430,000 years? Am I reading this headline correctly? (since the site seems to have fallen victim to the HN-hug-of-death). That seems wildly further back than I understood humans to have tools, or even homo sapiens to have existed.
ETA: Today I learned I had a much much larger gap in knowledge than I thought I did. Thanks to everyone for the information and links!
Tools predate homo sapiens (which emerged about 300 kYA) by millions of years. The first stone industry - Oldowan - is at least two million years old and might be as old as three million. They predate what we call “archaic humans” by a long time.
Even this evidence of woodworking is largely unremarkable. We’ve got phytolith [1] and microwear [2] studies showing unambiguous evidence of woodworking going back at least 1.5 million years. Wood tools just don’t survive very long, so this find is most notable for its preservation.
That's wild! Thanks for sharing. I didn't realize these things went so far back. So are you saying these were straight up non-human primates using tools? Or is this all traceable to our lineage?
> Tools predate homo sapiens (which emerged about 300 kYA)
I’m going to use a charged word because Jane Goodall used it.
Goodall asserted that humans and chimpanzees (and wolves) are unique among animals in that we have a genocidal tendency [1]. When a group attacks us (or has “land and resources” we want) we don’t just chase them off. We exterminate them. We expend great resources to track them down to ensure they cannot threaten us.
One reading of pre-history is that we had a number of hominids that were fine sharing the world, and humans, who were not. (I’ve seen the uncanny valley hypothesised as a human response to non-human hominids, as well as other humans carrying transmissible disfiguring diseases.)
The submission's subheading seems to imply that there was a gap where homo* emerged but weren't using tools then though? I can't read the article or copy-paste it due to pay wall, but it says something along the lines of the find suggesting our human ancestors were using tools longer ago than we thought.
> Even this evidence of woodworking is largely unremarkable .... this find is most notable for its preservation.
This somewhat contradicts the subheading, no?
> The finding, along with the discovery of a 500,000-year-old hammer made of bone, indicates that our human ancestors were making tools even earlier than archaeologists thought.
As others mentioned, tool use wasn't restricted to homo sapiens. I think this makes sense, no? We didn't spontaneously use tools, it must have evolved incrementally in some way.
I think we see shades of this today. Bearded Capuchin monkeys chain a complex series of tasks and use tools to break nuts. From a brief documentary clip I saw [0], they first take the nut and strip away the outer layer of skin, leave it dry out in the sun for a week, then find a large soft-ish rock as the anvil with a heavier smaller rock to break open the nut. So they had to not only figure out that nuts need to be pre-shelled and dried, but that they needed a softer rock for the anvil and harder rock for the hammer. They also need at least some type of bipedal ability to carry the rock in the first place and use it as a hammer.
Apparently some white-faced Capuchins have figured out that they can soak nuts in water to soften it before hammering it open [1].
No, we could have had something which other previous species didn't that unlocked the use of tools. Otherwise if no species could be the first, or it would be deemed spontaneous, no new skills could be unlocked.
You might be old enough to have been taught that Humans are tool-using apes. That's tragically incomplete: lots of apes use tools. Birds use tools. And now, cows use tools!
I was homeschooled in a particular conservative area. Much of what I have been taught was... woefully inadequate, we'll say. Lots of my learning has come in university and afterwards, so what I've picked up is pretty obviously incomplete and leaves me with many unknown unknowns in this area. Today has begun filling in many of those gaps so they get to be known unknowns now!
Honestly I would have expected a pig or horse to be discovered to use tools, rather than a cow. Cattle are generally... not thought of as particularly intelligent.
Yes it's definitely further back than homo sapiens have existed (200k - 300k years), but our ancestor species were known to have used tools and control fire. I believe we have evidence of tool use going back 1 million years. So this article is referencing the oldest known _wooden_ tools, which are obviously much less likely to be preserved across the ages.
We have 3.3 million year old stone tools https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14464. They're very simple (even more so than the Oldowan stone tools https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldowan) and basically just look like rocks, but there is clear evidence of intentional shaping by hominins (somewhere in the fuzzy late Australopthis/early homo transition).
We have evidence that non Homo sapiens bipeds (e.g., Neanderthals, Homo habilis) used tools far before we came onto the scene. A long lineage of hominin species came before humans!
And even today, our species' cousins (Chimps) are rudimentary tool users. Recently saw a documentary where they evolved their 'tools' to get honey from a 1-stick approach to a 3-stick approach.
The original link when I commented was to archeologymag.com -- it was later updated to NYTimes because of the hug of death that went on for multiple hours on archeologymag
It depends how loosely you want to define "tool". Certain other primates, birds etc use very primitive tools out in the wild. More sophisticated ones, with multiple parts etc turn up much later in the record.
This isn't a problem for evolutionary theory. It's literally a necessary prediction of it. Most recent common ancestor of humans and chimps is 5-10 million years ago. Since we have observed tool usage in modern chimps and lots of very complicated tool use in humans, the necessary prediction is that some amount of tool use goes back at least ~5-10 million years, with increased complexity roughly tracking with the continuous increase in braincase size.
