Why are the skeletons of our ancestors .. (ie:Homo floresiensis) have not been found??

Question

Why is it that so little bones and fossils have been found of mans ancestors??

I'm thinking that if the world blew up today, there would be plenty of OUR bones for ... aliens or whatever to dig up...

so why is it that we never find the bones/fossils of our own ancestors?.. well i realize we DO find them, but why on such a small scale? there were an estimated 50 MILLION humans on the planet earth in 10,000BC. Where the h**l did they all go???

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fossil_sites

Answer 1

What's to say they ever existed? If they did, what's to say they weren't just another race of Homo Sapiens?

Answer 2

Most estimates of the world population in 10,000 BCE is between 1 and 10 million.Back there there weren't graveyards or even organized civilizations. Most bodies were buried in trash heaps or away from habitation

I recently read of the exhumation of an old cemetery. While numerous graves were found and some beautiful jewelry found, not one bone was discovered.

At St.George's Church, Canterbury, England 269 graves were moved and studied. Few matched the traditional idea of a skeleton:

"The overall bone condition and preservation is not very good. In the total sample available for examination, only twenty skeletons (7.5 per cent) are practically complete and over 40 per cent are represented by incomplete limbs, or by small miscellaneous bones. The condition of the bones is mixed: over a quarter are in very good condition, but over halt of the burials consist of badly fragmented or eroded remains, some of which are no more than stains."

http://www.hillside.co.uk/arch/clocktowe...

Founder of Rhode Island, Roger Williams was exhumed 177 years after his death. Bones weren't found:

"The utmost care was taken in scraping away the earth from the bottom of the grave of Roger Williams. Not a vestige of any bone was discoverable, nor even of the lime dust which usually remains after the gelatinous part of the bone is decomposed. So completely had disappeared all the earthly remains of the founder of the State of Rhode Island, in the commingled mass of black, crumbled slate stone and shale, that they did not 'leave a wreck behind.'

http://freepages.misc.rootsweb.ancestry....

Jesse James was exhumed (again) in 1995. The hope was DNA testing would determine if he had been buried there. However:" All the bones in the grave were too deteriorated from water, which made Mitochondrial DNA testing impossible."

http://www.theoutlaws.com/outlaws5d.htm

You get the picture. Even recent, well-known graves don't yield much in bones. Add a thousand years and nothing but stains would be left.

Most soils don't lend themselves to bone preservation. During a dig I once found a bone bead that caused great excitement. Most referred to it as a "mouse donut" as rodents chew bones for the salt and minerals. Other soils are too wet or too acid to preserve bones.

There have been experiments where remains of animals were exposed and over a period on time checked. It was learned that the bones were quickly scattered and not preserved. Some Australopithecus remains show tooth marks of a leopard.

Preservation of bones requires special conditions and a good deal of luck is needed to find them. Most ancient finds are found by finding bones eroding out of a bank and scattered over a wide area. The older the bones the more likely they won't be complete.

Today our society is moving more to creation rather then burial. That will seriously limit the information future scientists can gather from exmination of the bones.

Answer 3

Bravozulu is right.

Think about dinosaurs.  They existed for over 100 million years.  Meaning there were Billions upon Billions of them, but there are still few fossils.

In fact, if bones didn't decay, we would be up to our necks in bones if you consider the number on animals that have lived and died on this planet over the last 350 million years.

Answer 4

If you are talking about our new friend...the "Hobbit", they have found remains, quite a good find, actually.

Look it up; it;s all there.

Answer 5

There are two big problems.  One is that it is rare for skeletons to fossilize.  They need to be buried away from decomposing bacteria in suitable soil that is building up sediment. Then they need to be freshly exposed today after being deeply buried for a million years or whatever.  It is rare to find sediments of any particular age.  When you find the right age, you usually need to search vast amounts of area to find any hominid fossils.  Ancient hominids couldn't support nearly the populations of today with hunter gatherer type lifestyles.