
85,000-year-old Finger Bone Complicates Understanding of African Migration - daegloe
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/rare-85000-year-old-finger-bone-could-complicate-our-understanding-african-migration-180968720/?no-ist
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aetherspawn
Not to be that guy, but I’m really starting to question the accuracy of dating
techniques when they publish finds like this.

This finding is only significant because of the age, but have we ever verified
our dating techniques over 5k years? 10k years? What’s to say that the hot
desert sun and strange weather patterns, radiation or whatever couldn’t skew
the dating and mean this bone is just some traveller from a mere 1-2k years
ago.

It seems further unlikely that such a bone from, 85k y/ago as they say, would
be so close to the surface.

Ftn In mechanical engineering we don’t ever “trust” the calculations until
they are thoroughly validated with ie strain gauges. And more often than not
we discover our assumptions were wrong. So I suppose a similar thing applies
here in dating science, except, it’s impossible to validate for another
thousand centuries. It seems backwards to hinge all our science on it when
(AFAICT) it hasn’t even been validated itself!

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abritinthebay
> but have we ever verified our dating techniques over 5k years? 10k years?

Yes.

> What’s to say that the hot desert sun and strange weather patterns,
> radiation or whatever couldn’t skew the dating

Lots. For a start - only one of those would possibly affect the outcome of
testing and would _also_ be detectable.

> It seems further unlikely that such a bone from, 85k y/ago as they say,
> would be so close to the surface

Your incredulity doesn't affect the outcome one way or another and unless you
want to dispute the fact that artifacts that are _much older_ are _often_
found on or close to the surface it's not based in any way to the real world.

> In mechanical engineering we don’t ever “trust” the calculations until they
> are thoroughly validated

And neither does the science around these dating techniques. In fact they're
usually better supported than _any_ engineering is.

> It seems backwards to hinge all our science on it when (AFAICT) it hasn’t
> even been validated itself!

And here's the thing: You're incredibly misinformed and that's why it makes no
sense to you.

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taneq
> And neither does the science around these dating techniques. In fact they're
> usually better supported than any engineering is.

Given that the results of most if not all engineering can be directly tested,
this seems unlikely.

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sten
I believe his point is that these methods are contentious for various reasons
(religious objection being an example) so they have been heavily scrutinized
and where exceptions have been found so have explanations. While most
engineering doesn't receive the same level of attention, even if it could.

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warent
Not to be excessively cynical or downright insulting, (also, my knowledge of
archaeology is feeble) but is there any way to verify that they found the
bones there in the desert?

> The discovery is “a dream come true, because it supports arguments that our
> teams have been making for more than 10 years,”

Ten years of debate could be motive enough for some people to fabricate the
finding.

EDIT: All that aside, assuming it is legitimate and we can trust the
discovery, I definitely agree an absolutely phenomenal discovery

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make3
"Finding a human bone in the Nefud Desert—a windswept oval patch of sand dunes
the size of Kentucky—is perhaps the world’s most impressive example of an
unlikely find"

I wonder how you can test that a fossil wasn't just discovered elsewhere and
moved to a convenient place, if the ground composition is sufficiently similar

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stevenwoo
Can't they do destructive testing of a part of the fossil using some isotope
with a longer half life than carbon 14? It's described as being in a field of
bones sticking out of sand so it's the only possible way it could have been
accurately dated - no surrounding sedimentary rock formation to do additional
testing upon.

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make3
Does this address the problem of knowing if the bones were moved?

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jonhendry18
A nearby hippo bone was also tested. It seems rather unlikely that a human
bone and a hippo bone of similar age would have been stumbled across somewhere
else compared to this site which appears to be a dried up body of water.

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DaveSapien
This seems likely as there are increasing findings of human activity that go
much before 60,000 around the world. One that recently comes to mind is a
sight in Cambodia where there are traces of human activity dated around 71,000
years ago. ([https://phnompenhpost.com/national-post-depth/peeling-
back-l...](https://phnompenhpost.com/national-post-depth/peeling-back-layers-
prehistory-battambang))

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chiefalchemist
What if the bone was left there? Say by a bird? Or another human. It's a
single small hand bone. It feels fair to question how else it might have
arrived at where it was found.

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megaman22
So much of paleontology is wild-ass guesses extrapolated out from miniscule,
fragmentary evidence. In any other field, it'd be wildly irresponsible to
generalize in such fashion on such slim evidence.

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Abishek_Muthian
It's worrying to see research into land migration hypothesis is itself
becoming extremely difficult to confirm; I wonder whether the southern exit
hypothesis (crossing red sea) or other water-route migrations would see new
facts soon.

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horsecaptin
Could someone have moved it 45000 years ago as a joke like how Tesla launched
a car for the aliens to scratch their heads in perpetuity?

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gus_massa
They are not dating the bone, they are dating the mud around the bone. To be
more precise, they are dating the last time the mud around the bone received
sunlight. (And from the patterns in the mud they are sure that nobody dig a
hole at midnight to put the bone there.)

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jonhendry18
They also dated the bone.

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ccvannorman
or, "Remnants of Prehistoric Adam's Family Production Gives The Finger To
Paleontologists"

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lurquer
Where's the rest of the skeleton?