I don't understand why you think it'd be an issue?
Dumbed down understanding of mine: evolutionary theory predicts that graph goes from (0.1; 0) to (very high; in a million years). X axis: years, Y axis: progress or evolution. The only difference such discoveries make is to further refine the slope of the graph. Was the development linear or exponential? How fast did it progress? Obviously, in the past 500 years we didn't change as humans but our technological progress accelerated beyond belief.
Then ... you find out that smoking was introduced to the new world in the 16th c, and indigenous North Americans didn't start using the bow & arrow ubiquitously until after the year 1000. But! Native North Americans were using copper contemporaneously with the old world.
It might be just my perception, but it seems like every single time anthropologist make statements to the effect that complex human development didn't start until XX they are proven wrong. It wouldn't bother me so much if it wasn't for the fact that those "estimates" are generally used as proof to dismiss alternative timelines for human progression. I'm certainly not trying to say the planet had Atlantis with flying cars 300,000 years ago; but it certainly seems plausible that there were large/complex societies beginning long before the advent of our current written history... an idea that is regularly dismissed as foolish.
There's bound to be a lot of vital archeological evidence of the development of humans and our cousins below the water. Past peoples probably lived near the coasts and the rising water would have obscured or destroyed a lot of the evidence of their existence. I think a lot about what must be or have been just out of reach of our current studies.
That’s rapidly changing. Underwater archaeology has been going through a mini-Renaissance in the last thirty years thanks to multibeam and side scan sonar. Now with the proliferation of underwater drones capable of high-resolution 3D photogrammetry, that is rapidly accelerating into a full blown revolution. As usual the problem is lack of funding to do excavations. There are far more known sites than there are funds to study them.
The thing I’m continually surprised by is the usage of obsidian by nearly every ancient-ish civilization. The usage of bow & arrow predates farming, insane.
Not really that insane, hunting is a much faster reward cycle than farming. On the surface, it makes sense that tools for hunting are produced earlier than tools for farming
Ancient crops were also pathetic to a modern eye. Before thousands of years of selective breeding, corn had six or seven kernels on a cob. Doubtful that it would be possible to survive on a field of wild cultivars without at least a few generations pushing towards more productive specimens.
Perhaps the key word is "wooden"? Which is not to say much older wooden tools didn't exist, but it's likely extremely rare that they would be preserved this long.
Without assuming correctness, assuming instead "risk probability" - if previous advanced civilizations have risen and fallen on Earth, after evolving here naturally - what should we do as a species to not share their fate?
edit: I am not sure backupping to 'Mars', with its lack of magnetic field, inhospitality, and necessity to live underground is a positive idea
> The finding, along with the discovery of a 500,000-year-old hammer made of bone, indicates that our human ancestors were making tools even earlier than archaeologists *thought*.
I am tired of this. No. Archeologist only claim what they have discovered. They don't speculate because they work based on evidences. Journalists should better. This wording sounds like archeologists were wrong. That only fuel the narrative that layman's opinion is more informed than professionals.
True but every science headline is misleading, loaded or exaggerated. My pet peeve "X found where it should not exist". What they mean is "scientists are pleased because there's some new evidence that is not explained by their current models and that means they get to improve their models which is the goal of science anyway, so pretty much just another day for science but glad to keep you updated"
Science works by scientist having a model of reality and then testing that model against reality, gathering evidence that fits or doesn't fit the model, evaluating how well the model corresponds to reality.
If there is a widely accepted model in the archaeological community, and the new data contradicts it, the wording "than archaeologists thought" seems plausible enough.
Of course, depending on the model, the model itself might admit regimes of "non-applicability", or have some measure of confidence... If archeologists have large uncertainty whether human ancestors made tools 500,000 years back or not, then they shouldn't be surprised upon finding evidence that the ancestors did.
I don't know any specifics about this case, just arguing that that kind of wording by itself is not always wrong by default.
I have always believed that the human evolution consensus which is usually based upon finds of advanced toolmaking in absence of culture cues, to be questionable by orders of magnitude. So it seemed natural to simply double generational concepts of the village along a trade route, from ~500kya (like the Nile) to 1 million YA as a hyperstable span of evolution of the 'trade route village'. I even wrote a book about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtxgpaXp9vA that might seem like whole fiction. But science seems not to ask, how many times might we have started over?
That's ridiculous. Scientists absolutely ask these questions. We just don't have the answers so we don't make assumptions. It is implicitly assumed there is an enormous amount of proto- and pre-human culture and technology that is undiscovered or undiscoverable. We have very long known that hominins made tools, art and structures out of organic material that has decayed beyond our ability to detect.
That's how these evolutionary scientists do read it - 'the race to find the evidence to backup our concepts of intelligent hominid behavior has achieved another breakthrough'. The journalists frame it as 'scientists are shocked again' to get more views/engagement. No doubt some 'scientists', being people, probably get taken in by the journalists framing too.
