Clothing is a Biblical indication of the Fall. The earliest evidence of
working with hide is from around 1.8 million years. Hides are used to make
clothing.
"The next oldest bone artifacts include 125 flaked, battered,
or polished pieces from Olduvai Beds I and II and a series of long-
bone fragments with polished tips from Swartkrans Member 1 and
Sterkfontein Member 5. At all three sites, the bone implements
certainly or probably date from between 2 mya and 1.5 mya.
Microscopic examination supports the artifactual nature of 41 Olduvai
pieces. Of these, 4 were not tools in the narrow sense but
apparently served as anvils or platforms on which soft substances
such as skin were repeatedly punctured by sharp ended stone
artifacts. The remaining 37 are large, flaked pieces of bone,
including (a) 26 with polish of the kind that forms on experimental
pieces used to cut or smooth soft materials such as hide and (b) 11
with wear that probably formed from contact with a more abrasive
substance such as soil. Experiments show that the polish on the
Swartkrans and Sterkfontein pieces could have been produced by
digging for subterranean plant foods in rocky soil."
"The microscopic and experimental results indicate that the
flaking, battering, or polishing on the Olduvai and thus that
artifactual use of bone began at least 2-1.5 mya. However, it is
important to stress that at each site the bones identified as
artifacts represent only a tiny fraction of the total number of bones
recovered. Even more important, for the most part the bone artifacts
were minimally shaped before use, and truly formal bone implements,
made to a repetitive pattern in advance of use, appear only much
later, in the Eurasian Upper Paleolithic/African Later Stone Age,
beginning between 60,000 and 50,000 years ago."~Richard G. Klein, The
Human Career, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), p.
164
And
"Some of the fossil bones looked so worn at the tip that they must have
been used for several days. Bob began to wonder if the hominids carried these
digging sticks with them. Then he noticed that the wear scratches on some
specimens were obscured by a glassy polish. A similar sort of polish occurs on
modern bone tools used by hunter gatherers to burnish hides. Bob speculates
that the hominids may have made hide bags to carry tools and tubers, and the
glassy polish formed as the bones rubbed against the leather. A few tiny, awl-
like pieces of bone---the sort of tools that could be used to puncture leather-
-- were also uncovered at Swartkrans."~Donald C. Johanson, Lenora Johanson, and
Blake Edgar, Ancestors, (New York: Villard Books, 1994), p. 163-165
The next from 300,000 years ago.
"But in the very remote Stone Age past, our primary evidence for hide
working comes from Lower Paleolithic sites in Europe, the earliest about three
hundred thousand years ago, where stone artifact edges show the telltale
microscopic wear pattern of highly rounded, rough, and pitted edges with
scratches perpendicular to the tool edge, indicating a scraping motion. In the
earliest Stone Age, we have no direct evidence of the working of hides. Once a
skin is cut away from an animals's body, it can be worked with stone tools,
ideally flakes or retouched flake scrapers, to remove adhering meat and fat,
which will normally make the skin go rancid. It is usually easier to remove
adhering tissues by staking the skin on the ground with hair side down and
allowing it to dry in the sun. A sun-dried skin (rawhid) can serve as a stiff
carrying device, but to make a softer, more pliable material that can be used
as clothing, ususally some chemical tanning agent (such as brains, urine, ash,
and water) must be used. Whether Oldowan hominids had such technologies is
unknown, but it seems more likely that a strong reliance upon clothing for
warmth was especially correlated to hominid movements into more temperate parts
of the world later in time."~Kathy D. Schick and Nicholas Toth, Making Silent
Stones Speak, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), p.162
Murder is also a sign of the Fall.
The earliest evidence of murder is from ~`48,000 years.
murder, warfare among neanderthals
"Second, the presence of stone-pointed spears in the Mousterian is still
a viable thesis. There is evidence for projectile impact and hafting from use
wear studies in the Levantine Mousterian collections. Further proof is
provided by Neanderthal skeletal remains, specifically from the rib cage of
Shanidar Neanderthal III. The rib in question is the left ninth rib, located
in one of the most vital areas of the body. It exhibits a slit, about 1.5 mm
wide, evidence of a wound that had begun to heal when the individual was
killed in a rockfall. Recently, I had the opportunity to study the cast of
this rib in the Natural History Museum of the Smithsonian Institution. The
rib was also examined by R. W. Mann, a forensic anthropologist at the museum,
and a specialist in stab wounds. He concluded that the direction of the wound
was from back to front and from above to below. A study of the slit itself,
its shape, narrow width, and complete penetration of the rib, indicate that
only a thin stone point set in some sort of haft and projected with much force
by another individual, could have produced such a result."~Rose L. Solecki,
"More on Hafted Projectile Points in the Mousterian," Journal of Field
Archaeology, 19(1992):207-212, p. 211
"One of these examples is the trauma on the left ninth rib of the
skeleton of Shanidar 3, a partially healed wound inflicted by a sharp object.
The implement cut obliquely across the top of the ninth rib and probably
pierced the underlying lung. Shanidar 3 almost certainly suffered a collapsed
left lung and died several days or weeks later, probably as a result of
secondary complications. This is deduced from the presence of bony spurs and
increased density of the bone around the cut.
"The position of the wound on the rib, the angle of the incision, and
the clenness of the cut make it higly unlikely that the injury was
accidentally inflicted. In fact, the incision is almost exactly what would
have resulted if Shanidar 3 had been stabbed in the side by a right-handed
adversary in face-to-face conflict. This would therefore provides conclusive
evidence of violence between humans, the only evidence so far found of such
violence among the Neanderthals."~Erik Trinkaus, "Hard Times among the
Neanderthals," Natural History, 87:10(Dec. 1978), p. 58-63, p. 61-62
However scalping is found at Bodo Ethiopia on a skull dated 400,000 years ago.
glenn
Foundation, Fall and Flood
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm