Comment by profsummergig
2 days ago
This image of the femur, can anyone shed light on why there are notches carved on the side?
https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/b6b6509049556deef91d0459df864...
Also, regarding "There is no technology, extant or imaginable, that could extract that marvellous secret from her bones",
I put those under the "famous last words" category.
We cannot predict today what we may discover about bones in the future. There could be something akin to DNA fingerprinting that lets people discover ancestry. Just because we've not discovered it yet, doesn't mean we will never discover it. Not saying we will, but I prefer to keep an open mind about science and human creativity.
While we don't really know how many biological processes work, we have a pretty good idea how the basic mechanics of life work. The discovery of "something akin to DNA fingerprinting that lets people discover ancestry" would be the type of major discovery that would completely upset our understanding of things. Such a discovery would have to be consistent with all the evidence we already have (and is explained by our current understanding) while simultaneously introducing entire new concepts.
Not strictly impossible of course, but very few things are impossible in the strictest sense. For all practical purposes, given our understanding of the world, "there is no imaginable technology that could do this" is correct.
>The discovery of "something akin to DNA fingerprinting that lets people discover ancestry" would be the type of major discovery that would completely upset our understanding of things.
It's already available, and ever heard about Mitochondrial Eve? [1]
But this narrative somehow does not fit the non-intelligent design believer thus is not made popular and well-known to the rest of the world.
What we have now is the illogical conjecture that human ancestry is originated from monkey while Darwin himself did not condone it. His actual conjecture is that man and monkey probably has the same ancestry.
Ironically it's reported in one of the major holy books that some people were turned into monkey because of working during their God's assigned holidays (read holy days) thus braking their covenant and got transformed into monkey [2].
[1] Mitochondrial Eve:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve
[2] The Jews breach the Sanctity of the Sabbath:
https://quran.com/al-baqarah/65/tafsirs
"major discovery that would completely upset our understanding of things"
- such things happen regularly.
'"there is no imaginable technology that could do this" is correct.'
- i'm so glad i don't have this mindset.
> such things happen regularly
They do not. The type of foundational discovery that would be required is quite rare. It would equal to the discovery of germs, or DNA.
1 reply →
The marks could be scouring marks from the wind, I think. From the description in the article, these fossils have basically been sandblasted out of their sandstone matrix over time, so if there's a dominant wind direction small irregularities in the fossil could probably quite easily develop into this kind of parallel markings.
> "There is no technology, extant or imaginable, that could extract that marvellous secret from her bones"
It's because the inference depends on having data from a very large sample of other finds. It wouldn't matter if there were a single Eve and we found her entire skeleton and extracted the DNA perfectly. We couldn't prove it was Eve without all the other samples, and it's beyond unlikely they'll just show up.
I'm disgusted by the convention that findings are controlled by self-interested glory-seeking finders. These belong to the entirety of humanity and should be treated as such, with utmost care and complete openness and humility. We shouldn't tolerate grave robbers any more than bank robbers. Like banks, archeaologists are fiduciaries of the highest order, and should be selected and managed as such, not like salespeople on commission. If you want to seek abandoned treasure, go elsewhere.
> I'm disgusted by the convention that findings are controlled by self-interested glory-seeking finders
The basic idea makes sense; you spend a lot of time, effort, money, and sometimes personal risk to excavate these things. You should be given a chance to actually benefit from all this work.
But within reason, and obviously here someone abused a common-sense convention in a way that is hard to distinguish from outright bad faith behaviour.
In my opinion, the major failing here is from the university in not stepping in a bit more forcefully to deal with this.
Totally agree about findings. In fact, oppositional researchers should be given the opportunity -- by law -- to refute claims. They should be given 100% access to all the evidence for a period of time.
“It belongs in a museum!” -Indy
... the Graverobber
Look like teeth marks.