What's incredible about this too is they found it in England, which means they had to first build a boat to get there and leave the tools on the island
Ok, since I moved to the US from Europe a few years ago my perception of wood has changed a lot, especially for construction. Seeing this reinforces my view.
Wood lasts for fucking ever under the proper conditions. Old construction in Europe often only had the beams made of wood, and I always thought that was orders of magnitude more durable than wooden houses, like thousands of years vs decades. I don’t think that’s true anymore.
And this might be one of the few environmentally friendly decisions that Americans got better than Europeans, I guess. Wood is still prevalent in construction here, and as far as I know concrete and cement production are quite bad.
BTW, I’m a total ignorant about all this so just intuition and probably wrong
It's not totally a "decision" on the part of the Americans to use a lot of wood in construction. It's just that America has tons of space, including space useful for growing Douglas Fir and Southern Yellow Pine, which then can be turned in to 2x4s and other construction lumber.
Most of Europe long ago exhausted easily accessible natural forest resources, and where it's not densely populated tends to prefer using land to do other stuff (like grow food). Hence, stone and concrete and similar materials in European construction.
While some lumber production happens in the United States, most lumber is imported from Canada. That's because while the USA does have good tracts of land on which lumber is grown, Canada has much, much more. This is why you see "Made in Canada" stamped on quite a lot of plywood and plenty of timer used in residential construction.
The part that I don't quite know how to make sense of is why Canadian producers seem to have a near monopoly on sandpaper products.
Modern concrete construction uses iron rebar liberally. That means every concrete structure built today will crack and crumble in a few hundred years at most, as the iron absorbs oxygen, it swells from the rust. Which is a shame, roman concrete buildings without rebar will still be standing 1000s of years from now.
Roman construction was also much less efficient because they had no material (besides wood) capable of carrying load in tension. Rebar allows us to make cheap practical structures that are impossible with just concrete - roman style or not.
There are wooden framed houses built in the UK now, particularly in Scotland. The problem with a lot of American houses is the piss poor insulation which leads to energy usage 2-3x that of equivalent European houses. Maybe that's changing now.
A big problem with houses is we never rebuild. It's kind of crazy. We replace almost everything else eventually, including commercial buildings. Skyscrapers only last a few decades. But we expect houses to last forever. But they're only getting older. Is it possible to strip a wood building right back to the frame and start again?
There's no intrinsic reason balloon-framed housing has to be poorly insulated, and properly-insulated (and wrapped) balloon-framed construction is actually far better insulated than the "well-insulated" thick-walled structures based on stone, packed earth, brick, etc., which traditional half-timbered or masonry structures offer.
There is of course a large stock of extant housing which pre-dates best-standards insulation practices, though much of this can be improved dramatically at relatively low cost, especially by improving siding ("wrapping") and insulating attics. Thicker walls (nominal 2x6 rather than 2x4, or greater) can also be retrofit, either extending the exterior or interior wall dimension, though at considerably greater cost, and with trade-offs to either exterior or interior dimensions (lot size, environment, or reduced interior volume).
You have to balance that with how shitty all-wood construction makes it to live in cities near other people, and the toll paid by the environment by people choosing to live in suburbs (and drive ICE vehicles) over living in cities.
I don't think so, have you read 'The Bonobo and the atheist'? Humans are not the only ones using tools and in reality there isn't much difference between humans and animals. The conclusion I get from the book is that the only difference is religion. Although, I have a feeling that humans do have a more developed intellect (problem solving) but this was not explored in the book.
I actually saw the website, pictures of the tools and text and everything before it gave me the database error message. It would have been totally fine.
maybe the trump administration can learn something from these tools to offset the 10k STEM PhDs that have resigned and moved onto to greener pastures...
There is archaeological evidence of tools going back even further, potentially over a million years, but it's ignored for the usual reasons of dogma and not conveniently fitting into the paradigm of the current priestly class. I'd highly recommend this talk Michael Cremo (author of "Forbidden Archaeology") gave for this "Authors at Google" program in 2014:
> There is archaeological evidence of tools going back even further, potentially over a million years, but it's ignored for the usual reasons of dogma and not conveniently fitting into the paradigm of the current priestly class.
? I don't think you can find anyone in archaeology who says tool use began less than 1 million years ago (mya). Maybe you mean something else?
The univeral consensus in archaeology says tools emerged either 3.3 mya, which is still subject to debate last I knew, and certainly by 2.58 mya - the Odowan industry famously discovered by the Leakeys in the Oldovai Gorge in Tanzania, in 1969.
The same consensus continues with the development of the more advanced Acheulean industry ~1.76 mya, which dominated until ~ 400,000 years ago (arguably the most successful technology ever).
It instantly destroys all credibility. Any serious theory would present itself on its own merits rather than going for the victimhood angle. When you title your book in such a way as to push the perceived victimhood to the forefront, it indicates that there is no convincing evidence and therefore the only option left to you is to play at the conspiracy angle, cursing the shadowy figures who are suppressing the "forbidden truth".
