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Comment by lll-o-lll | Hacker News Reader

Cool! I was unaware there were non-human primates that made and used stone tools. Sucks for the archaeologists of course, but I get the impression that theirs is a profession where you must constantly revise in light of new evidence.

Now, if it turns out that ancient DNA is all bunk, I’ll be very sad indeed. Understanding the origins of the human primates is so interesting, but maybe we will never have enough good data to be confident of much. There are limits to what we can figure out, but that’s never stopped anyone from telling a good story!

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I wonder if monkey archeology will have artefacts described as being ‘for ritual use’?

Landfills become "ceremonial mounds" filled with trinkets and household necessities for the afterlife.

The site at Onkalo is still a mistery. One might suspect that the barrels are some kind of Sarkophagus. Surely a mighty warrior king was burried here with his troops

I assume landfills have been much rarer in past times.

Ex-archaeologist here. You are correct, less people less trash, but you might be surprised.

Archaeological landfills are called middens[0], and they're more like trash heaps than landfills, but there's a lot of them around the world.

A quick primer from dig it Scotland on middens: https://www.digitscotland.com/a-load-of-old-rubbish-what-mid...

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midden

I’d assumed that a large part of it was that things were broadly biodegradable. Bone and pottery seems to be found, but a lot has rotted away.

Near me there are a lot of middens and it’s just shells now, presumably from nearby Maori pa sites.

I am no expert, but I have always joked that instead of the Stone Age, it probably should be called the Wood Age. There were probably some awesome wooden structures or techniques that have been now lost to the ages because they are no longer around.

Good point, bearing in mind that working wood with only stone and wooden tools is a lot harder than with metals

Working, well, anything we're still going to see traces of would've been even harder harder with only stone and wooden tools than it would be to work wood. It seems pretty reasonable to guess that if we see a culture with stonework and pottery and access to wood, they probably also did stuff with the wood that hasn't survived. (We can then look for evidence, like tools that seems like they they make the most sense to be using for woodwork.)

I'm not sure if it's correct, but I remember a tv show about archeology in East Asia, and they claimed that the problem is that they made too many tools of bamboo (that decompose) instead of tools of stone (that is forever).

Not picking on you, more on this kind if comment.

I think it is easy to be snide about fields like archaeology when you come from a field of absolutisms and proofs, but what else are they supposed to do with gaps in knowledge? We don't have to approach CS work wondering if the 1s and 0s we found were naturally occurring, or put there by some level of intelligent being. Our field in entirely of human construction.

The extension of this attitude leads to situations where Talib is berating a Classics professor for there being 'no data to back up her claim'! As if we can't study anything without data, or we should ignore history until there is something for a mathematician to work with on it.

Perhaps we should poke fun at the physicists who talk about 'dark matter' in the same way.

What a boring world it would be without shifting knowledge of the known and unknown.

On the other hand "I don't know" is a valid, and (should be) an acceptable answer.

'ritual use' is code for, I don't have a clue what practical use this thing could have.

This isn't about known v unknown, it's about being intellectually honest and admitting the unknown.

I can’t know is what’s lacking from the zeitgeist. Too many people say I don’t know which implies they can. No, often it is can’t know.

Really?

What is the meaning of life? Where did the universe come from?

Some of the most interesting questions are unanswerable / don't have a correct answer.

In the field of archaeology there generally isn't the absolute 'can't know' though. Until the Rosetta stone came along we didn't know what various hieroglyphs meant. But the hypothetical existence, however remote of another Rosetta stone means we can know the answer to these various questions.

"I can't know" is good shorthand for "this cannot be known with precision, given available information."

Good scientists discuss and, when possible, quantify uncertainty.

Is it good shorthand? Seems as flawed as hypothecating ritual use.

Again if you don't know something, just say you don't know. If something can't be known, hypothecate, fine, but be honest about your ability to know.

Good scientists should surely be precise and intellectually honest at minimum.

Yes, it's good shorthand.

> But the hypothetical existence, however remote of another Rosetta stone means we can know the answer to these various questions.

Partially flawed logic here aside, a Rosetta stone needs to be qualified in this case. We most likely (almost definitely) cannot know whether these tools at these sites were made and used by hominins or monkeys without time travel, as the sites themselves have been processed and additional discoveries likely eliminated as a result of the destruction of the sites. A Rosetta stone in this setting would be a recorded observation by hominins that lived in the time of themselves making and using these tools at every site that is at question, made in a format we could interpret, because anything else leaves open the possibility that at least one of them, and thus many other sites, were made by monkeys.

