Silica Valley........778,000 BC
Israel Fossils Change Record
Evidence Puts Hominid Migration 250,000 Years Earlier
The Associated Press
W A S H I N G T O N, Aug. 11 — New findings in the
sediments of a dried lake bed in Israel show that
early hominids migrated into the region some
780,000 years ago, bringing with them
sophisticated stone tool-making skills developed
in Africa.
Craig S. Feibel, a Rutgers University geologist, said that
the findings show that a hominid called Homo erectus
migrated from Africa and settled at a site called Gesher
Benot Ya’aqov some 250,000 years earlier than previous
studies had suggested.
Gesher Benot Ya’aqov is located in the Dead Sea rift of
northern Israel. The site is dry now, but once it was the
center of a freshwater lake, surrounded by trees and lively
with game, said Feibel, the co-author of a studying
appearing today in the journal Science.
New Dating Technique
Feibel said that a shift in the Earth’s geomagnetic field
enabled the researchers to establish the new age for the
Gesher Benot Ya’aqov site.
The Earth’s magnetic field, for reasons not understood,
will occasionally reverse. Rocks and some soils carry the
signature of the magnetic field that existed at the time they
were formed.
The last magnetic field reversal, the one that causes
compasses now to point north instead of south, occurred
780,000 years ago. Researchers digging at the Gesher Benot
Ya’aqov site preserved the orientation of sediments and then
checked their magnetic polarity in the laboratory.
Feibel said they found that specimens in a middle depth
of the Gesher Benot Ya’aqov dig had a reverse polarity, while
rock higher up in the dig had the current magnetic polarity.
Fossils were found in both the upper and lower parts of the
dig. This proved that Homo erectus was living at the site
when the reversal occurred, he said.
Specimens from the site include fossils of elephants,
antelope, deer and other animals that the hominid used for
meat, he said. There were also residues from a variety of
edible plants.
Evidence of Hominid
There were no actual fossils of the hominid, but Feibel said
the researchers found stone tools, principally a type of ax,
that bore the same characteristic stone chipping techniques
used by hominids that lived earlier in Tanzania.
“What we see at [the site] is a whole new technology
that also was found at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania,” said
Feibel. “All the technological breakthroughs [in stone
tool-making] seem to have been made in Africa and they
came out of Africa.”
Homo erectus is a human-like animal that preceded
modern humans by hundreds of thousands of years |