Why not just watch the talk and hear his argument from himself?
Wikipedia has a bias against everything outside of mainstream academia, there are activist groups like Guerrilla Skeptics that go through articles and rewrite them to undermine anything remotely fringe. It's not as objective as people like to think it is.
I'm not the person you asked this of, but I've worked in museums and research settings and can lob a response your way.
Ultimately, it's that scientists are humans, too. Despite some of them really making their research data-forward, things like tenure, career, funding, and even who would publish your work now and in the future all create normal human environments that reward small, incremental changes to a body of knowledge that don't upset the apple cart, not discoveries that suggest huge changes. In fact, large changes and discoveries can be resisted and denied further research in favor of the status quo.
This is not a new phenomenon by any means:
Both warm-blooded dinosaurs and the Chicxulub impact were both theories dismissed as fringe for decades before overwhelming evidence led to them being accepted as likely. In no small way thanks to Jurassic Park.
Recall that eugenics and phrenology both used to be widely accepted scientific "fact."
100 fairly prominent scientists signed a letter stating emphatically that Einstein's Theory of Relatively was categorically wrong and should be retracted.
Plate tectonics was seen as fanciful crackpot musings for decades. The author of the original theory died 30 years before plate tectonics was even considered possible.
Germ theory was dismissed for most of Louis Pasteur's lifetime, despite being able to literally show people yeast in a microscope.
Helicentrism has a storied past.
Quantum theory was also denied heavily at first. Now it saves photos to our hard drives.
And how many times has the earliest dates of hominids and tool use and human thresholds of development been pushed back by tens of thousands of years?
This is not an exhaustive list, by any means.
So we have ancient examples and modern ones - and everything in between. So the level of education or scientific progress or equipment are not the cause. Humans are. Humans do this all the time. So until overwhelming evidence surfaces, which can take decades or longer, claims like this shouldn't be dismissed out of hand until proven solidly in error. A theory is a theory, so let it be a theory.
It took about 30 years for every geologist to reach consensus on tectonic plates and continental drift. Old heads who'd invested a lot of their credibility arguing against it had a lot to lose by admitting they were wrong, so they refused to do it.
Bill Bryson's book A Short History of Nearly Everything is where I'm taking that from. It's a great read and shows all the ways in which scientists failed to see what was under their nose for decades before finally figuring out, which makes one wonder what's currently ripe for the picking.
I think it just doesn't fit into the accepted timeline so it's mostly ignored. This is a common pattern with scientific discovery where evidence that contradicts the prevailing paradigm is ignored and builds up until it can no longer be ignored and causes a paradigm shift. This idea comes from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn.
430,000 years? Am I reading this headline correctly? (since the site seems to have fallen victim to the HN-hug-of-death). That seems wildly further back than I understood humans to have tools, or even homo sapiens to have existed.
ETA: Today I learned I had a much much larger gap in knowledge than I thought I did. Thanks to everyone for the information and links!
Tools predate homo sapiens (which emerged about 300 kYA) by millions of years. The first stone industry - Oldowan - is at least two million years old and might be as old as three million. They predate what we call “archaic humans” by a long time.
Even this evidence of woodworking is largely unremarkable. We’ve got phytolith [1] and microwear [2] studies showing unambiguous evidence of woodworking going back at least 1.5 million years. Wood tools just don’t survive very long, so this find is most notable for its preservation.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...
Well, today I learned something! Thanks for the information, I guess I know which rabbit hole I'm going down today.
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But the article says "our human ancestors" which implies they are not talking about other hominins."
Edit: Okay I just found that Human can also refer to other hominids
from: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/human
- a bipedal primate mammal (Homo sapiens) : a person
- broadly : hominid
That's wild! Thanks for sharing. I didn't realize these things went so far back. So are you saying these were straight up non-human primates using tools? Or is this all traceable to our lineage?
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> Tools predate homo sapiens (which emerged about 300 kYA)
I’m going to use a charged word because Jane Goodall used it.
Goodall asserted that humans and chimpanzees (and wolves) are unique among animals in that we have a genocidal tendency [1]. When a group attacks us (or has “land and resources” we want) we don’t just chase them off. We exterminate them. We expend great resources to track them down to ensure they cannot threaten us.
One reading of pre-history is that we had a number of hominids that were fine sharing the world, and humans, who were not. (I’ve seen the uncanny valley hypothesised as a human response to non-human hominids, as well as other humans carrying transmissible disfiguring diseases.)
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/06/does-...
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The submission's subheading seems to imply that there was a gap where homo* emerged but weren't using tools then though? I can't read the article or copy-paste it due to pay wall, but it says something along the lines of the find suggesting our human ancestors were using tools longer ago than we thought.
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> Even this evidence of woodworking is largely unremarkable .... this find is most notable for its preservation.
This somewhat contradicts the subheading, no?
> The finding, along with the discovery of a 500,000-year-old hammer made of bone, indicates that our human ancestors were making tools even earlier than archaeologists thought.
