Excavations at a Middle Stone Age archaeological site, Shinfa-Metema 1, in the lowlands of northwest Ethiopia, revealed a population of humans at 74,000 years ago that survived the eruption of the Toba super-volcano.
Photo courtesy https://topographic-map.com, Open Database License (ODbL) v1.0
This, the fourth in a clutch of very recent papers that casually and unintentionally refute creationism simply by revealing the facts that run counter to the claims of creationists. It concerns the effects of a devastating volcanic eruption of Mount Toba in Indonesia 64 thousand years before creationists think there was life on Earth, or even an Earth to have life on it.
They believe this because a bunch of Middle Eastern pastoralists made up a tale to fill the gaps in their knowledge and understanding and describe a magic man in the sky creating a small flat planet with a dome over it, just a few thousand years earlier.
The facts are those revealed by a research team which included Curtis Marean, Christopher Campisano and Jayde Hirniak from Arizona State University who have shown that not only did African populations of humans survived the effects of this volcano, the most devastating in human history, but that its effects may have facilitated human dispersal out of Africa into Eurasia. They have presented their evidence in the form of a paper in Nature and explained the research in a University of Arizona news release:
Modern humans dispersed from Africa multiple times, but the event that led to global expansion occurred less than 100,000 years ago.
Some researchers hypothesize that dispersals were restricted to “green corridors” formed during humid intervals when food was abundant and human populations expanded in lockstep with their environments.
But a new study in Nature including Arizona State University researchers Curtis Marean, Christopher Campisano and Jayde Hirniak suggests that humans also may have dispersed during arid intervals along “blue highways” created by seasonal rivers.
Researchers also found evidence of cooking and stone tools that represent the oldest evidence of archery.
Working in the Horn of Africa, researchers have uncovered evidence showing how early modern humans survived in the wake of the eruption of Toba, one of the largest super-volcanoes in history, some 74,000 years ago. The behavioral flexibility of these people not only helped them live through the super-eruption, but may have facilitated the later dispersal of modern humans out of Africa and across the rest of the world.
The team investigated the Shinfa-Metema 1 site in the lowlands of present-day northwestern Ethiopia along the Shinfa River, a tributary of the Blue Nile River.This study confirms the results from Pinnacle Point in South Africa — the eruption of Toba may have changed the environment in Africa, but people adapted and survived that eruption-caused environmental change.
Professor Curtis W. Marean, co-author
Institute of Human Origins
School of Human Evolution and Social Change Arizona State University.
The super-eruption occurred during the middle of the time when the site was occupied and is documented by tiny glass shards whose chemistry matches that of Toba.
Pinpoint timing through cryptotephra
Cryptotephra are signature volcanic glass shards that can range from 80–20 microns in size, which is smaller than the diameter of a human hair. To extract these microscopic shards from archaeological sediment requires patience and great attention to detail.One of the groundbreaking implications of this study is that with the new cryptotephra methods developed for our prior study in South Africa, and now applied here to Ethiopia, we can correlate sites across Africa, and perhaps the world, at a resolution of several weeks of time.
Professor Curtis W. Marean.
A tiny glass shard less than the diameter of human hair was recovered from a Middle Stone Age site in northwest Ethiopia. Its chemistry matches that of the Toba super-volcano located on the other side of the world in Indonesia. The people who lived at this archaeological site survived the super-eruption because of their behavioral flexibility.Photo by Racheal JohnsenThe methods for identifying low-abundance cryptotephra at Pinnacle Point were first developed at University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV), led by the late Gene Smith and Racheal Johnsen, and now carried on at ASU’s Sediment and TEphra Preparation (STEP) Lab.Searching for cryptotephra at these archaeological sites is like looking for a needle in a haystack, but not knowing if there is even a needle. However, having the ability to correlate sites 5,000 miles apart, and potentially further, to within weeks instead of thousands of years makes it all worth it.
This study, once again highlights the importance of the University of Nevada-Las Vegas/Arizona State University team pushing the limits for successfully analyzing extremely low-abundance cryptotephra to date and correlated archaeological sites across Africa.
Assistant professor Christopher J. Campisano
Institute of Human Origins
School of Human Evolution and Social Change. Arizona State University.
School of Human Evolution and Social Change graduate student Hirniak led ASU’s effort to create its own cryptotephra lab — the STEP Lab — working with Campisano and building on methods developed at UNLV. Hirniak also collaborated with cryptotephra labs in the United Kingdom that work with sediment samples preserving hundreds or thousands of glass shards. Now Hirniak’s primary expertise is in tephrochronology, which involves the use of volcanic ash to link archaeological and paleoenvironmental records and place them on the same timeline, which was her contribution to this research.
Migrations along 'blue highways'Our lab at ASU was built to process extremely low-abundance cryptotephra horizons (less than 10 shards per gram) using a highly specialized technique. There are only a few labs in the world with these capabilities.
Jayde N. Hirniak, co-author
Institute of Human Origins
School of Human Evolution and Social Change
Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA.
Based on isotope geochemistry of the teeth of fossil mammals and ostrich eggshells, they concluded that the site was occupied by humans during a time with long dry seasons on par with some of the most seasonally arid habitats in eastern Africa today. Additional findings suggest that when river flows stopped during dry periods, people adapted by hunting animals that came to the remaining waterholes to drink. As waterholes continued to shrink, it became easier to capture fish without any special equipment, and diets shifted more heavily to fish.
