Oldest Dating Site In The World
Before they went mainstream, personals were a way for same-sex couples to discreetly connect.
Has the Internet really revolutionized dating? Or is hijacking tech for love and sex just what humans do?
The site is also home to some of the oldest petroglyphs (engraved rock art) in the world – it is also one of the biggest collections of rock art, with at least a million individual works of art. The petroglyphs date back to about 30,000 years ago, although the Aboriginals may have been living in the region for over 50,000 years, and depict. The world’s oldest dating service helped them find love. Many users of personals sites believe the same in the United States. Sites like Match.com, eHarmony, JDate and even fetish sites like FetLife all allow paid accounts that unlock a higher level of commitment to the dating adventure. No other free dating site provides oldest free online dating sites in the world without payment you with The Oasis Active free online dating site is a safe, clean and license content, paid advertisers, and 33 were in favor of free license files, dating from the device manufacturers or Temples, the oldest free-standing monuments in the world.
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Hardly a week goes by without another new think piece about online dating either revolutionizing society or completely ruining our ability to have real relationships. But these hyperbolic pronouncements miss a deeper fact:
At its core, 'online dating' isn't something we just started doing 5, 10 or even 20 years ago. Before the Internet, there were personal ads, and before that, lonely shepherds carved detailed works of art into tree bark to communicate their longing for human contact.
Since the earliest days of mass media and technology, people have been finding ways to broadcast their desires and find connections that might have otherwise eluded them. I mean, one could argue that even Voyager 1's Golden Record is kind of a massive, interstellar personal ad (complete with the recorded sound of a kiss!) out to the universe. It's as if humanity decided to document all our best features and send them into space with this message:
Lonely humans seek extraterrestrial lifeforms in Milky Way or nearby. Open to all body types.
The modern newspaper was invented in 1690, and the first personals followed soon after. So dating apps are really the latest manifestation of human beings doing what we've always done -- create new tools to communicate and then turn around and use those tools to find love, sex and companionship.
1695: The First Personal Ads
According to history professor H.G. Cocks (seriously --The Best Name Ever for an academic) personal ads began as a way to help British bachelors find eligible wives. One of the earliest personals ever placed was by a 30-year-old man, with 'a very good estate', announcing he was in search of 'some good young gentlewoman that has a fortune of £3,000 or thereabouts.' (£3,000 is equivalent to roughly £300,000 today. #ShamelesslySeekingSugarMomma...)
1700s: Personal Ads for Homosexual Safety
Personal ads were one of the only ways for the gay and lesbian communities to meet discreetly and safely at this time. Less-Than-Fun fact: homosexuality was outlawed and punishable by death in the UK by wife-murderer Henry VIII and continued to be illegal until 1967. During this time, gathering sites for gay men known as Molly Houses were subject to regular raids by law enforcement. (Meanwhile in the future U.S.A., anyone accused of being a 'sodomite' doing 'buggery' was also legally sentenced to death as of 1776.) Coded words, female names and other signals in personals were channels to privately expressing vulnerability and find companionship that society forbade.
1727: Women Get Smacked Down for Expressing Personal Desire
In 1727, Englishwoman Helen Morrison became the first woman to place an ad in a Lonely Hearts column. She convinced the editor of the Manchester Weekly Journal to place a small ad stating she was 'seeking someone nice to spend her life with.' (It's radical, I know.....)
A man responded to Helen, but it was not the man she was hoping for. It was the mayor, who had her committed to an insane asylum for four weeks.
Women asking for what they want -- clearly delusional to 18th century dudes.
1800s: Aristocrats Catch On
Always on the lookout for ways to exploit media for their own ends, aristocrats in the 1800s used personal ads to broadcast their interest in romantic engagements that seem scandalous by today's standards. An 1841 ad in the Journal of Munich tells of a 70-year-old Baron seeking a woman 'between 16 and 20 having good teeth and little feet.'
(Well... maybe not that much has changed for the one percent? )
Mid 1800s: The General Public Follows
In the mid-19th century, the need to advertise for a husband or wife was still considered a 'failure' and associated with deviant behavior for many judgmental straight, white, middle-to-upper class people. But as magazines and periodicals such as The Wedding Bell in the US and The Correspondent, Matrimonial Herald and Marriage Gazette in the UK hit the newsstands with immense popularity, matchmaking and personals took off as well, creating the first wave of true mainstream normalization for the personal ad.