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I've felt for a long time that the field relies rather a bit too hard on absence of evidence being evidence of absence.
It’s so cool and strange to think we have examples of tools that literally predate humans.
As others mentioned, tool use wasn't restricted to homo sapiens. I think this makes sense, no? We didn't spontaneously use tools, it must have evolved incrementally in some way.
I think we see shades of this today. Bearded Capuchin monkeys chain a complex series of tasks and use tools to break nuts. From a brief documentary clip I saw [0], they first take the nut and strip away the outer layer of skin, leave it dry out in the sun for a week, then find a large soft-ish rock as the anvil with a heavier smaller rock to break open the nut. So they had to not only figure out that nuts need to be pre-shelled and dried, but that they needed a softer rock for the anvil and harder rock for the hammer. They also need at least some type of bipedal ability to carry the rock in the first place and use it as a hammer.
Apparently some white-faced Capuchins have figured out that they can soak nuts in water to soften it before hammering it open [1].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFWTXU2jE14
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7sJq2XUiy8
No, we could have had something which other previous species didn't that unlocked the use of tools. Otherwise if no species could be the first, or it would be deemed spontaneous, no new skills could be unlocked.
This process also display coordination within a group and memory. Quite impressive.
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You might be old enough to have been taught that Humans are tool-using apes. That's tragically incomplete: lots of apes use tools. Birds use tools. And now, cows use tools!
Cow tools: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj0n127y74go
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_tools
I was homeschooled in a particular conservative area. Much of what I have been taught was... woefully inadequate, we'll say. Lots of my learning has come in university and afterwards, so what I've picked up is pretty obviously incomplete and leaves me with many unknown unknowns in this area. Today has begun filling in many of those gaps so they get to be known unknowns now!
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronika_(cow) might be a better Wikipedia link.
Honestly I would have expected a pig or horse to be discovered to use tools, rather than a cow. Cattle are generally... not thought of as particularly intelligent.
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Yes it's definitely further back than homo sapiens have existed (200k - 300k years), but our ancestor species were known to have used tools and control fire. I believe we have evidence of tool use going back 1 million years. So this article is referencing the oldest known _wooden_ tools, which are obviously much less likely to be preserved across the ages.
We have 3.3 million year old stone tools https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14464. They're very simple (even more so than the Oldowan stone tools https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldowan) and basically just look like rocks, but there is clear evidence of intentional shaping by hominins (somewhere in the fuzzy late Australopthis/early homo transition).
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We have evidence of control over fire (but not fire starting) at about 1 million years. Stone tools go even further back, at least 2 million years.
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There's a 476k year old wooden structure in Zambia, and includes some tools somewhere around 3x0k years old: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalambo_structure
Fascinating stuff!
We have evidence that non Homo sapiens bipeds (e.g., Neanderthals, Homo habilis) used tools far before we came onto the scene. A long lineage of hominin species came before humans!
And even today, our species' cousins (Chimps) are rudimentary tool users. Recently saw a documentary where they evolved their 'tools' to get honey from a 1-stick approach to a 3-stick approach.
Others already clarified the confusion about your question. Just wanted to note that the HN audience is not going to hug-of-death nytimes.com.
The original link when I commented was to archeologymag.com -- it was later updated to NYTimes because of the hug of death that went on for multiple hours on archeologymag
It depends how loosely you want to define "tool". Certain other primates, birds etc use very primitive tools out in the wild. More sophisticated ones, with multiple parts etc turn up much later in the record.
It wasn’t Homo sapiens most likely. We have found stone tools made by Erectus.
The big secret: certain pools of ancient humans have been smart for alot longer than modern evolutionary theory wants to admit
This isn't a problem for evolutionary theory. It's literally a necessary prediction of it. Most recent common ancestor of humans and chimps is 5-10 million years ago. Since we have observed tool usage in modern chimps and lots of very complicated tool use in humans, the necessary prediction is that some amount of tool use goes back at least ~5-10 million years, with increased complexity roughly tracking with the continuous increase in braincase size.
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I don't understand why you think it'd be an issue?
Dumbed down understanding of mine: evolutionary theory predicts that graph goes from (0.1; 0) to (very high; in a million years). X axis: years, Y axis: progress or evolution. The only difference such discoveries make is to further refine the slope of the graph. Was the development linear or exponential? How fast did it progress? Obviously, in the past 500 years we didn't change as humans but our technological progress accelerated beyond belief.
Then ... you find out that smoking was introduced to the new world in the 16th c, and indigenous North Americans didn't start using the bow & arrow ubiquitously until after the year 1000. But! Native North Americans were using copper contemporaneously with the old world.
What if the meaning / definition of ETA when used like this?
likely "edited to add"
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It might be just my perception, but it seems like every single time anthropologist make statements to the effect that complex human development didn't start until XX they are proven wrong. It wouldn't bother me so much if it wasn't for the fact that those "estimates" are generally used as proof to dismiss alternative timelines for human progression. I'm certainly not trying to say the planet had Atlantis with flying cars 300,000 years ago; but it certainly seems plausible that there were large/complex societies beginning long before the advent of our current written history... an idea that is regularly dismissed as foolish.
