What would happen if we discovered a homo sapiens fossil that was 2million years old??

Question

What would happen if we discovered a homo sapiens fossil that was 2million years old??

Answer 1

It would completely revolutionize science, but I don't think Homo-Sapiens as they currently exist could have survived in the world of 2 million BC, so it probably won't ever happen. I'd guess 500,000-1million years would be the absolute max.

Answer 2

Chuckle... ain't gonna happen.  Genetic science has determined 300,000  to 400,000 yrs ago would be the max for the Sapien Genome. The Sapien most probably became recognizable as homosapien about 200,000 yrs ago.  Our genes have what we'd call a "ticking clock" that biologists use to date the species.  We'd be very supprised if the homosapien was indeed a species even 300,000 yrs ago.

Unfortunately we are unable to extract DNA from ancient fossiles & have no biological material to work with.

Some work is in progress toward "reverse engineering" fossiles to obtain DNA.

Answer 3

Well there is a homo sapien in the Yahoo Answers section. U should ask him.

Answer 4

now that would be very interesting  to find something that lasted for so many years  friend

Answer 5

The most common dating technique used for the 2mya range in areas where hominids are found is that of radioactive decay of the volcanic tufts.  The artifacts are dated by their proximity within or between these tufts.  Most sites are found by visual inspection after periods of erosion thus naturally exposing outcroppings of artifacts and fossils.  Due to these conditions it is not always possible to get an accurate date and frequently "out of chronology" findings like this are disputed by the fact that erosion may have carried the fossil/artifact to a lower stratigraphic level, thereby creating a false dating in the association of incorrect tufts.  There are already many such findings like this, including a Homo sapiens finding from Omo, Ethiopia, which dates back to 130,000 years ago.  Due to this eroded specimen being found at the same level as an in situ Archaic Homo sapiens find, however, creates evidence that erosion to a lower stratigraphic level is definitely a consideration regarding the factuality of the dating for this Omo Homo sapiens find.  Moreover, this 130,000 dating is even acceptable given the DNA evidence for Homo sapiens, yet it is still disputed.  If a 2mya Homo sapiens find were suggested, well it would be so ridiculously inconsistent with the fossil progression of our hominid evolution and the DNA evidence that either dating error or a bad assumption would have had to have been made.  As the dating method is very straight forward for these tufts of the 2mya range and the artifacts are not typically individually dated, an erosion incidence that carried this more modern artifact to a lower stratigraphic level would be the most likely conclusion.  In most cases it is not even possible to date individual artifacts/fossils, which is why it is so important to find evidence in-situ that supports the eroded outcrops; otherwise your eroded artifacts are open to extreme scrutiny.

Answer 6

We would report it to proper authorities who would take it from there. They would confirm that is was a homo sapiens fossil that was 2 million years old -- or not to begin with.

Answer 7

First off, we'd have to verify the dates.  Scientists aren't perfect, so if anyone got a date that old, the first assumption would be that something got messed up along the way.  If you did the tests again and got them verified, there'd probably be a lot of arguing.  It happened with Meadowcroft, a site in Pennsylvania that pushed back the earliest human settlement dates in the US.  The archaeologist who dug up that was super-careful and took a lot more samples than necessary, because the dates he got were too old for then-current theories.  Even now, there are those who will continue to argue that his dates are wrong.  However, due to the care with which samples were pulled and due to other sites that also have early dates, most scientists accept that Meadowcroft was settled a thousand or two years earlier than previously thought possible.

So then, the next step would be to get some more samples.  One 2 million year old h. sapiens skeleton is startling, but you're still going to get people arguing with you because you can't take human error out completely.  Two or three skeletons, or fragments of skeletons, and you've really got something.

And somewhere starting around you publishing your 2 million year old skeleton, people are going to start having to rethink human evolution theory.  This is probably not going to destroy evolution theory as a whole: the flu bug still changes every year, and the descent for other animals hasn't changed.  But we'd have to completely revamp how we think about the ways in which humans evolved and the rapidity with which we did so.  It'd be interesting and give lots of grad students plenty of things to write papers on.