Its climatic effects appear to have produced a longer dry season, causing people in the area to rely even more on fish. The shrinking of the waterholes may also have pushed humans to migrate outward in search of more food.Projectile points from a Middle Stone Age archaeological site, Shinfa-Metema 1, in the lowlands of northwest Ethiopian dating from the time of the Toba super-eruption at 74,000 years ago provide evidence for bow and arrow use prior to the dispersal of modern humans out of Africa.Photo courtesy the Blue Nile Survey Project
The humans who lived at Shinfa-Metema 1 are unlikely to have been members of the group that left Africa. However, the behavioral flexibility that helped them adapt to challenging climatic conditions such as the Toba super-eruption was probably a key trait of Middle Stone Age humans that allowed our species to ultimately disperse from Africa and expand across the globe.As people depleted food in and around a given dry season waterhole, they were likely forced to move to new waterholes. Seasonal rivers thus functioned as ‘pumps’ that siphoned populations out along the channels from one waterhole to another, potentially driving the most recent out-of-Africa dispersal.
Professor John Kappelman, lead author
Department of Anthropology
The University of Texas, Austin, TX, USA.
The people living in the Shinfa-Metema 1 site hunted a variety of terrestrial animals, from antelope to monkey, as attested to by cut marks on the bones, and apparently cooked their meals as shown by evidence of controlled fire at the site. The most distinctive stone tools are small, symmetrical triangular points. Analyses show that the points are most likely arrowheads that, at 74,000 years in age, represent the oldest evidence of archery.
Abstract
Although modern humans left Africa multiple times over 100,000 years ago, those broadly ancestral to non-Africans dispersed less than 100,000 years ago1. Most models hold that these events occurred through green corridors created during humid periods because arid intervals constrained population movements2. Here we report an archaeological site—Shinfa-Metema 1, in the lowlands of northwest Ethiopia, with Youngest Toba Tuff cryptotephra dated to around 74,000 years ago—that provides early and rare evidence of intensive riverine-based foraging aided by the likely adoption of the bow and arrow. The diet included a wide range of terrestrial and aquatic animals. Stable oxygen isotopes from fossil mammal teeth and ostrich eggshell show that the site was occupied during a period of high seasonal aridity. The unusual abundance of fish suggests that capture occurred in the ever smaller and shallower waterholes of a seasonal river during a long dry season, revealing flexible adaptations to challenging climatic conditions during the Middle Stone Age. Adaptive foraging along dry-season waterholes would have transformed seasonal rivers into ‘blue highway’ corridors, potentially facilitating an out-of-Africa dispersal and suggesting that the event was not restricted to times of humid climates. The behavioural flexibility required to survive seasonally arid conditions in general, and the apparent short-term effects of the Toba supereruption in particular were probably key to the most recent dispersal and subsequent worldwide expansion of modern humans.
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The fact that volcanoes are abundant throughout much of the world is one of the primary reasons out of countless reasons why the creator of this world cannot be omnibenevolent, omnipotent, omniscient, and cannot be rational and sane. Volcanoes are incredibly dangerous, deadly, and horrifying. A large volcanic eruption can be as catastrophic as a nuclear bomb explosion. Not only is there devastation from the violence of the explosion and lava flow but the air itself can be polluted causing fog and acid rain for many, many miles away from the eruption itself, as on the Big Island of Hawaii.
ReplyDeleteThe infamous 1883 explosion of Krakatoa, Java in Indonesia killed some 36,000 people and much of the wildlife. The noise was heard thousands of miles away! Anyone near the explosion would have been killed just from the noise alone. That's beyond terrifying.
Volcanoes have a more beneficial side as they can form islands and they are fertile and many plants grow readily on volcanic soil. Be that as it may the malevolent dangerous side of volcanoes outweighs the benefits. I ask creationists why would a good, loving, mighty, all knowing creator God have to have something this dangerous, this deadly, this terrifying? Isn't there a less dangerous, less terrifying, less cruel way to create land and give fertile soil? It's as if the creator can only create through violence, terror, pain, killing, death and has no other options. It's a creator who can only create through cruelty and not in a merciful way.
Indonesia is notorious for its numerous volcanoes, and here in US, there's Mount Saint Helen's which erupted in 1980 in Washington state and there's the super volcano in Yellowstone in Montana and Wyoming which can destroy who knows how many miles if it erupted. How many human lives and how many animal lives would be lost if such an eruption happened is anybody's guess. A loving God would not have created and would not be allowing such horrors. A creationist's usual execuse is blaming Adam and Eve for the existence of volcanoes, as if volcanoes didn't exist before Adam and Eve. Why not blame every single misfortune, evil, and horror on Adam and Eve, Mr. Creationist? So if I slip and fall on a sidewalk, its the fault of Adam and Eve. If we suffer from mold, mildew, grime, scum, ants, dandruff, birth defects, miscarriages, tooth decay, heart disease, stroke, aneurysm, malaria, rabies, and the list goes on and on indefinitely, its all the fault of Adam and Eve. It's unbelievably STAGGERING that grown up adults continue to believe in this absurd and false belief written by some ignorant moron in the Bronze Age. It's such an obvious myth, how can anyone with functioning brain cells take it seriously? It's fake science, fake history, fake reality. It's unscientific, unhistorical, unrealistic, unfair, unjust, irrational, insane, stupid and cruel to blame everything on Adam and Eve. Creationists like to believe in false myths. My answer to creationists is that they have a right to believe in whatever makes them happy, but don't expect any rational, sane person to believe it.
Ethiopia and East Africa are beautiful places, as is much of Africa, but unfortunately, the beauty is spoiled and ruined by volcanoes, dangerous, deadly wildlife, drought, famine, tropical diseases, overpopulation, unclean water, and crime, poverty, and genocides, such as the 1994 Rwanda genocide. Creationism has been no help to solve any of these evils.