There's bound to be a lot of vital archeological evidence of the development of humans and our cousins below the water. Past peoples probably lived near the coasts and the rising water would have obscured or destroyed a lot of the evidence of their existence. I think a lot about what must be or have been just out of reach of our current studies.
That’s rapidly changing. Underwater archaeology has been going through a mini-Renaissance in the last thirty years thanks to multibeam and side scan sonar. Now with the proliferation of underwater drones capable of high-resolution 3D photogrammetry, that is rapidly accelerating into a full blown revolution. As usual the problem is lack of funding to do excavations. There are far more known sites than there are funds to study them.
The thing I’m continually surprised by is the usage of obsidian by nearly every ancient-ish civilization. The usage of bow & arrow predates farming, insane.
I guess that before metal working, obsidian would have been the best knife edge available.
It's a far, far better knife edge than metal even now. It's used in some specialized scalpels. It's just fragile.
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Not really that insane, hunting is a much faster reward cycle than farming. On the surface, it makes sense that tools for hunting are produced earlier than tools for farming
Ancient crops were also pathetic to a modern eye. Before thousands of years of selective breeding, corn had six or seven kernels on a cob. Doubtful that it would be possible to survive on a field of wild cultivars without at least a few generations pushing towards more productive specimens.
https://evolution.earthathome.org/grasses/andropogoneae/maiz...
Article title is click bait.
Hominin tools that are millions of years old have already been found by archeologists.
e.g., recent news: Scientists uncover 3-million-year-old tools but they weren’t made by our ancestors: https://www.futura-sciences.com/en/scientists-uncover-3-mill...
A list of findings of earliest known hominin tools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earliest_tools
Perhaps the key word is "wooden"? Which is not to say much older wooden tools didn't exist, but it's likely extremely rare that they would be preserved this long.
Without assuming correctness, assuming instead "risk probability" - if previous advanced civilizations have risen and fallen on Earth, after evolving here naturally - what should we do as a species to not share their fate?
edit: I am not sure backupping to 'Mars', with its lack of magnetic field, inhospitality, and necessity to live underground is a positive idea
> The finding, along with the discovery of a 500,000-year-old hammer made of bone, indicates that our human ancestors were making tools even earlier than archaeologists *thought*.
I am tired of this. No. Archeologist only claim what they have discovered. They don't speculate because they work based on evidences. Journalists should better. This wording sounds like archeologists were wrong. That only fuel the narrative that layman's opinion is more informed than professionals.
True but every science headline is misleading, loaded or exaggerated. My pet peeve "X found where it should not exist". What they mean is "scientists are pleased because there's some new evidence that is not explained by their current models and that means they get to improve their models which is the goal of science anyway, so pretty much just another day for science but glad to keep you updated"
I'm not so sure if that's too wrong.
Science works by scientist having a model of reality and then testing that model against reality, gathering evidence that fits or doesn't fit the model, evaluating how well the model corresponds to reality.
If there is a widely accepted model in the archaeological community, and the new data contradicts it, the wording "than archaeologists thought" seems plausible enough.
Of course, depending on the model, the model itself might admit regimes of "non-applicability", or have some measure of confidence... If archeologists have large uncertainty whether human ancestors made tools 500,000 years back or not, then they shouldn't be surprised upon finding evidence that the ancestors did.
I don't know any specifics about this case, just arguing that that kind of wording by itself is not always wrong by default.
I have always believed that the human evolution consensus which is usually based upon finds of advanced toolmaking in absence of culture cues, to be questionable by orders of magnitude. So it seemed natural to simply double generational concepts of the village along a trade route, from ~500kya (like the Nile) to 1 million YA as a hyperstable span of evolution of the 'trade route village'. I even wrote a book about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtxgpaXp9vA that might seem like whole fiction. But science seems not to ask, how many times might we have started over?
That's ridiculous. Scientists absolutely ask these questions. We just don't have the answers so we don't make assumptions. It is implicitly assumed there is an enormous amount of proto- and pre-human culture and technology that is undiscovered or undiscoverable. We have very long known that hominins made tools, art and structures out of organic material that has decayed beyond our ability to detect.
That's how these evolutionary scientists do read it - 'the race to find the evidence to backup our concepts of intelligent hominid behavior has achieved another breakthrough'. The journalists frame it as 'scientists are shocked again' to get more views/engagement. No doubt some 'scientists', being people, probably get taken in by the journalists framing too.
What's incredible about this too is they found it in England, which means they had to first build a boat to get there and leave the tools on the island
England wasn’t always an island
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland
Estimates will continue to go earlier, and more things that were, or are, alive will be considered exceptional. Seems to be a function of looking.
Ok, since I moved to the US from Europe a few years ago my perception of wood has changed a lot, especially for construction. Seeing this reinforces my view.