Late 1800s: The Scam Emerges
You know, someone's always got to ruin the party. The popularity of personals paved the way for grifters who soon realized that they could prey on the vulnerability of people seeking love. Scam artists caused a scandal that many newspapers ran with, and personals disappeared practically overnight as public attitudes became more cautious. Phishing, fake profiles, and ads for escorts continue this tradition today.
Early 1900s: The Lonely Rural Farmers, Ranchers and Shepherds
Around the turn of the last century, personal ads enjoyed a renaissance of popularity, especially in the Western US with low populations and the harsh realities of rural life without a partner. (Farmers Only continues the legacy to find 'where all the country girls are' today.)
Some very pragmatic examples of early 20th century personals:
HOUSEKEEPER: 18 to 30 years of age, wanted by widower, 40. Have prominent position with the rail company, have 75-acre ranch also house in town; object matrimony if suited; have boy 13 years old, would not object to housekeeper having child. Can give best references.
Young woman, reared in luxury, having lost everything and earned her living for the past eight years, is tired of teaching and wishes a home: would like to meet a well-to-do businessman who would appreciate refinement and affection in a wife. Object: matrimony.
If only these two had found each other's personals then.....
1920s: Lonely WWI Soldiers Seek Pen Pals
Personal ads went mainstream again in the early 20th century, when social pressures to get married by 21 (and thus, expectations for relationships) were much lower, thankfully than their earlier incarnations. Many of the postings were simply calls for friends or pen pals. These kinds of ads were especially fashionable among lonely soldiers during World War I.
1960s: Counterculture and Computer Love
Removed from the context of wartime, old stigmas crept back in. Like the Internet today, lonely hearts ads were suspected of harboring all sort of scams and perversities. Because they were often used by homosexuals and sex workers, British police continued to prosecute those who placed personals until the late 1960s, when ads became part of the burgeoning youth counterculture.
Meanwhile, a new technology was emerging. In 1965, a team of Harvard undergrads created Operation Match, the world's first computer dating service. For $3, users could answer questionnaires and receive a list of potential matches, a process that is still used by many dating sites.
1990s-2000s: Second Wave of Mainstream
The explosion of the Internet in the mid-to-late 1990s created a new context for personals, and by the end of the decade, they had become relatively acceptable. Even before the Web itself, bulletin boards and newsgroups hosted a variety of ways people could use technology to meet others with similar interests, including dating. Services such as America Online, Prodigy and eventually Craigslist offered chat rooms, forums and online classifieds of use to singles. By the time Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan AOL'd each other in You've Got Mail, it had become clear that the Internet was going to change every aspect of our lives forever -- including love and romance. Match.com was founded in 1995, and by 2007, online dating had become the second highest online industry for paid content. (....Can you guess what's #1?)
2010 - Today
By 2010, different dating sites existed for virtually every city, sexual orientation, religion, race and almost every hobby, making it easier to find exactly what we're looking for and harder to stumble on someone who exists outside our pre-defined bubbles of identity.
In 2002, Wired Magazine predicted, 'Twenty years from now, the idea that someone looking for love won't look for it online will be silly, akin to skipping the card catalog to instead wander the stacks because 'the right books are found only by accident.'
Online dating is the new norm for introductions, replacing the role of traditional personals and in many cases, merging with the functions of social media. If we are going to improve the way people meet one another, we're going to have to do so by questioning the existing paradigms of online dating and figuring out how to do it better.
One thing is certain: the tenacity with which human beings will seek each other out with any tool available is inspiring. Ultimately, we use the technology of online dating because we crave connection and that desire alone timeless and connects us always.
Our human ancestors were roaming Earth as far back as 6 million years ago, but what is the earliest site containing archaeological evidence of their existence?
It turns out, there are two spots — one in Kenya and the other in Ethiopia — that are considered the top candidates for world's oldest archaeological sites, according to about a dozen scholars, all with expertise in prehistoric archaeology and anthropology, who spoke with Live Science.
The question of what is the oldest archaeological site in the world is 'a topic that has since recently divided the archaeological community,' Yonatan Sahle, a senior lecturer of archaeology at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, told Live Science in an email.
Related: The 25 most mysterious archaeological finds on Earth
The first site, called Lomekwi 3, holds bones of hominins as well as stone artifacts and is located on a low hill in West Turkana, Kenya. In a study published in 2015 in the journal Nature, researchers reported that, by dating the sediment where the artifacts were found, they estimated the age of the site to be about 3.3 million years. The finds 'mark a new beginning to the known archaeological record,' a team of scientists wrote in the journal article. The tools were likely created by Australopithecus afarensis, a hominin (human ancestors and their relatives) that thrived in the region at the time.
