MARS IS AT ITS´ CLOSEST APPROACH TO EARTH IN 60,000 YEARS. WHAT
HAPPENED THE LAST TIME IT CAME THIS CLOSE TO THE PLANET?
---
http://zimmer.csufresno.edu/~fringwal/calendar.txt
(*) December 31, 11:57:30 p.m. (60,000 years ago):
"Homo Sapiens almost becomes extinct, particularly in Central Asia.
Perhaps we were displaced by archaic hominids: it is not known. Gene
differences in contemporary humans, however, indicate a constriction
of the population at this time."
--
http://www.education.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4704013,00.html
"Then, about 60,000 years ago (give or take), something important
happened in Africa - a sea change in human behaviour."
--
http://www.calacademy.org/thisweek/archive/%20This%20Week%202001/20010516.html
"The results support the "Out of Africa" hypothesis, which says that
modern humans, or Homo sapiens, evolved in Africa only after an older
hominid species, Homo erectus, had spread throughout the Old World.
When these early humans left Africa and reached Asia about 60,000
years ago, they replaced earlier hominid populations. The minority
competing theory, known as the "Multiregional" hypothesis, contends
that modern humans evolved several times from H. erectus populations
in Africa, Europe, and Eastern Asia."
--
http://www.trussel.com/prehist/news289.htm
"Aborigines may date to 60,000 B.C.
PERTH, Australia (AFP-Jiji) Aborigines lived in northern Australia up
to 60,000 years ago, experts have concluded after re-examining
evidence unearthed in the southwest of Western Australia"
--
http://informationcentre.tripod.com/evolve6.html
"Rock (Carbon 14) Dating:
Once the living matter has died, the C-14 begins to decay back into
the Nitrogen-14. By measuring the C-14 content one is supposedly able
to determine the age of the object. It is a fact that C-14 is wildly
inaccurate over 60,000 years; so, it is not used in regards to
macroevolution."
--
http://www.nationalgeographic.co.in/ngcinnews_FinancialExpress.shtml
"You are related to a man in Africa, born 60,000 years ago, and so am
I, says Dr. Spencer Wells.
Financial Express, 24th NOvember 2002 -Time to rewrite your family
tree, especially now when there’s a new theory that says that around
60,000 years ago, a man identical to us in all important respects,
walked the soil of Africa. That every man alive today is a descendant
of that man. A real-life Adam, some would say."
--
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/paleo/ctl/100k.html
"The Last Ice Age cycle lasted from roughly 60,000 to 20,000 years
before present, with Ice Age cycles occurring since 2.6 Million years
ago to the present."
--
http://www.museum-london.org.uk/frames.asp?http%3A//www.museum-london.org.uk/MOLsite/gallery/prehistory/tour_cat.asp%3Fsec%3D1
"Human absence...
Humans evolved throughout this period. It is possible that different
human species lived side by side at certain times. However between
150,000 and 60,000 years ago there is very little evidence for a human
presence in Britain. This may have been due to the extinction of local
populations or a failure to colonise the area before sea levels rose.
It is thought that Neanderthals, another human species, recolonised
Britain about 60,000 years ago."
--
http://216.239.37.104/search?q=cache:UYGattThm70J:www.guardian.co.uk/life/feature/story/0,13026,989719,00.html%3F%3Drss+60,000+years+ago&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
"The great leap
About 60,000 years ago humans were on the brink of extinction."
---
"the last time Mars was closer to Earth...was on September 12 of the
year -57616 (that is, 57617 B.C. of the historians)...60,000 years
ago...the Julian calendar has been extended indefinitely towards the
past — as is custom for astronomers. However, we know that the Julian
calendar is off by 1 day after about 130 years. So, after 58,000 years
the calendar is off by about 446 days...”
--
WHAT WAS HAPPENING IN 58,000 B.C...
http://www.letsgo.com/SF/03-LifeAndTimes-9
“San Francisco
San Francisco / Life & Times / The San Francisco Story /
58,000BC-1542AD
The Coast Miwoks, Ohlones, and Wintuns were the first people to
colonize the Bay Area, establishing small tribal societies with unique
languages and customs nearly 60,000 years ago...”
--
http://www.telusplanet.net/public/dgarneau/euro2.htm
“58,000 B.C.
Neanderthals are digging graves east of the Tigris River, in Iran and
carefully placing their loved ones with finely crafted flint tools,
charred animal bones (roasted meat) blobs of pollen likely from
flowers. The Neanderthal culture established a reverence for life, a
belief in a life after death and compassion for the unfortunate.”