Wood lasts for fucking ever under the proper conditions. Old construction in Europe often only had the beams made of wood, and I always thought that was orders of magnitude more durable than wooden houses, like thousands of years vs decades. I don’t think that’s true anymore.
And this might be one of the few environmentally friendly decisions that Americans got better than Europeans, I guess. Wood is still prevalent in construction here, and as far as I know concrete and cement production are quite bad.
BTW, I’m a total ignorant about all this so just intuition and probably wrong
It's not totally a "decision" on the part of the Americans to use a lot of wood in construction. It's just that America has tons of space, including space useful for growing Douglas Fir and Southern Yellow Pine, which then can be turned in to 2x4s and other construction lumber.
Most of Europe long ago exhausted easily accessible natural forest resources, and where it's not densely populated tends to prefer using land to do other stuff (like grow food). Hence, stone and concrete and similar materials in European construction.
While some lumber production happens in the United States, most lumber is imported from Canada. That's because while the USA does have good tracts of land on which lumber is grown, Canada has much, much more. This is why you see "Made in Canada" stamped on quite a lot of plywood and plenty of timer used in residential construction.
The part that I don't quite know how to make sense of is why Canadian producers seem to have a near monopoly on sandpaper products.
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My understanding is the UK exhausted most of its old forests in the quest to smelt enough metal for a navy. Smelting is incredibly energy intensive...
>concrete and cement production are quite bad.
Modern concrete construction uses iron rebar liberally. That means every concrete structure built today will crack and crumble in a few hundred years at most, as the iron absorbs oxygen, it swells from the rust. Which is a shame, roman concrete buildings without rebar will still be standing 1000s of years from now.
Roman construction was also much less efficient because they had no material (besides wood) capable of carrying load in tension. Rebar allows us to make cheap practical structures that are impossible with just concrete - roman style or not.
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How about petrified wood? Would that also crack and crumble in the long run?
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There are wooden framed houses built in the UK now, particularly in Scotland. The problem with a lot of American houses is the piss poor insulation which leads to energy usage 2-3x that of equivalent European houses. Maybe that's changing now.
A big problem with houses is we never rebuild. It's kind of crazy. We replace almost everything else eventually, including commercial buildings. Skyscrapers only last a few decades. But we expect houses to last forever. But they're only getting older. Is it possible to strip a wood building right back to the frame and start again?
There's no intrinsic reason balloon-framed housing has to be poorly insulated, and properly-insulated (and wrapped) balloon-framed construction is actually far better insulated than the "well-insulated" thick-walled structures based on stone, packed earth, brick, etc., which traditional half-timbered or masonry structures offer.
There is of course a large stock of extant housing which pre-dates best-standards insulation practices, though much of this can be improved dramatically at relatively low cost, especially by improving siding ("wrapping") and insulating attics. Thicker walls (nominal 2x6 rather than 2x4, or greater) can also be retrofit, either extending the exterior or interior wall dimension, though at considerably greater cost, and with trade-offs to either exterior or interior dimensions (lot size, environment, or reduced interior volume).
Northern Europe still uses wood, se have a lot of it.
You have to balance that with how shitty all-wood construction makes it to live in cities near other people, and the toll paid by the environment by people choosing to live in suburbs (and drive ICE vehicles) over living in cities.
I wonder how would we react with tools dating back to, say, 5MY ago ...
That would shake our knowledge from the foundations.
No it wouldn't, as we already think it's pretty likely. Chimpanzees use tools, so our most recent common ancestor with them, something like 6 million years ago, may well have used tools too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_use_by_non-humans, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee%E2%80%93human_last_...
I don't think so, have you read 'The Bonobo and the atheist'? Humans are not the only ones using tools and in reality there isn't much difference between humans and animals. The conclusion I get from the book is that the only difference is religion. Although, I have a feeling that humans do have a more developed intellect (problem solving) but this was not explored in the book.
5 Million years ago would be insane... but what about..
5 BILLION years ago...
we might find some, in 4,5 billion years
Sure, but did they have MCP?
Pretty sure my neighbor is using these as ground cover in her garden.
Do we know if these were formed intentionally or just happened to be in such a form and were used by those that found them?
Do we know if these were used more than once, or if they were in a convenient shape that was grabbed by a local for one time use?
How do we know that these were actually used as tools and not just pieces of wood that coincidentally in the site?
Do we have any reason to think these were used by (precursor to) humans more than ravens, beavers or any other number of animals that use tools?
Because of the paywall I could not read the whole article, but the pictures and intro leave a lot unanswered.
how do they know it was tools and not some wood some guy was munching on?
Now find the tools used by the Egyptians or the people before that lived there and made the tool markings..
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Website has problems, NYT version: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/26/science/archaeology-neand...
Thanks, we've switched to that from https://archaeologymag.com/2026/01/430000-year-old-wooden-to... and put a couple extra links in the toptext.
