45000 years ago in Ethiopia humans built a paint workshop; used it for millennia
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
An explanation lies in the fact that in those ancient times there was little numbers of humans, sometimes less than 20,000 (on the whole earth) so it is not surprizing they inhabited the same places over and over. They had no manpower to even build a village. That would come much later with neolithics when population will explode in numbers, but perhaps not in quality of life.
It must be jarring for a new cohort of humans to come across artifacts invented and developed by predecessor that they can't understand.
Our archival-based approach to history is a complete opposite, but I wonder if the relics of the past helped influence the future generations of ancient human.
I could imagine everything around being like them.
Also, at the point that some apocryphal Israelites left Egypt, the Giza Pyramids would have already been 1000 years old.
The "ancient world" had its own ancient world.
Also another perspective fun fact: Stonehenge is older than the Pyramids
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippian_culture
By the time Europeans penetrated to most of these areas, the cultures were nothing but legends. Only the mounds remained.
As others have pointed out your position is a modern one; the "wonders of the ancients" is a several thousand year old perspective. And in fact for a good chunk of recent European history (last couple of millennia) the prevailing view was one of declinism when compared to the Romans of the late Republic and early empire.
But we don't know if the users of this cave had that jarring experience. 4500 years is a long time but it's quite possible -- likely even -- that there was continuous use, so it was "just part of the landscape" with knowledge accreting and being passed on.
The reason I say "likely" is that presumably the color technology evolved over some period of time, and if the users died off and the cave was later rediscovered after a gap, the new discoverers would have to re-invent a bunch of the tech somewhat from scratch (although results and possibly raw materials would be right there to provide hints).
It's interesting to speculate what kind of speech and culture they might have had.
Nature has no respect for our discrete classifications.
It might still fit the hierarchy, but the delineation will be much better aligned with nature.
So, pretty good prediction.
http://www.muzarp.poznan.pl/en/exhibitions/permanent/rock-ar...
Wampatuk hill, one of the many that make up the ridges of the Blue Hills, is made entirely out of a material called rhyolite. Essentially this hill represents a portion of the lava column located within the volcano that solidified so quickly that it’s silica (or glass)- rich magma turned into a crystalline fine grained blue rock with tiny flecks of quartz. It is the natural blue color of the stones of the Blue Hills that gave the area its name, and it is this one particular type of blue stone that brought Native people from the surrounding area to Wampatuk to mine and work its natural stone. The entire area surrounding the hill consists of massive boulders and outcrops of blue hills rhyolite, each one slightly different, and each one a type of stone that I have found turned into tools that we excavate on archaeological sites throughout the area. These range from the deep blue-black stones east and south of Wampatuk to the oddly speckled material you find on Wampatuk itself. This hill was a Mecca of stone tool production.
As you walk the Sawcut Notch path along the northern boundary of the park, you will pass great dome and little dome. These two small hills are made out of Braintree slate and Massachusett hornfels. Keep an eye open for scoop-like marks in the stone where thousands of years before a Massachusett Native person was standing exactly where you are striking the slate to remove portions of it to turn into tools. Turn around and behind you will be small mounds of stone fragments.
These mounds are not natural deposits, but heaps of stone waste, each the result of stone striking stone working raw slate down to a spear preform or perhaps a stone adz. These are all viewable from the path and artifacts lie within the path itself. ...
... The natural hillside was not in fact natural, it was, and IS, a quarry of truly monumental proportions. The terraces I had walked were not simply erosional, but were in fact carved into the raw rock by Massachusett Native people quarrying stone from the hillside for thousands of years, and the mounds and pathways I had been climbing over were mountains of stone debris consisting of Millions upon millions of stone flakes each individually struck by human hands.
Link with cool descriptions and maps etc of those in Ohio. I located some on modern maps that you can still see and that havent been disturbed in a long long time.
People have been programming computers for 70.
That is a terrifying thought.
Nitpick. "The world's first known paint". Future-proof and more to my taste.