--
www.bragg.army.mil/culturalresources/prehistory.htm
“Projectile points from this time period are subdivided into four
types--Kirk Stemmed/Serrated (ca. 6,000--58,000 B.C.)...represent the
early portion of the Middle Archaic and are relatively infrequent
finds...The stark contrast in style and craftsmanship between these
points and earlier ones has led some researchers to suggest a
migration of people from the north into North Carolina...”
--
www2.bc.edu/~robbinr/Pages/World%20Dev.html
“58,000 BC The Nile attracts human habitation.”
--
www.danbyrnes.com.au/lostworlds/timeline/lwstory18.htm
“58,0000BC: Approx: The Mungo Man controversy on the genetics of human
origins breaks out: Australia was enlivened on 9 January 2001 to read
reports of far-reaching new research by Australian scientists on the
origins and dispersal of humanity, globally...”
--
ALSO WITHIN THAT SAME PERIOD...
http://www.cesmap.it/ifrao/discov1.html
"THE JINMIUM CLAIMS...spectacular claims about the early occupation of
Australia...According to the claims, the exfoliated rock art was found
between layers dated at 58000 years...well before the first occupation
of the continent as generally recognised..."
--
http://www.archbold-station.org/abs/Biennial99/R9Research/R9LWRlakes.htm
"...oak/herbs alternate in dominance. Thus pine dominated
36,000-44,000 years ago, oak/herbs 46,000-58,000 years ago..."
--
www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.12/edgier.cities.html
“... But humans have been building cities for 58,000 years now, and
patterns have
developed. All cities, for example, appear chaotic in their early
stages...”
----------------------
12 Planetarian March 2003
When Was Mars Last This Close?
Jean Meeus
Leuvense steenweg 312, box 8
3070 Kortenberg
Belgium
In August Mars comes closer to Earth than in the last
60,000 years. This article explains why this is so.
The next time Mars will
come closer than this
August will be on August
28, 2287 …
When Mars makes its very close approach
to Earth in August, astronomers everywhere
- and especially planetarians - will be asked
when Mars last came this close, and when
next it will come closer. The answer would
be simple if it were a matter of a few hundred
years, as planetary distances can be calculated
quickly and accurately within a few
thousand years of the present, but in this
case the actual answer is more difficult to
determine.
Essential to a solution of the problem is an
understanding of the changing eccentricities
of the orbits of the Earth and Mars. In 1994
Simon et al. (1) published an expression for
the eccentricity of the orbit of the Earth (see
Chapter 33 in More Mathematical Astronomy
Morsels). Presently, the eccentricity is 0.0167
and decreasing. The next minimum of the
eccentricity will be 0.0023 in about the year
29,500. Another, still deeper minimum
(0.0006) will occur near A.D. 465,000 and
near that epoch the orbit of the Earth will be
almost exactly circular. But at other times
the eccentricity can be as large as 0.06. The
eccentricity of the orbit of the Earth reaches
maximum values at intervals of about
100,000 years.
The eccentricity of the orbit of Mars
appears to vary with a period of 96,000 years,
which is superposed on a greater variation
with a period of about 2,200,000 years.
Presently the eccentricity varies around the
value 0.09, but one million years ago its
mean value was 0.03.
In the year 2000, the value of the eccentricity
of the Martian obit was 0.0934. It is
slowly increasing, and it will reach a maximum
value of 0.1051 around A.D. 24,100. But
186,000 years later it will reach a still higher
maximum, 0.1184, the largest within a two
million time span around the present. Figure
1 shows the variation in the orbit of Mars
during a time span of two million years.
Oppositions of Mars occur at intervals of 780
days, or 25.6 months. Pages 63-96 of the second
edition of my Astronomical Tables of the
Sun, Moon, and Planets (Willmann-Bell, 1995)
gives the complete list of all oppositions of
Mars taking place between the years 0 (as
astronomers call 1 B.C.) and A.D. 3000, and
also the corresponding date when the distance
of Mars to the Earth is a minimum.
Mars is nearest to the Earth near the time of
its opposition, but due to the eccentricities
of the orbits, opposition and least distance
don’t coincide exactly. The time interval
between Mars’ opposition and its least distance
to Earth can be as large as 81/2 days. In
2001, for instance, opposition took place on
June 13 but least distance was on June 21.
