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Old 17th November 2012, 03:54 PM   #25
Dinwar
Penultimate Amazing
 
Join Date: Jul 2010
Posts: 16,668
Originally Posted by bobwtfomg View Post
Over the past 40 years new discoveries and new technologies have revealed an amazing amount of information about our distant past, and have in general pushed back estimations of when our ancestors first learnt various technologies and formed complex societies. Is it totally unreasonable to think there might be another Nevali Cori or Golbekli Tepi under some place as yet unexplored by modern archeology?
In paleontology and archaeology you have to address FADs and LADs--first appearance datums and last appearance datums (yes, I know the plural of datum is data; FAD=First Appearance Datum, and I'm pluralizing the whole thing). Essentially, the first time you see something in the record is some time after the first one appeared, and the last time is (usually) sometime before it goes extinct. So people were probably making Clovis points prior to our first find, simply because the odds of the first one surviving are vanishingly small. So it's perfectly reasonable to expect some amount of plasticity in our estimations of origins and extinctions.

That said, there are limits to what can be expected. This is also based on the probability of preservation. Rare things and squishy things are unlikely to get preserved, so the difference between the FAD and the actual origin is likely to be fairly big. Hard things and common things are much more likely to be preserved (not individually, necessarily, but if you have ten million of them even a 1 in 1,000,000 chance will preserve ten), so the difference between the FAD and the actual origin will be lesser. There are some weird things found far outside of their expected range, but they're relatively uncommon.
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