The Neanderthals Rediscovered: How Modern Science is Rewriting Their Story by Papagianni Dimitra & Morse Michael A

Author:Papagianni, Dimitra & Morse, Michael A.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Published: 2015-09-08T04:00:00+00:00

A modern human skull found at Qafzeh, Israel, dated to around 100,000 years ago.

Researchers were surprised to discover that the first modern humans reached northern Israel, and probably the Asian continent, much earlier than the Neanderthals did. This was the one possibility that no one entertained in the days before absolute dating. It stands as an important lesson in science: in the absence of evidence, one must always be wary of drawing conclusions based on expectations, no matter how obvious they may seem. The human past seems to have a ceaseless ability to surprise us.

There is another lesson arising from this incident: absolute dating techniques are not always reliable. Carbon dating has gone through successive stages of calibration and correction since the 1950s as researchers became more aware of its limitations and learned to compensate for contamination and for changes in the atmospheric concentration of 14C. TL and ESR dating have also been improved since the 1980s. It is always instructive when different techniques (or even the same technique) produce different results on the same material, and there has been a general trend towards testing smaller sample sizes in order to eliminate contamination.

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