That is paywalled. Try https://archive.ph/mHlUT
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Website appears to be down from too much traffic
I actually saw the website, pictures of the tools and text and everything before it gave me the database error message. It would have been totally fine.
Ironically even archive.is just has the 503 page cached.
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https://imgur.com/a/1cIZVDi
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It hit the HN hug of death it seems :(
the site never loads
maybe the trump administration can learn something from these tools to offset the 10k STEM PhDs that have resigned and moved onto to greener pastures...
"well preserved tools" said the ad -> I bought some, surprisingly expensive for a hammer -> it's a mishap and inform piece of wood -> straight to dump
I can’t be the only one that saw the aforementioned tools and thought: did I misread stool?
You're the only one.
There is archaeological evidence of tools going back even further, potentially over a million years, but it's ignored for the usual reasons of dogma and not conveniently fitting into the paradigm of the current priestly class. I'd highly recommend this talk Michael Cremo (author of "Forbidden Archaeology") gave for this "Authors at Google" program in 2014:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKfGC3P9KoQ
> There is archaeological evidence of tools going back even further, potentially over a million years, but it's ignored for the usual reasons of dogma and not conveniently fitting into the paradigm of the current priestly class.
? I don't think you can find anyone in archaeology who says tool use began less than 1 million years ago (mya). Maybe you mean something else?
The univeral consensus in archaeology says tools emerged either 3.3 mya, which is still subject to debate last I knew, and certainly by 2.58 mya - the Odowan industry famously discovered by the Leakeys in the Oldovai Gorge in Tanzania, in 1969.
The same consensus continues with the development of the more advanced Acheulean industry ~1.76 mya, which dominated until ~ 400,000 years ago (arguably the most successful technology ever).
That book name is... off putting, and his wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Cremo) isn't encouraging in a quick scan...
It instantly destroys all credibility. Any serious theory would present itself on its own merits rather than going for the victimhood angle. When you title your book in such a way as to push the perceived victimhood to the forefront, it indicates that there is no convincing evidence and therefore the only option left to you is to play at the conspiracy angle, cursing the shadowy figures who are suppressing the "forbidden truth".
Why not just watch the talk and hear his argument from himself?
Wikipedia has a bias against everything outside of mainstream academia, there are activist groups like Guerrilla Skeptics that go through articles and rewrite them to undermine anything remotely fringe. It's not as objective as people like to think it is.
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why do you think would this info be surpressed?
I'm not the person you asked this of, but I've worked in museums and research settings and can lob a response your way.
Ultimately, it's that scientists are humans, too. Despite some of them really making their research data-forward, things like tenure, career, funding, and even who would publish your work now and in the future all create normal human environments that reward small, incremental changes to a body of knowledge that don't upset the apple cart, not discoveries that suggest huge changes. In fact, large changes and discoveries can be resisted and denied further research in favor of the status quo.
This is not a new phenomenon by any means:
Both warm-blooded dinosaurs and the Chicxulub impact were both theories dismissed as fringe for decades before overwhelming evidence led to them being accepted as likely. In no small way thanks to Jurassic Park.
Recall that eugenics and phrenology both used to be widely accepted scientific "fact."
100 fairly prominent scientists signed a letter stating emphatically that Einstein's Theory of Relatively was categorically wrong and should be retracted.
Plate tectonics was seen as fanciful crackpot musings for decades. The author of the original theory died 30 years before plate tectonics was even considered possible.
Germ theory was dismissed for most of Louis Pasteur's lifetime, despite being able to literally show people yeast in a microscope.
Helicentrism has a storied past.
Quantum theory was also denied heavily at first. Now it saves photos to our hard drives.
And how many times has the earliest dates of hominids and tool use and human thresholds of development been pushed back by tens of thousands of years?
This is not an exhaustive list, by any means.
So we have ancient examples and modern ones - and everything in between. So the level of education or scientific progress or equipment are not the cause. Humans are. Humans do this all the time. So until overwhelming evidence surfaces, which can take decades or longer, claims like this shouldn't be dismissed out of hand until proven solidly in error. A theory is a theory, so let it be a theory.
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It took about 30 years for every geologist to reach consensus on tectonic plates and continental drift. Old heads who'd invested a lot of their credibility arguing against it had a lot to lose by admitting they were wrong, so they refused to do it.
Bill Bryson's book A Short History of Nearly Everything is where I'm taking that from. It's a great read and shows all the ways in which scientists failed to see what was under their nose for decades before finally figuring out, which makes one wonder what's currently ripe for the picking.
I think it just doesn't fit into the accepted timeline so it's mostly ignored. This is a common pattern with scientific discovery where evidence that contradicts the prevailing paradigm is ignored and builds up until it can no longer be ignored and causes a paradigm shift. This idea comes from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn.
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"extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".
As long as there is low number of samples with such age you should always assume methodological mistakes in measurement
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> Am I taking crazy pills, or are you?
Please edit out swipes, as the site guidelines ask (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are.
Your comment would be fine without that first bit.