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Ice Age Man on Sicily
November 29, 2012 at 1:36 pm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/201...182945.htm
Quote:ScienceDaily (Nov. 28, 2012) — Skeletal remains in an island cave in Favignana, Italy, reveal that modern humans first settled in Sicily around the time of the last ice age and despite living on Mediterranean islands, ate little seafood. The research is published November 28 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Marcello Mannino and colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany.
I'm not so sure about their conclusions here. We have evidence of early man on Crete 130,000 years ago and they would have needed boats to get there.
Boats would mean that no land bridge was necessary across the Straits of Messina.
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RE: Ice Age Man on Sicily
November 29, 2012 at 1:57 pm
Or maybe they were very strong swimmers.
You can fix ignorance, you can't fix stupid.
Tinkety Tonk and down with the Nazis.
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RE: Ice Age Man on Sicily
November 29, 2012 at 2:52 pm
(November 29, 2012 at 1:36 pm)Minimalist Wrote: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/201...182945.htm
Quote:ScienceDaily (Nov. 28, 2012) — Skeletal remains in an island cave in Favignana, Italy, reveal that modern humans first settled in Sicily around the time of the last ice age and despite living on Mediterranean islands, ate little seafood. The research is published November 28 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Marcello Mannino and colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany.
I'm not so sure about their conclusions here. We have evidence of early man on Crete 130,000 years ago and they would have needed boats to get there.
Boats would mean that no land bridge was necessary across the Straits of Messina.
Why not?
The Polynesians, a people descending from the New Zealand Maori managed to settle places as remote as the Easterislands at 1000 a.d.
And then they were probably a people just as primitive as stone age europeans.
Who sailed halfway through the entire pacific!
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RE: Ice Age Man on Sicily
November 29, 2012 at 3:02 pm
I remember hearing that Homo erectus may have used rafts or boats because they settled on islands in Indonesia about 800,000 years ago where there were no land connections.
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RE: Ice Age Man on Sicily
November 29, 2012 at 3:25 pm
(November 29, 2012 at 1:57 pm)downbeatplumb Wrote: Or maybe they were very strong swimmers.
I'm thinking they had really, really big catapults.
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RE: Ice Age Man on Sicily
November 29, 2012 at 11:44 pm
Quote:Who sailed halfway through the entire pacific!
Well, yeah - but then they weren't trying to get from Italy to Sicily, were they?
I don't have a lot of patience for this whole "early man walked everywhere" line of thinking. Overland travel entails obstacles which are missing from sea travel.
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RE: Ice Age Man on Sicily
November 29, 2012 at 11:48 pm
(November 29, 2012 at 11:44 pm)Minimalist Wrote: I don't have a lot of patience for this whole "early man walked everywhere" line of thinking. Overland travel entails obstacles which are missing from sea travel.
Yep. There is certainly evidence of very early migration by water, even over long distances. I suspect at least some of it was of the "Oh shit, where did THAT current come from?" variety.
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RE: Ice Age Man on Sicily
November 30, 2012 at 12:08 am
Even people moving overland would run into a river eventually. You can wade across a stream. You can't wade across the Danube. Some concept of water travel is a must.
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RE: Ice Age Man on Sicily
November 30, 2012 at 1:22 am
Guys, monkeys evolved in the old world and migrated across the atlantic 20 millions years ago to South Americas. There hasn't been a land connection between the old world and the new since 80 million years BC. The monkeys must have ridden on something that floated. They crossed a far greater span of water than the gap between Libya and Crete, Brindisi and Sicily, or the islands of Indonesia.
Did primitive monkeys also have previously unsuspected "maritime technology"?
Or could primitive man crossed seaways the same way the monkeys did, by accidentally surviving on rafts of vegetation that are often washed out to sea after coastal storms?
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RE: Ice Age Man on Sicily
November 30, 2012 at 1:46 am
I don't know that anyone has done a study in the Med but Robert Bednarik trashed the "vegetation mat" idea in the Pacific.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1006058/posts
Quote:If hardy teams of H. erectus reached Flores by sea, their mode of transportation remains unknown. Some scientists suspect that small numbers of Stone Age folk accidentally drifted as far as Flores after climbing onto thick mats of vegetation that sometimes form near the Southeast Asian coast.
That speculation doesn't float, contends Bednarik. Only a craft propelled by its occupants could negotiate the treacherous straits separating one Indonesian island from the next. To back up that claim, he launched a project in 1996 to determine what Stone Age groups would have had to do, at a minimum, to reach Flores and its neighboring islands. A lot of hard work, a handful of sea excursions, and a few close calls later, he and his comrades thrust their newest and most improved bamboo raft, dubbed Nale Tasih 4, into the Lombok Strait.
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