Prehistoric stone tools indicate ancient humans shared knowledge | Hacker News Reader

Prehistoric stone tools indicate ancient humans shared knowledge

theguardian.com

48 pointsdiodorus14 comments

For some reason the Guardian's link to the original study doesn't work. This does:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-12677-5

I've only managed to skim it so far, but it seems like there was a lot of effort to compare the similarities of the shapes of the artifacts which were collected over large areas. What I didn't see was anything beyond correlation. In my very simplistic view, I wonder how much of the shape is driven by the size of a person's hand holding the rough stone to be shaped, and the structure of the rock and how easily it cleaves while still holding a useful edge.

With cooking, there are small circular dough things stuffed with some filling all over the world (pierogis, gyoza, etc). I don't see this as some sort of massive social phenomenon. It's something that is relatively easy to invent independently. Somehow someone decides that they want to grind up a grain, and make a dough. Rolling that dough into a ball is something that any 5 year old will do with Playdoh with no prompting. Then flattening that into a circle is pretty natural. The leap to adding a filling, folding it in half and then cooking it somehow is not that great.

Basically the authors concede that everyone makes these stone gyoza, but claim that the reduced variation in the tool within this region means increased communication of tool-making is associated with this era of increased tool-production.

The data seem to bear this out, but they do not really address differences in materials or differences in morphology of the user.

Arguably valid reasons for ignoring both of these are given,

1) that in a limited view material has little impact and material was not selected for within populations who could have traded or traveled for similar materials, and

2) (this may have just been implicit) these are repeatedly indicated to be backed tools. This means they were designed to be mounted in a carrier tool (typically wood or bone that did not survive to present day). Like a safety razor blade, you don’t hold it in your hands.

The last sentence in the article explains that they compared the tools to others collected from Australia, which must have been used for similar purposes, and found much more variation between African and Australian than between African tools from different places.

I.e., this is not a question of convergent evolution. There is more than one way to skin a cat or thylacine. What we see here is path dependence. Tools were made a certain way because one's father, grandfather, and great-grandfather made them that way and reproduced successfully, and not because that was the only way to make such a tool. And, people who had previously made tools differently, or did without, adopted these, and maybe abandoned others. Maybe these were superior, or maybe people using them had more social cachet, prompting emulation; either way, the design was learned, so communicated.

People who spent a lifetime using these things probably knew a thing or two about technique for a variety of that are impossible for us to rediscover without going all in reliving exclusive dependence on those tools for generations. How would this knowledge not spread? Imitating others isn't exactly something that was only discovered recently. Try to make a child not imitate...

If there is tool similarity spread over wide distances, it just means that some of those techniques must have had a very compelling efficiency advantage over other approaches that would be served better by a different shape.

I'm sort of fascinated by the estimate that walking would be at a pace of 20 km a day, because a modern human can maintain about 25 km a day indefinitely without an inordinate amount of training (worst part will be conditioning your feet) so this is either an incredibly sophisticated and well reasoned or incredibly arbitrary estimate and I wish I knew which. (It is possible too that it comes down to shoes, legends of Kenyan marathon training notwithstanding.)

Probably about food and water more than anything physical. You'll need a few hours a day to gather/hunt/prepare. Then, humans in groups move slower the larger the group gets unless very well trained and equipped.

> Because the people across southern Africa all chose to make the tools look the same, it indicates they must have been socially connected, said Amy Way, the project’s lead archaeologist, from the Australian Museum and the University of Sydney.

Peoples hands are also pretty much all shaped shaped alike. Even if there is no communication, people are going to shape stone tools a certain way to optimize using it with your hands. Given the simplify of the tools, I think assuming that must have been in communication is pushing beyond the evidence.

If it was simply convergent evolution of technique you'd expect to keep finding similar tools across even longer spans of times and regions, well into the bronze age or something, right? You'd expect "rediscovery" of the tool in Europe, the Americas, etc.

(Edited)

This tool was as close to ubiquitous as tools get. Within the paper it is mentioned the tool existed for 50k years or better, and they compare this population from southern African with one spatially and temporally removed in Australia.

This type of tool was not held in a hand, but mounted in a carrier.

That was addressed in TFA, if you (bother to) read to the end.

They compared the tools to Australian tools. Australian hands are like African hands, but the tool designs differ.

No mention of what the tool does. Anyone know?

Cutting, scraping, and drilling, when mounted in a handle.

It specializes in two functions:

- looking exactly like some random rock to a layperson

- messing with the mind of a 21st century paleontologist or anthropologist

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