120k-year-old footprints offer early evidence for humans in Arabia
sciencemag.org
sciencemag.org
Back in the 90s I was in saudi arabia when a national geographic story came out about some fossil footprints. Because of the size/spacing of the prints it was evident that two proto-humans, one smaller, were walking together while perhaps holding hands. So the cover art was two hairy proto-humans, one male and one female, naked, walking hand in hand away from the viewer. Needless to say this was an issue for the saudi censors, who at that time would ink over magazine covers by hand.
By censoring anything you suggest that these are people, not animals, and thereby acknowledge evolution. Do you censor the female? The male? Both? On store shelves I saw every interpretation. My favorite was the one that ignored the nakedness, censored only the hand holding.
Even funnier is that the people employed to do the censorship were usually foreign guest workers, often Indians, to ensure that no Saudis themselves were exposed during the process of censorship.
I think it's a bit unfair to conflate 'always on' and 'default on, but easy to remove'.
edit: also, I'm in the UK, and happily using a VPN on Windows, Linux, and Android with no issues.
Mozilla vpn works (it's new) but the websites for proton, Nord etc. don't work. The actual service works fine
The censors with their felt tip pens clearly had a variety of artistic talent. I found myself choosing from various censorings of Nirvana's Nevermind which had the cover with the naked baby.
Some had a blocked out rectangle, some were scribbled on, some just blocked out the silhouette of the baby. I settled on one which had neatly drawn on a pair of swimming trunks!
Seems like another life now.
Swimming trunks is a pretty funny way to do it.
Meanwhile, The Stones' Live Licks European cover is better because the American one has a bra.
Fun facts, the green pastures of Arabian Peninsula in ancient times has been mentioned in a well known authentic hadith (saying of Muhammad), "The Hour will not begin until the land of the Arabs once again becomes meadows and rivers”[2].
It’s been ignored primarily due to the political, philosophical, perhaps even meta philosophical reasons. As the implication is that significant genomic differences existed within and between the early human populations. And so whether all of them qualify as “human”.
The same reason why it took so long for some people to have significant Neanderthal ancestry to become accepted fact. The average percentage of Neanderthal ancestry seems to increase as you move eastwards to East Asia.
The person got massively and publicly shut down by leaders in the company who wrote lengthy messages about it and explained holding this belief wasn't acceptable in this company and rationalised the reaction with other leaders saying it was a way to send a message. They didn't manage to get the guy fired (but they tried!) and he left after a few months of radio silence.
Sure thing, nobody else dared to say something about it but the victim got messages of support by tons of people afraid to speak up.
My opinion is that, given it's a company's private space, the company could limit freedom of speech and ban public political discussion to avoid this scenario - still, seeing people trying to force their dogma on other people was shocking.
https://medium.com/@alexanderemmanual/law-38-think-as-you-li...
The utterances of these kinds of statements within a workplace can be used by a lawyer to paint the corporate culture as one that is sexist/racist/etc.
After Google fired the engineer, Damore, for his statements criticizing the discriminatory nature of affirmative action, and potential biological differences being the cause of the disparity between the number of men and women in computer science and engineering, the company actually received open letters from leading Democrats demanding that such an event never transpire again.
It's approaching something like a state ideology, with billions of dollars at stake in its tenets being upheld and not questioned.
This is mostly because for several decades the term Neanderthal in pop culture has been used to describe someone who is brutish or dumb.
Many people want to believe that they are descended from or fashioned by the god(s) or godlike idealized humans, not from some people who trudged through a swamp and sheltered in a rock outcropping.
And now with the realization that people of Eurasian ancestry carry Neanderthal genes, you're already starting to see the same fallacy emerge in the opposite direction , where people are starting to use Neanderthal ancestry as a badge of superiority over those without it like the people of Sub-Saharan Africa.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/30/africa/africa-neanderthal-dna...
Interestingly, this is said to be a piece of the puzzle of whatever new model replaces the Out Of Africa one.
Why did it open up for research? A change in leadership or just new deals opening because of money?
Alright I need to slow down on the coffee this morning.
That's nothing. There are plenty of fossil dinosaur footprints aged many millions of years.
So what we call Arabia and Africa weren't distinct land masses, and if anything it would be surprising if they were not inhabited by hominids similar to those nearby in today's Africa.
The Red Sea Rift is quite recent [1] in geological time but not 120 kya recent.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Sea_Rift#Spreading_model
40% of the Red Sea is only 100 m deep, and during the last major ice age 20kya sea levels were 120 m lower than they are today.
https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-9....
> Thus, the present interglacial, the Holocene, is compared with MIS 5 or the interglacials of Marine Isotope Stage 11.
This tracks pretty well with the earliest times talked about now for people in Australia. Somewhere in that ballpark people needed to be walking out of Africa so they could end up in Australia.
> Diatom paleoecology and sedimentary analysis indicate that Alathar was an oligotrophic (nutrient-poor) and shallow freshwater lake for the majority of its existence. This is consistent with similar-aged nearby freshwater paleolake deposits situated in the southern reaches of a “freshwater corridor” that connected the Arabian interior to the Levant and northeast Africa at times during marine isotope stage 5 (MIS 5; ~130 to 80 ka)
> The lake surface is heavily trampled, which probably reflects a dry season during which herbivores congregate around diminishing water supplies, and is consistent with sedimentary evidence for the drying up of the lake at that time. A total of 376 footprints were recorded, of which 177 could be either confidently or provisionally referred to an ichnotaxon. Seven hominin footprints were confidently identified... we argue that H. sapiens was responsible for the tracks at Alathar.
> Given their similar orientation, distances from one another, and differences in size, they are interpreted as two, or up to three, individuals traveling in concert.
> Elephants, in particular, suggest the regional presence of freshwater sources and substantial plant biomass, while the size of the tracks is suggestive of a species larger than any extant taxon.
> Some of the ungulate prints are consistent in shape and size with a giant buffalo, possibly Syncerus, a taxon previously identified at nearby MIS 5 sites.
The research paints a wonderful picture of this "freshwater corridor" during the MIS 5 interglacial. The question I have is what caused the ecology to dry out in our own interglacial? Did the Great Rift change enough in 100 kyr to impact the local climate this much?
this just put a smile on my face..thank you :-)
Seven, actually. They found hundreds of footprints of various animals, about half of which were too questionable to identify.
Footprints are often identified because they get filled in with a different material than the substrate. One on its own might not be enough for a positive ID, but this is way bigger than "two holes"
I don't know why the press article choose the first image of Figure 4, the second image is much more convincing. (You can see clearly the toes, except the middle one.)
Also, in the bottom center of Figure 1 you it is possible to see that they found 4 footprints in a row, and if you imagine that there are one or two missing footprints they are at the correct distance, like the path of someone waking. (Why there are only right footprints and no left footprints?)
Pure speculation here (plus some experience/training in tracking), but if somebody is walking along a shore with one foot in mud, and the other foot in dirt, they only leave deep impressions on one side. Similarly, if they're walking with one foot in shallow water, and one foot in mud, then one side will erode much faster than the other.
Walking around the edge of a lake, with the lake to the walker’s right, and softer/wetter ground under the right feet?