sea rise 7 feet which could have been enough to completely wipe out entire settlements.

Same with early settlements in the US. Most of the coastal settlements would now be completely under water.

We are looking in the wrong places for really old evidence of humans, I believe most of that evidence is under water.

theCryptofishist · Post by **theCryptofishist** » Wed Dec 29, 2010 1:42 pm

can't--I dunno, it looks like the "let's claim it for the home team" thing that goes on and on in anthropology. And based on pretty weak evidence. And it's really hard to pit a few teeth against the fact that Africans show more genetic variety than the whole rest of the world combined.

And Rhino--so you don't favor the Black Sea hypothesis?

Post by **Eric** » Wed Dec 29, 2010 2:56 pm

If evidence cannot be proven wrong, it's not science. Scientific theories live & die by the fact that they can be proven wrong, not that they appear to be completely right. Creationism is not science because there is no way to prove it wrong- how do you show that a "Creator" didn't make something? With evolution you just need to find a mammal where there couldn't be one- like before the Carboniferous period (or any of thousands of variations on this, none of which has ever happened)

Most theories hold that modern humans came from Africa, but there are other theories out there. I tend to go with a combination of studying and my own gut intuitions for my beliefs on the matter (which I would most definitely not claim as anything other than pure speculation) and for me the evidence of modern humans originating in Africa is still the strongest.

I never close my mind off to being proven wrong. Techniques and knowledge are growing at a ridiculous pace, there is no way to know what's around the corner. It's one of the reasons I subscribe to science & archaeology magazines and read so many websites about them- I love finding this stuff out.

Geekster's also completely right on the sea levels- we may never know when modern humans arrived in the America's since so many sites have been covered by the sea.