Mystery of two-million-year-old stone balls solved
livescience.com
livescience.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qesem_cave
The article describes how the researchers made replicas and used those to crush bones, which they did better than unshaped stones of similar size. The replicas also had marks after use similar to the original artifacts. I really like when scientists do this kind of validation.
This article taught me about ancient humans; I did not know we had such archaeological evidence from them. I had heard that anatomically modern humans have been around for 100 thousand years, so art in Lascaux caves from 17,000 years was made by people like us (just pre agriculture and civilization), but I had no idea about humans 200,000 years ago using tools.
For perspective, this cave was used (likely intermittently) by humans for 200,000 years, so 100 times the Christian Era or 40 times the span recorded history (oldest writing dating back to Egypt around 3rd millenium BC). But then it was unused, probably covered up and undiscovered for the same length of time until present.
You might be interested in Sapiens.
https://www.amazon.com/Sapiens-Humankind-Yuval-Noah-Harari/d...
Also, it’s not as if exactly 100,000 years ago, humans turned modern. It was a long drawn-out transition, and perhaps some qualities came much earlier. Which makes me wonder what archaeologists consider as modern and how they arrived at that date. I’ll have to look for the Sapiens book recommended in the other comments.
And thanks for that link, it’s really interesting. I particularly like the linked pages for John Frere and thunderstones, about how stone axes were found and considered in modern times. I find such historiography fascinating: the stone axes were thought to be from gods or fairies at first, then some early scientists started to make more rational guesses about their origin—another approach to deep time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderstone_(folklore)
And yet we lost the knowledge only 10-20,000 years ago. I find that kind of sad. I wouldn't mind learning how to make one.
Somewhat related for the Bronze Age is the Clickspeing YouTube channel where the guy create bronze-working tools by hand and then uses them to re-create the Antikythera Mechanism. It is surprisingly complex, but he is meticulous and perfectionist with incredible results. Unfortunatel, he stopped posting halfway through, so I’m not sure what happened.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_first_wri...
This is funny. As if they were just hanging around with the luxury to want to be challenged.
They didn't live very long, their lives were harsh, they were probably banging out kids at an unbelievable rate.
There's something just fantastically out of touch about your statement here. Very silver platter.
Even now, there are much more intelligent people than you or I with no time or resources for intellectual pursuits, and following that, no particular drive either.
If you're hungry and your living conditions are risky, you probably don't care about lacanian this or knot topography that. Much too busy.
> banging out kids at an unbelievable rate
That's not actually helpful. Some stats would be good. I did a quick search for number of offspring for the yanomami but found nothing.
I dunno, original poster mentioned scant nutrition being a condition for an extended effect so mayyyybe, seems like it would not be very hard to study today.
Depending on the environment, ancient people's lives didn't have to be nasty, brutish and short. Leave that to the modern overcrowded slum.
As he sat, he saw a Brazilian fisherman rowing a small boat towards the shore having caught quite few big fish. The businessman was impressed and asked the fisherman, “How long does it take you to catch so many fish?”
The fisherman replied, “Oh, just a short while.”
“Then why don’t you stay longer at sea and catch even more?” The businessman was astonished.
“This is enough to feed my whole family,” the fisherman said.
The businessman then asked, “So, what do you do for the rest of the day?”
The fisherman replied, “Well, I usually wake up early in the morning, go out to sea and catch a few fish, then go back and play with my kids. In the afternoon, I take a nap with my wife, and evening comes, I join my buddies in the village for a drink — we play guitar, sing and dance throughout the night.”
The businessman offered a suggestion to the fisherman.
“I am a PhD in business management. I could help you to become a more successful person. From now on, you should spend more time at sea and try to catch as many fish as possible. When you have saved enough money, you could buy a bigger boat and catch even more fish. Soon you will be able to afford to buy more boats, set up your own company, your own production plant for canned food and distribution network. By then, you will have moved out of this village and to Sao Paulo, where you can set up HQ to manage your other branches.”
The fisherman continues, “And after that?”
The businessman laughs heartily, “After that, you can live like a king in your own house, and when the time is right, you can go public and float your shares in the Stock Exchange, and you will be rich.”
The fisherman asks, “And after that?”
The businessman says, “After that, you can finally retire, you can move to a house by the fishing village, wake up early in the morning, catch a few fish, then return home to play with kids, have a nice afternoon nap with your wife, and when evening comes, you can join your buddies for a drink, play the guitar, sing and dance throughout the night!”
The fisherman was puzzled, “Isn’t that what I am doing now?”
And the story DID have that guy - the businessman!
I get that we have a lot of intellectual force multipliers now, so the achievement of a few propagates and impacts more than similar intellectual leaps in the, past, but given the kind of advancements we know one person is capable of making, there was remarkably little progress during all of this supposed leisure time.
More on point, if all of these intellectuals were hanging out in the amazon, bored, why didn't they come up with long term data storage like clay tablets and writing? Why didn't they write their combinatorics proofs in stone? I know you're not really saying they had combinatorics, but a few millennia of frustrated brain boxes should leave some kind of legacy, especially in the totally physical space they lived and worked in.
