New research: Stone Age tools were surprisingly sophisticated

Cavemen were no simpletons. Cave paintings at the Museo Regionale Archeologico, Palermo. Image courtesy of Bernhard J. Scheuvens, Wikipedia.



Joel Kontinen


Time and again, believers in the Darwinian story are amazed by discoveries that change their view of ancient man. Recently they discovered that ancient Papuans were more sophisticated than they had assumed. Then they found that Europeans ground flour much earlier than they had thought.

There is more to come. Recently, Vincent Mourre at the University of Toulouse-Le Mirail in France and colleagues studied 127 triangular and leaf-shaped rock points found in a cave in South Africa and published their research results this week in Science.

The points were probably used in spears or knives.

According to ScienceNOW, early men knew how to ”carve with remarkable finesse. A new study suggests that cave dwellers were using a delicate stone-carving technique called pressure flaking 75,000 years ago, 55,000 years before scientists thought the technique was invented.”

Evolutionists are known for inflating dates so we should take them with a pinch of salt.

What the research shows, however, is that the Book of Genesis had it right. It tells us that early man was no simpleton but a creative being made in the image of God.

Source:

Minogue, Kristen 2010. Stone Age Toolmakers Surprisingly Sophisticated. ScienceNOW (28 October).

Were Hobbits Master Toolmakers?

Hobbits were obviously master toolmakers.



Joel Kontinen

In 2003 tiny human fossils were found on the Indonesian island of Flores. The 1-metre- tall Flores Man (Homo floresiensis) was soon dubbed Hobbit after Tolkien’s diminutive Middle Earth hero.

It now seems that these Hobbits have left us proof of their dexterity. They used sharp-edged stone tools.

Archaeologist Mark Moore of the University of New England in Armidale, Australia, and his colleagues examined over 11 000 stone tools found in the Liang Buan Cave on Flores island.

With a brain capacity of a third of H. sapiens, Hobbits were nevertheless able to craft so good stone tools that when people classified as H. sapiens later came to the island, they used the very same pattern in their tools. This became obvious when the archaeologists examined the layers in the cave. H. sapiens obviously used the same cave after the Hobbits.

Moore even suggests that H. floresiensis and H. sapiens might have interacted.

Although Hobbits were small, we have no reason to think that they were not fully human. They were obviously no more primitive than individuals classified as Homo sapiens. Like us, they were the descendants of a real man called Adam.



Source:

Culotta, Elizabeth. 2009. Did Humans Learn From Hobbits? ScienceNOW Daily News. (17 April) http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2009/417/3

Neanderthals Were More Advanced Than We Thought

Reconstruction of a Neanderthal girl. Christopher P.E. Zollikofer. Anthropological Institute, University of Zurich Image from Wikipedia.

Joel Kontinen


The first Neanderthal skulls were found in 1829 and 1848 but the early remains went rather unnoticed. They got their name from a 1856 discovery in the Neander valley in Germany. They were assumed to be the remains of early men. The publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of the Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) gave impetus for the search for links between modern man and less developed beings.

In evolutionary thinking, Neanderthal man was assumed to be a very primitive man, incapable of speech and higher culture. However, recent discoveries have shown that the Darwinian view is wrong. Neanderthals were culturally more advanced. They were able to speak, buried their dead, cleaned their teeth and even made musical instruments.

The latest confirmation of the Neanderthals’ cultural development comes from a dig in England. According to a recent item in BBC news, archaeologists have examined dozens of tools they believe were made by Neanderthals. When the tools were first found in Beedings in West Sussex, in 1900, they were thought to be too modern and thus assumed to be fakes. Most of them were thrown away.

Now archaeologists have re-examined some of the artifacts and concluded that they are genuine. The old view of semi-human, grunting Neanderthal men deserves to be buried.

Source:

McGourty, Christine. 2008. 'Neanderthal tools' found at dig. BBC news 23 June
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7466735.stm