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.
> 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.
Just edited to add two paper citations for the phytoliths and microwear studies. Have fun! It’s a deep rabbit hole largely ignored by popsci publications so there’s lots to explore.
I don’t read popsci but if you’re interested in a rigorous treatment I’d recommend The Human Career by Klein which has the broad overview and The Human Past edited by Scarre which is more of a textbook.
I mostly just read the papers as they are published but I’ve heard good things about those two books (they’re on my reading list but I haven’t read enough to form an opinion)
Use of fire considerably pre-dates H. sapiens, with anthropological evidence dating to 1.7 -- 2 million years ago. Sapiens diverged from common ancestors about 600,000 years ago.
"We" (Homo sapiens) did not invent fire. Our predecessor species were already using it.
Firestarting is harder to pin down and may be within the scope of homo evolution.
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.
Way back when I was in high school doing history (Money for Nothing was on heavy rotation on the radio and Bob from Stranger Things was still Mikey from the Goonies), our teacher explained that there was evidence of stone tools being used by early hominids, then nothing much except maybe fragments of rock that may have been used as hammers or axe heads, and then into an era where simple bronze tools emerged. What archeologists believed, she said, was that people went from "big chunk of rock" to "small delicate bit of rock tied with strips of animal hide to a stick" to "big chunk of metal", and the wood and animal hide had simply rotted away. There would be this whole lost chunk of technology.
And she told us that would likely happen again, there would be a gap where our technology proved to be insufficiently durable to last throughout history. Unsurprisingly not everyone in the class thought this was likely, but I figured it was possible.
Anyway, I could go on about the archeology of tech all night, but I've got to figure out how to get the photos off this Kodak DC25 camera card. Something about a DLL from the original installer that you wrap in a Linux library? Can't remember.
> And she told us that would likely happen again, there would be a gap where our technology proved to be insufficiently durable to last throughout history. Unsurprisingly not everyone in the class thought this was likely, but I figured it was possible.
I heard that fear being muttered mostly about everything going digital and that's much harder for archaeologists to dig up than paper or stone tablets.
However, that's all nonsense, of course: the stuff that people bother to write down is seldom all that interesting. Who cares about who was king or whatever? The real juicy bits are all in our garbage dumps, and we are producing garbage that'll last much longer than anything the ancients could muster. What with all our metal, glass, plastic etc.
> 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.)
I honestly have no clue what word you used was 'charged'. Considering any of those words charged makes me worry how far political correctness has gone! (I'm assuming, I suppose, politically charged?)
The worst part of reading this thread is I know I won't be able to google image anything interesting related to "non-human hominids" :( Your comment was oddly depressing lol. Real "are we the baddies?" moment this morning.
> won't be able to google image anything interesting related to "non-human hominids"
We were a large family [1].
> Real "are we the baddies?" moment
We were animals. We acted in accordance with our natures. Wolves and chimpanzees aren’t baddies any more than bees or hyenas. Nature is brutal.
Today, however, we are more than our natures. We have the capacity to criticize it when it arises in ways we disapprove of. In a certain sense, humans have a unique capacity to reduce suffering in a way without precedent in Earth’s natural history.
That's kinda ridiculous to think we're not animals anymore, our nature is to use intellect for survival (and though we know we can reduce suffering further we choose not to).
Your argument, written here and As far as I understand it at the moment, goes along with the other argument that everything is a simulation, or that everything that we do is preordained based upon physics. All mindbenders.
I want to believe that I have the ability to make an educated decision when faced e.g. with impulses to suppress or oppress others, I do know that I can consider ramifications and benefits outside of those which directly impact me.
So, perhaps it's better to say, we can be unanimal like rather than simply not animal, at all? What do you think?
I see what you mean by being able to consider the worth of harming something for your own gain. But doesn't this apply to all animals? If a bear was hungry I'm sure they would happily eat you, but they would probably think twice if they weren't. Same for early humans, it's just we have our technologies (which our intellectual nature has enabled) now to prop us up and not have to really think about survival.
The main thing I'm curious to hear your thoughts on is what are we if not animals? Gods? That's surely completely relative, like an anteater to an ant.
> Your argument, written here and As far as I understand it at the moment, goes along with the other argument that everything is a simulation,
What?
This isn't a mindbender. You're just drawing lines.
Edit: I slightly misread your comment as advocating that we're not animals. However, whether one describes us as not animals or able to be "unanimal like" is still a matter of drawing lines.
As equal to their ability to cause it. It’s this dichotomy that makes us, human. We have the power of destruction, the power of criticism, the power of nurturing, and the power to advance. We are amazing animals.
You might say we have eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge but not the tree of wisdom. So although we can act against our base nature we don’t always.
humans have a unique capacity to reduce suffering in a way
With low cost to our wellbeing as well. Which I think is the main point. Our advances in logistical transportation and food production allow us to be kinder and more plentiful than ever before. Unfortunately we see "instinctual" echoes of past strife seemingly arise from minor inconveniences (those ppl do something that annoys me).
Another way of looking at it is that humans (and apparently our close brethren) are tribal, don't give up fighting easily, and can generationally hold grudges.
Invaders of days gone by knew that even the young kids would grow up to "avenge their people", so to avoid problems (violence/killing against their tribe) in 10-15 years, it's better to just totally erase the population.
Of course we are the baddies. That’s the narrative every time people need to defend terrible behavior lead by sociopaths: but that’s just human nature. Very practical fallback.
I think this is part of the reason humans are so stupid during any sort of divisions where "sides" emerge. To be able to do commit this genocide, you need a very ugly "switch" in your head that can make your actions justifiable/right. I think this switch is the same, emotional, unthinking one that makes some people so religion about teams sports, phone OS, political alignment, etc.
Related, I think this is also the mechanism for how religion tends to stabilize societies/give them cohesion. Rather than having an eventual positive feedback loop of division, the division is placed between some type of "good" and "evil" rather than your neighbor. The "us vs them" division that switch craves is put on something more metaphysical (and sometimes a net benefit, like defining evil as behavior destructive to societies).
And lions. And banded mongooses. And meerkats. And ants. Lots and lots of ant species - they’re actually by far the worst, following colony pheromones to the end of the earth just to get a single ant. Ants that aren’t genocidal to their own species tend to be some of the worst invasive species (like Argentinian ant supercolonies).
I love me some Jane Goodall as much as the next guy but that hypothesis is not taken seriously by primatologists and using the word “genocidal” in this context would get you laughed out of the room. Lethal intergroup aggression, coalitionary killing, and raiding are all different aspects of violent behavior in animals and hominins are far from unique in demonstrating them.
Sometimes when I think about this it makes me wonder if we should take the dark forest hypothesis seriously (re: Fermi paradox).
Not only are we the only species to reach this kind of technology but among humans the first group to reach space was the Nazis. Today the innovation in that area seems driven by militaristic states and by people who seem ideologically adjacent. In other words it’s driven by very aggressive territorial members of one of the most aggressive territorial species.
We can’t generalize from one example of evolution, but if this is indicative of a common pattern then there might be some scary MFs out there. Our radio signals have been spreading for a while, so for all we know something is on its way to cleanse the universe of all forms of life that offend its god (or whatever its genocidal rationalizations is).
If this is true then we die. There is zero chance of resisting something with the technology to travel the stars and perhaps a million years or more head start on us. We’d probably never even see it coming or know what happened.
I had this thought when I saw the ideological turn (or mask removal) of certain people in the space industry. I found it metaphysically disturbing. Again… if there is other advanced life and if this is the pattern of how you evolve to become spacefaring, then we are doomed.
Given enough time of human survival, the only species left on this planet will be ones that are aesthetically pleasing to us
Everything selectively bred due to environmental or artificial pressures to have big eyes, big heads, high vocal sounds, attributes of human babies
It is very strange and an aberration amongst species, one being tolerating other beings because of their entertainment value and the joy they give from looking at them, but seems to be consistent and validate what's happened over eons of homo sapien propagation
Animals being tasty is a trait we heavily select for. I don't think chickens have any of the traits you describe but they're certainly not at risk of extinction.
Every part is unsubstantiated. For starters, for the vast majority of H. Sapiens existence on earth--from 300,000 years ago to about 45,000 years ago, we shared the world with 4 or 5 other hominids that we know about. (Neanderthal, Denisoven, H. Luzonensis, H. Floresiensis, and still perhaps a few H. Erectus, and no doubt even more we haven't found yet.)
That's 250,000 years of coexistence. We know that we sheboinked with at least two other species, probably more, because we still carry their genes to this day. So much so that it couldn't have been just a sheboink or two; we sheboinked over extended periods of time, i.e. we formed families with Neanderthals and Denisovens.
We have no evidence of warfare between the species. I.E. We have found no Neanderthal skull with an arrowhead in it, for example. Besides the fact that we are the only ones left, I don't see any substantiation at all.
It is a mystery why they are not still here. But the last 50,000 years, since the end of the last Ice Age, has been very hard on human species, for some reason. We are the only humans left, what every got them might get us too if we let it.
> We have no evidence of warfare between the species.
Thats not correct.
We have a neanderthal slain by spear, at a time and place where it was only carried by modern humans. [0]
This isn't a singular event. We have a history on injuries consistent with war, on both sides.
Yes, we "sheboinked". We also took women as prizes of war and raped them. As humanity has continued to do for most of their history.
Sure, the story is probably more complex. Some tribes at war, others at trade. Some who intermingle, and others who raged. That's... Just history of a people. That's normal.
But we absolutely have a history of war between the species.
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?
The first identified tools were 3.3 million years ago, which is before the homo genus emerges. Thus, those were either by Australopithecus afarensis or by a yet unidentified hominid species -- they were still very likely our ancestors (but technically TBD).
Then around 2-2.5 million years ago you get the first homo species in the genus homo such as Homo habilis and they created the Oldowan tool culture.
Both Australopithecus afarensis and Homo habilis are our ancestors -- however they are also the ancestors of other homo lines that diverged from us that we are not descendents of (which are now extinct).
People often forget how widespread and varied the Homo genus was before all our cousin species went extinct (likely in part due to us).[1] Homo erectus colonized the entire old world very effectively 1.5 million years ago!
I believe the evidence is animal bones that show marks from butchery, as well as actual sharpened stone flakes and other things found primarily in what is now Kenya: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lomekwi
Last I knew, the 3.3 mya evidence from the site Lomekwi 3 in Kenya was debatable, though a serious possibility, and the 2.58 mya evidence from the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania was considered the sure thing.
Also, more than primates use tools: Many corvids (crows, ravens, etc.) do, as do other animals. Look up New Caledonian Crows in particular.
But don't take all this from HN commenters debating each other; find some authoritative sources. A recent review article in a scientific journal would be a great start. Google Scholar lets you search for review articles.
That's a difficult distinction to make - at which point does tool selection differ from modification for use as a tool - any animal that strips the leaves off a twig in order to use it as a tool has manufactured the tool.
The people of the Olduvan industry from 2.58 mya tools (the earliest accepted by consensus [0]) manufactured their tools - that's exactly what archaeologists are talking about.
Chimps and New Caledonian Crows (and maybe some other animals) also manufacture their tools, at least sometimes, BTW. IIRC the crows strip sticks and bend them into hooks to grab at objects.
Why would someone imply otherwise if they don't know? What are people trying to prove in this discussion?
[0] There's strong evidence of 3.3 mya; see other comments.
Not sure what you are asking. My point was that animals using objects as tools is a different thing than the Oldowan stone tool manufacturing “industry”. I wasn’t saying that tool manufacture is exclusive to primates. However, pointing out mere tool use by non-primates is sort of beside the point of the TFA topic, IMO.
> My point was that animals using objects as tools is a different thing than the Oldowan stone tool manufacturing “industry”.
Agreed, though the dividing line is tricky.
(Your prior comment didn't say 95% of that; for example, it doesn't mention animals. Because the parent comments were focused on human ancestors, that's what I thought you were addressing.)
I think the whole interest in tool making is we're looking for clues to intelligence and tools are just one of the few things they left behind. It's much less satisfying to discover an animal's tool making is an instinctual behavior like burrowing animals making their own holes to sleep in, than that they worked it out using more generalized thinking.
In terms of tools by homonins, there is a roughly ~3million year history of stone tool use by various species, and the main thing preventing that date from being pushed further back is the difficulty in discerning between stones that have been shaped intentionally and those shaped by natural forces.
Our last common ancestor with our closest non-human primates (Pan genus) diverged about 6-8 million years ago, so what constitutes “human” is murky and I don’t think archaeologists give the matter much thought. “Human” means homo sapiens, “archaic human” means a few subspecies like neanderthals up to about 600 kYA, and the rest are just “hominins”.
We have both observational and archaeological evidence of tool use in chimpanzees, macaques, and capuchins so it’s a pretty widespread behavior. I think the archaeological evidence for monkeys only goes back about four thousand years but thats because we havent studied the issue as much in archaeology.
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].
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).
Thanks for these sources. Archeology definitely is a big known unknown for me, so even getting started reading basic info about this is rough. I appreciate the links and terms.
This youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/stefanmilo has a lot of good stuff. I don't know enough to know where he's right or wrong, but provides entry points for to looking more into it.
I have gone down a couple rabbit holes based on his videos and while it seems like he's occasionally gotten some facts wrong or misunderstood an argument, I'm pretty confident he's doing a decent job accurately representing the archaeology.
Awesome. I've watched plenty of Miniminuteman (Milo Rossi) videos, but his tend to be more pop-sci/debunking outrageous claims and less foundationally educational. I'll check this channel out too.
Wait hang on, would they "control" file by finding natural sources (volcano, lightning strike wildfire, etc.) and then make use of that source for controlled sources of light/heat/etc? I guess I've always thought of "control" of fire including the intentional starting thereof.
> Wait hang on, would they "control" file by finding natural sources (volcano, lightning strike wildfire, etc.) and then make use of that source for controlled sources of light/heat/etc?
Pretty much. Being able to transfer/build a fire is a lot easier than starting one. Fire starting requires bow/flint&steel and a lot of patience. Control basically means using simple torches to transfer fire from one place to another (where the initial source is either lightning/wildfire or embers of a previous fire).
Some very recently published research (Dec 2025) claims evidence of fire starting among homo neanderthalensis. This would push back fire starting know-how (not only control) from 50k to 400k years ago. Cool stuff!
There's pretty strong evidence that the use of fire to cook food is what enabled modern humans, with their short (and relatively fragile) digestive systems and giant energy hungry brains to evolve. Cooking food makes more calories bio-available in food and also reduced the amount of energy the body needs to expend on that food to harvest calories... so there's more energy available for thinking (etc).
That’s a complicated question. The Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa where we found the first evidence of controlled fire also contained burned plant remains and bones, which could be interpreted as evidence of cooking. There were also burned fish remains found at the Gesher Benot Ya’aqov site in Israel, dated to about 780 kYA, which could also be interpreted as evidence of cooking.
By far the strongest evidence is the Qesem Cave in Israel, which had a central hearth and so many burned animal remains that it couldn’t have been accidental. Unfortunately the dating on that is controversial and the error bar is huge at 300 +- 100 kYA (200,000-400,000 years ago).
I had thought (perhaps wrongly) that our brains got a massive "boost" in capacity when our ancestors moved to coastal areas and the diet was dominated by (Omega 3 heavy) shellfish and crustaceans.
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.
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.
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.
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!
No, but I do think it more likely they got a more accurate world history class somewhere along the line. I was taught creationism thanks to the conservatism nature of my family and the area I grew up in. It took a long while to know and accept the world (and universe) is as old as it is.
I'm relearning a lot of stuff I was told visiting natural history museums as a kid reading this thread and the linked articles. I doubt I'm the only person in this forum who had a couple of educated parents who wanted their kids to learn more than what is taught in basic public k-12 curriculum.
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.
Well, most cattle aren't given much to stimulate them, and they're bred for meat production and complacency. People aren't exactly looking to make the life of cattle fun or enjoyable.
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.
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
> 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 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.
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
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.
It would be quite fascinating to see what kind of structure we could produce if we decided to make the longest lasting cement structures we could create with modern technology, and assuming minimal maintenance over the lifetime of the building. A one-and-done kind of structure.
I bet we could do fairly well. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of years. We've learned a lot about how to form exceptionally long lasting cement. We just choose not to do it that way, most of the time.
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.
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
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.
Yeah, that was me. I threw the link into archive.is to check if it had a snapshot, but it just created a shanpshot of the 503 before I could figure out how to cancel it.
It gets wilder, all of the finds mentioned so far are stuff I have heard of, then there are the intentional burials from millions of years agoby a tiny hominum in SA, deap in a
cave complex that requires extream cave crawling to get into, and also from SA, there is strong evidence for the manufacture of red pigment @400kyr ago.
And if you like, you can wander around certain sea sides and pick, little tiny dino trackways that have fallen out of the cliff,
:)
> then there are the intentional burials from millions of years agoby a tiny hominum in SA, deap in a cave complex that requires extream cave crawling to get into
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...
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.
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:
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.
Because life is short and we have to prioritize the talks we watch. And if you've seen enough bullshit, you can smell it coming. So if someone gives strong signals that they're full of it, we don't bother.
Because charismatic people can make us believe just about anything, and if we think we're immune to that we just haven't met the right charismatic person. I like to do some searching when something jumps out at me, like his book name, to get some background before I invest more time into the topic.
The self professed skeptic community is pretty extreme. Their arguments so often go beyond occams razor that is essentially absurdism to get around anything non-material or unexplained by current science / thinking.
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.
>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.
I like how the word “overwhelming” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
You've worked in those settings, and you think archaeologists reject tool use older than 1 mya?
Also, you don't understand that science is a process, based on evidence, and revision is an essential part of that process? Archaeology especially advances regularly, because evidence can be relatively very rare. If they weren't revising it, it would mean the whole research enterprise - to expand knowledge - was failing.
> 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?
I don't know, how many times? Tool use is universally believed, in the field, to have begun at least 2.58 million years ago, and with strong evidence for 3.3 mya. Tens of thousands of years isn't in the debate. See this subthread:
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.
> 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).
The accepted age of the Oldowan (Mode I) tool industry is almost three million years. That’s been accepted by mainstream archaeology for almost a hundred years.
The widely accepted age of woodworking - aka the construction of wood tools - is at least 1.5 million years. Again this is mainstream archaeology. None of this has been suppressed by anyone.
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!
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