Recovering this Rosetta stone, or its equivalent, is so unlikely that can’t is the better answer.

I disagree that it's flawed logic.

It is possible to know, we just don't. You for example are presupposing that no technology will come along that will eg allow us to detect fingerprints, or tooth marks in bones or nuts found nearby. You're also presupposing that no new sites will come to light.

If anyone postulated the existence of the Rosetta stone before it's discovery, do you think anyone would have said it's existence was in any way likely?

It’s flawed logic because you are collapsing the idea that you can imagine it with the idea that it can happen. Whether or not it can happen is unknowable, i.e. can’t be known, which is the point you were refuting.

I gave 2 concrete examples. Are both of those impossible?

> Whether or not it can happen is unknowable, i.e. can’t be known, which is the point you were refuting.

If I play the lottery, it is unknowable whether I will ever win, it can't be known. That doesn't mean I will never win the lottery. The possibility of me winning the lottery is independent of possibility of me knowing whether I'm going to win. Which is kind of the point.

But eventually I might win the lottery, and the unknowable question of whether I will win the lottery will have a concrete answer. So by definition, it was never unknowable to start with!

But you can't know something you've never personally experienced. You're collapsing that which you can experience with that which you can't and assuming that because there are things unknown that are possible to experience they are the same as things that are unknown that you can't experience. That's a very different type of knowing.

It is certainly more accurate to say that one may believe in something to be true, but one can't know.

I was personally amused by the GP’s joke about the absurdity of there being any bright lines between different hominid species.

And I was also amused by your quip about the laziness of the dark matter explanation for gravity we don’t understand.

IMHO there is a place for humor here as long as it’s on topic.

Just my 2c.

I liked the joke, but I had to pick on one of the several similar comments... and picked this one

Honestly, I feel like "ritual use" makes for a good placeholder. Cliché is better than creativity, in this instance.

Everyone knows "ritual objects" means stuff without known/obvious use. We know that people's stuff is often hard to explain, with context. This captures it.

Also, a lot of what people do is ritual. We may not see our culture this way, but it's often a good description.

What's a credit card signature? What's a baseball trophy, fidget spinner or star ears figurine?

> Everyone knows "ritual objects" means stuff without known/obvious use

How to distinguish between "for ritual use (for real)" vs. "for ritual use (nudge, nudge, wink wink)"?

Why not say "we don't know yet", instead? Like a normal person.

Because we don’t know if anything from archeology is “for ritual use (for real).” Sometimes people just do odd stuff because it’s cool. Mount Rushmore should make you wonder about giant ancient statues.

In 10,000 years people might be looking a remnants of Christ the Redeemer statue and think it’s clearly for ritual use. But we know it isn’t for ‘ritual use (for real)’ so someone making such an obvious leap would be wrong, thus making other such seemingly obvious leaps could just as easily be wrong.

I would think that Christ the Redeemer would be a good example of something that is largely for ritual use

What specific rituals would you you say it was built for?

Christian deity worship

I understand your point, but that’s not a specific ritual.

Sacramental wine is created for a specific ritual, houses of warship are made for many rituals but it’s easy to pick one of them as an example. But you can’t point to a specific example here because that’s not what it was built for.

To be clear people have weddings for example at all kinds of interesting buildings, but only some of them where built for that reason. This might seem trivial but it is a meaningful distinction otherwise essentially anything interesting becomes a ritual object.

I do see your point too; it could very much be argued that it’s not for ritual use per se, but it’s debatable, and not a good example of something that’s certainly not for ritual use, which is how the commenter was using it

> we don’t know if anything from archeology is “for ritual use (for real).”

I apologize for being unable resist thinking of a counterexample any time someone makes a generalization. Would household utensils found in a sealed burial chamber be a clear case of ritual use for real, or did dead people in ancient times put them to some practical use we haven't identified?

I do think people getting buried in clothing qualifies as ritualistic when the body was presented for an open casket funeral.

However, people still regularly get buried with their wedding rings or similar such items. Do you consider that behavior ritualistic, or just sentimental?

> Do you consider that behavior ritualistic, or just sentimental?

If you squint a little is a bit of overlap in the definitions of those words. I think that’s where the practice lies.

Sentimental: A: marked or governed by feeling, sensibility, or emotional idealism

B: resulting from feeling rather than reason or thought

Ritual: 1: the established form for a ceremony specifically : the order of words prescribed for a religious ceremony

2A: ritual observance specifically : a system of rites

B: a ceremonial act or action

C: an act or series of acts regularly repeated in a set precise manner

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary

That’s fair.

