"If Jews were the first people how did we come from Africa?"

[Burnt Offerings]

What do you mean by verify that they’re “true fossils”? As in, you want to see and/or touch them? Or do you mean, you desire a more substantive understanding of how scientists can say that they’re they’re this age or that age?

There have been fossil hoaxes before (like “piltdown man”) but such incidents are very rare and, when they’re revealed as frauds, they get exposed by scientists, not religious fundamentalists.

The “young earth creationists” are pretty amusing...I remember reading some Christian fundamentalist magazine once where they had some of that content. Their interpretation of fossil evidence for evolution, including intermediate fossils, can be summarized thusly: “it’s either a monkey or a person”. If it looks more modern, it’s a person, if it’s more archaic it’s a monkey. LOL. Sprinkle in some of the cases in which scientists were either initially mistaken or defrauded, and you have the YEC “counter” to evolutionary theory. Any YEC with a degree in the natural sciences is a duplicitous liar, as they never would’ve received a degree in biology, geology etc. while rejecting something as foundational as the theory of evolution

 

[Burnt Offerings]

I’ve never really understood why some of those people are so committed to trying to “discredit” evolutionary theory...I guess it just challenges their worldview but the crux of Christianity doesn’t seem (to me at least) to reside in all the “IN THE BEGINNING”-kinda stuff

 

[Jabberwocky]

I’ve never really understood why some of those people are so committed to trying to “discredit” evolutionary theory...I guess it just challenges their worldview but the crux of Christianity doesn’t seem (to me at least) to reside in all the “IN THE BEGINNING”-kinda stuff

I think there is a lot of racially based resistance to the out-of-Africa hypothesis. If you accept that hypothesis it is also logically impossible to hold most racially based theories about human differences

 

[RedRum OG]

I was aware they were "God's chosen people", but I wasnt aware they were "the first". Never heard any Jewish people claim that. Where did you hear that? Curious

 

[TripSitterNZ]

i think it starts the tribes of Abraham

 

[RedRum OG]

Radiocarbon dating is only reliable so far back, I think the limit is around 30,000 years iirc. After that period of time the carbon 14 gets depleted and researchers can only say, "it's older than [the limit]", but wouldn't be able to give anything approaching an exact figure of how old a particular fossil is.

It's also only useful for objects with a biologic origin...for example, artifacts made of stone cannot be radiocarbon dated.

For very old fossils different methods would have to be used, for example potassium-argon dating (i.e. how the famous fossil specimen of Paranthropus Boisei was dated) or correlating the fossils with the geologic stratum it was found in, or correlating the fossils with nearby assemblages of extinct animals to get a relative date, etc...

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Africa is the homeland for our species. This idea goes back to Charles Darwin (at least). We evolved in Africa and fully-modern Homo Sapiens left the African continent to colonize the planet less than 100,000 years ago*. There's a substantial body of evidence to support this conclusion based on both genetic and archeological evidence.

*There's evidence of human habitation in what we now know as Israel more than 100,000 years ago, but there's no evidence (that I'm aware of) that these humans spread further than the Near East. There's also an older theory which maintains that a much more ancient dispersal of hominids from Africa seeded the "old world" (Africa, Asia and Europe) with humans, who then evolved into modern humans in their respective continents: Neanderthals in Europe, Homo Erectus in Asia, and Homo Rhodesienses in Africa. This was somewhat popular before the advent of genetic evidence but has since lost influence in favor of the "recent African origin" theory put forth by Chris Stringer and others, which asserts that all humans alive today are the result of a dispersal out of Africa which occurred less than 100,000 years ago, which subsequently displaced all older populations of "archaic humans".

I believe it is about 50,000 for the upper limit of C14 dating. As you mentioned there are other, very cool ways of finding approximate age. Sometimes even weathering, or location in the strata/dirt can be clue, too.

The past is almost more of a mystery the future. At least the future will reveal itself someday. We don't get that with the past