Since we're here, it seems that they succeeded!
You shouldn't take it to mean that -- that is not true of most people in the world today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mvt9ZZis3GY
So this is more of a simian tool than a human one.
I've seen a huge increase in such errors over the past decade, both in terms and tense. I don't know how to explain it but it is discouraging. Sometimes the errors are quite confusing until you realize what happened; this one is quite minor.
"cobble" is more frequently a verb in my experience, to "cobble something together". The dictionary does say cobblestone as a noun = cobble as a noun though. So although they seem to be equivalent I think the original objection is that in some dialects / regions it probably just flows better in a sentence? Probably another subtle british vs american english thing. (I'm american) -- edit My brit friend says it's a stone until it's in a road, then it's a cobblestone.
However, I don’t think that makes it wrong for people / other disciplines to call it a cobblestone.
A pebble is of course a small rock. Pebbledash describes the decorative finish — which is made of pebbles and other material like cement or concrete — on some physical thing. You would say “my new house has pebbledash walls” or just by itself as a shorthand where it implies an unsaid word: “the pebbledash [finish] on this property gives it a delightfully vintage feel!”
So historically speaking, cobblestone describes a type of surface finish made of cobbles, and the two words have been quite separate.
Aerial is a fun one too. An antenna has components such as bolts and fixtures and junction boxes, but most prominently it will have a wire or other metal object that is thrust into the air: that is to to say a component that is aerial, or the aerial component.
Once I learned that distinction, saying “aerial” instead of the more precise “antenna” seems very quaint, like saying “wireless” for radio or “pianoforte” for piano. It’s not exactly the same as cobbles being used in cobblestone finishes, but they are interesting examples of nouns and adjectives merging into each other.
My 1982 paper dictionary agrees with Wiki sources that you can use the word "cobble" either as a short form of cobblestone, or as a verb for paving streets with such stones.
You can also use a different word, written the same, "cobble" for a now largely obsolete trade and some related things but this document clearly has nothing to do with those so that can't be what you mean.
In Minecraft "cobble" is certainly understood to be short for cobblestone. A "cobblegen" is either an arrangement of materials (lava, water, something heat resistant) so as to cause the game to make and replace cobblestone blocks when you mine them out, so as to obtain unlimited amounts of this building material, or in modded Minecraft it's a more compact machine which makes this material, perhaps in very large quantities indeed, and maybe related materials like sand.
Note that in the US “cobblestone streets” is often used to describe what are not even cobbles but setts (square trimmed blocks) which are still found in some older US cities like Boston or Manhattan and European cities like London or Paris.
I would not consider this terminology arcane.
Possibly not only a US term, given the description here? No idea who the user who posted it is.
Aside, I (in the US) always understood "cobblestone street" to use the "roughly put together" verb meaning of "cobble". The stones aren't always shaped, such as in the image here: https://www.historicalbricks.com/the-blog/history-cobbleston...
To emphasize the original point more strongly: in the UK a road surfaced with cobbles would be described as "cobbled" not as a "cobblestone street".
> I would not consider this terminology arcane.
Quite, it's just plain English.
Wait, for nearly 2 million years ... humans? Starting and ending when? Do we have human remains from more than 2 million years ago? Turkana Boy is 1.5 million years old and close to modern physiology, once you get back to 2 million isn't it australopithicus and such?
> That changed when Assaf and her team came across a cache of 30 stone balls in Qesem Cave in Israel, where humans lived from about 400,000 to 200,000 years ago
I wonder if 2 million is a typo for 200 thousand?
> these stones "might have helped enhance human caloric intake and adaptation in the lower Paleolithic period," (2.7 million to 200,000 years ago), at Qesem Cave and possibly beyond, the researchers wrote in the study.
Whew, OK, so 2.7 million years ago is their starting point on this. That's interesting. Who was shaping stones that far back?
An interesting other site is the Cerutti Mastodon site in San Diego with 130kYBP mastodon bones possibly crushed with similar stones which were found at the site.
Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldowan
You can see in the sidebar that you can traverse the industries in time (Preceded by and Followed by links). Amazingly, these span _species_, since stone tools were in use before Homo sapiens were on the scene.
The weirdest part for me though is how flawless transmission of the techniques happened over a relatively short period of time, but (1) was so infrequent that each technique lasted for tens or hundreds of thousands of years. Yet not so infrequent that it never happened, or it only happened once.
IIRC Writing died out several times, some specialists would see the value in recording language "permanently" and embrace the invention but nobody else did, then circumstances result in this group dying out or at least being dispersed and the ability is lost again.
There are some edge cases too. The invention of radio almost doesn't make sense, because they didn't yet understand enough about electromagnetism to make anything resembling a modern radio transmitter. The "spark gap" radio transmitter invented was totally crazy (in modern terms it's basically a broadband jammer and thus illegal), but if nobody else has a radio transmitter then it's all you've got. If that technology was slightly worse (say the maximum range is a hundred times worse or getting the transmitter working is not merely tricky to learn but such an art that few can do it reliably even with practice) it wouldn't be useful and would have gone nowhere until the electromagnetic theory gets better and valves are invented.