The site is located in a wooded area on a small hill not far from Lake Turkana. It's possible that Australopithecus afarensis was using the stone artifacts to break open nuts the team wrote in the paper. The number of people who lived at the site at any given time is not clear.
'Lomekwi 3 is the oldest known archaeological site in the world,' Jason Lewis, assistant director of the Turkana Basin Institute and a co-author of the paper, told Live Science in an email.
Jeremy DeSilva, an associate professor of anthropology at Dartmouth College who was not involved in the study, agreed that Lomekwi 3 is the oldest known archaeological site, but he noted that not all scholars agree. 'Lomekwi is controversial, and some of our colleagues remain unconvinced of the antiquity of these tools,' DeSilva told Live Science.
Indeed, a number of recent papers 'call into question the status of the artifacts at Lomekwi 3, arguing that some of the artifacts were not actually found in a context where the age of the artifacts can be certain,' David Braun, an anthropology professor at The George Washington University, told Live Science. In other words, the artifacts may not date to the same time as the sediment that it was found in.
Sahle is one of those archaeologists. 'For many of us — myself included — unequivocal evidence for the oldest archaeological occurrences comes in the form of 2.6-million-year-old stone tools from Gona,' which is located by the Kada Gona river in Afar, Ethiopia, Sahle said. The dating results for Lomekwi 3 are contested, he noted, and he has serious doubts that the remains found at that site date back 3.3 million years.
The research at Lomekwi 3 was published relatively recently, whereas research at Gona has been published over several decades and has withstood academic scrutiny, Sahle said. 'Inferences made on the chronological and behavioral context of [the] Gona archaeological assemblages derive from decades of research and have, therefore, withstood the test of time,' Sahle said.
The stone tools at Gona may have been made by Australopithecus garhi, a human ancestor that lived in east Africa around 2.5 million years ago. Fossils of the species have been found near stone tools and they may have been one of the first human ancestors to make sophisticated stone tools Smithsonian's Human Origins project website notes.
'The Lomekwi claims were not adequately demonstrated when announced, and there has [been] no new evidence provided, despite several well-considered criticisms of the original Nature announcement,' said Tim White, co-director of the Human Evolution Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. White agrees that Gona has the best unequivocal evidence for being the oldest archaeological site.
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On the other hand, some scholars are supportive of the idea that Lomekwi is older than Gona. Rick Potts, director of the Smithsonian's Human Origins Program, is convinced that Lomekwi 3 'is the oldest site with solid evidence of stone-on-stone percussion,' meaning that it's the oldest site that has stone artifacts made by human ancestors. He noted that the stone artifacts at Lomekwi 3 appear different from those found at Gona; they are cruder and may not have been used as tools at all. The stone artifacts at Lomekwi 3 'show awkward fracturing of the rocks, including large, thick, irregularly shaped flakes that could have been the accidental byproducts of pounding — for what purpose, no one currently knows,' Potts wrote in an email, noting that people at Lomekwi 3 may not have been creating tools but rather pounding rocks together for unknown reasons. Even if the Lomekwi 3 artifacts weren't used as tools, they would still be considered artifacts created by humans.
Brian Villmoare, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Nevada, told Live Science, 'I do tend to think that Australopithecus afarensis could have made stone tools,' but he noted that he has not examined the Lomekwi 3 artifacts.
A third candidate?
Braun said that if future fieldwork cannot alleviate concerns about the dating of Lomekwi 3, his second choice for the oldest archaeological site would be Ledi-Geraru in Afar, Ethiopia, which dates back about 2.8 million years.
At Ledi-Geraru, researchers found a partial hominin mandible with teeth, and they dated it by examining the age of the surrounding sediment, they reported in the journal Science in 2015.
Oldest Dating Site In The World 2020
Sahle expressed doubts about the dating of this site, saying that it may be considerably younger than 2.8 million years and that Gona is the site with the best unequivocal evidence.
Regardless of which of these archaeological sites is the oldest, all of them make the Giza pyramids (which are about 4,500 years old) and Stonehenge (which is roughly 5,000 years old) relatively young by comparison.
World Dating Site For Free
Originally published on Live Science.