Each opposition is followed by a very similar
one 79 years later. For example, the very
favorable opposition of 1956 was a close repetition
of that of 1877, when Asaph Hall discovered
the two satellites of Mars. This period
corresponds to 79 revolutions of the Earth
and 42 revolutions of Mars around the Sun.
After 79 years, the oppositions of Mars repeat
under nearly identical circumstances, with a
delay of only 2 to 5 days in the year. The
opposition of August 28, 2003, is a repetition
of the oppositions of August 23, 1924 and of
August 18, 1845.
In the course of centuries, close oppositions
of Mars are gradually becoming more
frequent. For example, Mars came to less
than 0.375 AU from the Earth 11 times
between the years 0 and 1000, and 15 times
between 1000 and 2000, but 22 times between
the years 2000 and 3000. This gradual
improvement is due to the secular variations
of both Mars and the Earth, resulting from
the gravitational attractions of the other
planets. The orbit of Mars is slowly becoming
more elliptical, its eccentricity increasing
from 0.09156 in the year 0 to 0.09430 in A.D.
3000. This allows it to approach closer to
Earth. In August 2003 Mars comes closer to
the Earth than at any time in the last several
thousand years, although actually only a little
closer than at the approach of 1924. Table
1 shows the closest approaches of Mars from
the years 0 to 3000. The next time Mars will
come closer than this August will be on
August 28, 2287, when Mars will be 0.37225
AU distant. The least distance between Mars
and the Earth during this millennium will be
0.37200 AU on September 8, 2729. Because
the closest distance between the orbits con-
tinues to decrease after A.D. 3000, still smaller
distances will occur then. Between the
years 3000 and 4000 the least Earth-Mars distance
will be 0.37061 AU on September 25,
3818.
As the orbital eccentricity of Mars will
continue to increase until A.D. 24,100, when
it will be as large as 0.1051, the planet’s perihelion
distance will decrease accordingly. It
appears that around A.D. 25,000, the least
separation between the orbits will be only
0.3613 AU, its smallest value during the two
million years around the present.
Figure 2 shows how the least distance
between the orbits of Mars and Earth has
varied in the past. The two figure have been
calculated on the base of work by the French
astronomer Bretagnon (ref. 2 and 3). From
this work I deduced that since the year
71,000 BC the least distance between the
orbits of Earth and Mars has been larger than
0.3728 AU, with the consequence that closer
approaches of Mars than that of 2003 happened
more than 73,000 years ago. This was
stated in my book.
After my book was published, I contacted
Dr. Aldo Vitagliano (of Naples University,
Italy) and asked him to investigate the
motion of Mars by numerical integration. In
April 2002, Prof. Vitagliano found that the
last time Mars was closer to Earth than it will
be in 2003, was on September 12 of the year
-57616 (that is, 57617 B.C. of the historians). So,
that was 60,000 years ago. The 73,000 years
cited in my book was, after all, a good
approximation. It should be noted that the
aim of the articles by Bretagnon is to provide
a good approximation of the evolution of
the orbits in the course of two million years,
not to provide a method for calculating
accurate ephemerides. “Care must be taken
with that date, September 12. To define that
date, the Julian calendar has been extended
indefinitely towards the past — as is custom
for astronomers. However, we know that the
Julian calendar is off by 1 day after about 130
years. So, after 58,000 years the calendar is off
by about 446 days, or more than one year!”
References
Much of the text of this article, including
the table and two figures, is taken from
Chapters 33 - 36 in More Mathematical Astronomy
Morsels by Jean Meeus, Willmann-Bell,
Richmond, Virginia, 2002. For more information
see:
http://www.willbell.com/math/
moremorsels .htm.
For a full list of Mars oppositions from the
years 0 to 3000, see Astronomical Tables of the
Sun, Moon, and Planets, second edition, Jean
Meeus, Willmann-Bell, Richmond, Virginia,
1995.
(1) J. L. Simon, P. Bretagnon, J. Chapront, M.
Chapront-Touzé, G. Francou, and J. Laskar,
“Numerical expressions for precession formulae
and mean elements for the Moon
and the planets,” Astronomy and Astrophysics,
vol. 282, pages 663-683, 1994.
(2) P. Bretagnon, Astronomy and Astrophysics,
vol. 30, pages 141-154, 1974.
(3) P. Bretagnon, Milankovitch and Climate,
Part 1, pages 41-53, 1984.
(4) A. Vitagliano, personal communication to
the author, 2002. C