To have a feel of long period of time, I always use one metric: my grand father. He's lived 93 years, so almost 100. 2000 years ago was then 20 grandad away. Not so long ago after all. 200K ago is 2000 grandad away. Quite some time but nothing astronomical yet.
210k-year-old skull in Greece is earliest sign of modern humans in Europe, Asia
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Re: 210k-year-old skull in Greece is earliest sign of modern humans in Europe, Asia
#12To have a feel of long period of time, I always use one metric: my grand father. He's lived 93 years, so almost 100. 2000 years ago was then 20 grandad away. Not so long ago after all. 200K ago is 2000 grandad away. Quite some time but nothing astronomical yet.
25 years is probably a better approximation than 100 years. So 8000 gr. That's a lot of people.
Re: 210k-year-old skull in Greece is earliest sign of modern humans in Europe, Asia
#13To have a feel of long period of time, I always use one metric: my grand father. He's lived 93 years, so almost 100. 2000 years ago was then 20 grandad away. Not so long ago after all. 200K ago is 2000 grandad away. Quite some time but nothing astronomical yet.
You can also think in terms of generations. If everyone has a kid at 20 then you can draw 100 stick figures in a line to go 2000 years back. Not so long when you look at it.
Re: 210k-year-old skull in Greece is earliest sign of modern humans in Europe, Asia
#14> When it comes to figuring out how old something is, archaeologists are interested in one element in particular: uranium.
I though fossils were dated with Carbon-14. Did that change?
Re: 210k-year-old skull in Greece is earliest sign of modern humans in Europe, Asia
#15> When it comes to figuring out how old something is, archaeologists are interested in one element in particular: uranium. I though fossils were dated with Carbon-14. Did that change?
C14 dating loses precision dramatically past a certain age (~50k years, IIRC), because of the nature of half-lives. Since this is in the 200k range, C14 wouldn't be the go-to.
Re: 210k-year-old skull in Greece is earliest sign of modern humans in Europe, Asia
#16> When bone is buried in the ground, it can absorb U-238 from the environment. How? Is there traceable amount of Uranium-238 in every handful of dirt around the world?
I don't remember specifics from college, but yes, I think there is uranium pretty much everywhere. Oceans, rocks, dirt, maybe not airborne, but everywhere else.
Re: 210k-year-old skull in Greece is earliest sign of modern humans in Europe, Asia
#17To have a feel of long period of time, I always use one metric: my grand father. He's lived 93 years, so almost 100. 2000 years ago was then 20 grandad away. Not so long ago after all. 200K ago is 2000 grandad away. Quite some time but nothing astronomical yet.
You can also think in terms of generations. If everyone has a kid at 20 then you can draw 100 stick figures in a line to go 2000 years back. Not so long when you look at it.
So this person 200k years ago was roughly 10000 generations ago. That's long in human terms and very short in the history of the earth.
Re: 210k-year-old skull in Greece is earliest sign of modern humans in Europe, Asia
#18Does it strike anyone else as odd that the two skulls found practically "nose-to-nose" are 40,000 years apart in age? How do two humanoid skulls coincidentally end up right next to each other with 40,000 years gap between them?
Re: 210k-year-old skull in Greece is earliest sign of modern humans in Europe, Asia
#19> When bone is buried in the ground, it can absorb U-238 from the environment. How? Is there traceable amount of Uranium-238 in every handful of dirt around the world?
I don't remember specifics from college, but yes, I think there is uranium pretty much everywhere. Oceans, rocks, dirt, maybe not airborne, but everywhere else.
There is actually enough in the oceans that people have proposed concentrating it for commercial extraction. Probably not viable, but surprising to think about.
Re: 210k-year-old skull in Greece is earliest sign of modern humans in Europe, Asia
#20Take the dates with a grain of salt.
Nobody ever got a grant or a paper published for revising towards a younger date. No discovery in that.