“Stone tool find shows humans walked through Red Sea” says the headline at Earth Times . I was thinking grist for biblically fundamentalist Christians but, turns out, it was 125,000 years ago over what would have been dry land that only thousands of years later became the Red Sea, and the tool was a “primitive” hand held stone chopper. Not the same picture as Charlton Heston maybe leaving his staff behind after parting the waters yet it does push human migration out of Africa back almost 70,000 years.
I cannot say I like the label “primitive.” There may be questions of material efficiency (stone vs. copper, say) or ergonomic design or whether you can get one from a TV offer for only $19.95, but if it chopped what needed chopping, “primitive” becomes an insensitive pejorative used by archeologists to show their superiority. Anyway, the adze , as the thing is called, was found in an Arabian archaeological dig in Jebel Faya, east of Dubai.
Now if scientists can figure out how DNA from a Siberian species of hominids , neither Neanderthals nor Homo sapiens, ended up among some New Guinea people, I figure most of what’s worth knowing about the world will have been solved. That incidentally includes any questions around the human condition. Happily, the World Transformation Movement has that in hand, so I’m just not bothered by it anymore.
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