I can’t help but point out that “if you squint a little” is grounds for a great deal of debate. It’s exactly the kind of thinking that makes some sort of “ritual object (for real)” hard to distinguish even when actually living in the culture in question.

Touché!

Mount Rushmore is a good example.

Ancestral leaders, mythical heroes, apocryphal stories. When we describe the cult of a dead Pharaoh of living roman emperor, we're quite comfortable using terms like "cult," "rite," and such. When describing contemporary culture, we call it a political monument, a cultural heritage symbol or a national monument. To future archeology, it's all the same. Washington can be described in the same terms Nefertiti and the reverse. Visitors to the statue are pilgrims. Events taking place there are "performed rites."

It's not wrong describe constitutional judges as a priests endowed with mysterious abilities to commune with spirits of the past to gain knowledge of constitutional mystery. These rites are not that different from the oracle of Delphi.

Why/how isn't Christ the Redeemer a "ritual object." It's a statue of a god worshipped extensively by the people who live in Rio. It has artistic, religious & cultural meaning. Every day, millions of people cross themselves, say prayers, take mass or perform other christian rites. Why is Christ the Redeemer different to the Sphinx or Jupiter?

You can replace "ritual object" with "cultural object."

If we want to use cultural object then sure but saying ritual object implies something.

Suggesting the Kaaba in Mecca is the same category of thing as a giant ball of yarn roadside attraction misses a great deal of context.

Similarly the Supreme Court isn’t really different than any other aspect of government. They have their rituals, but the court had no problem adapting to COVID restrictions and having everyone work remotely.

I once read a great article on HN which I now can't find, which linked Skinner's superstitious pigeons with the development of human technology.

As told by this article, the Burke and Wills expedition in Australia encountered friendly aboriginals who shared with them a grain called nardoo which they ritually prepared. The preparation was convoluted, with many steps which seemed superfluous. After relations broke down, the party attempted to prepare and consume the nardoo as they had observed but quickly succumbed to illness and death.

It turns out that nardoo is extremely toxic without being processed in a very specific way. To Burke and Wills this process looked like a religious ritual. Perhaps many of the steps in the preparation were pointless, but the superstition of the aboriginals in doing it exactly this way was vital because a small change in the process could lead to illness.

We definitely still see this sort of superstition in Western cooking today, Adam Ragusea does a lot of fun mythbusting in this area.

Similar to theories on why Judaism forbids eating shellfish and pork, potentially pointing to a history of death from spoiled shellfish and pork, thus leading to a religious doctrine to avoid them.

People, including knowledgeable physicists and astronomers talk about about dark matter all the time, and with good reason. Let's make theories but be upfront about their shortcomings, especially if they're funny.

> what else are they supposed to do with gaps in knowledge?

Not saying anything about it, or saying "I don't know what that's about" sound like OK choices to me.

Having been in a position where I would maintain archaic software, I can tell you there certainly are gaps in knowledge in CS as well.

> We don't have to approach CS work wondering if the 1s and 0s we found were naturally occurring, or put there by some level of intelligent being. Our field in entirely of human construction.

Well, in hardware engineering and on the lower levels of software you may well have to keep it in mind:

https://community.hiveeyes.org/t/soft-errors-caused-by-singl...

But looks like this, as of now anyway, only applies to new world species and thus sites in the South American continent and not Africa or Asia.

It's been known for awhile that modern humans aren't the only tool users. Neanderthals and other archaic humans are straightforward examples, but western chimpanzees also do it pretty frequently. Even outside the apes, macaques are known to use stone tools for foraging and sexual gratification.

Lots outside primates, too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_use_by_animals

Birds, dolphin, octopuses, otters...

Sure and I guess Neanderthal tools would have produced similar tool shapes to those produced by historical humans.

What this paper is saying is that S.Am. primates may be responsible for primitive tools previously associated/attributed with/to humans (due to how they look/characteristics) in some South American sites but this aspect casts some doubt on the origin of those sites and thus affects chronological occupation of the continent by people.

Modern humans (homo sapiens) are ~200,000 years old. Tool use goes back ~2.5 million years.

These days, homo sapiens is more like 300-350 ky old, and (Lomekwian) tool industry is 3.4 My old :

https://tauromachy.wordpress.com/2018/07/05/the-lomekwi-tool...

Which puts into question the naming of homo habilis (="handy man", that 2.5 My old Oldowan tool industry you seem to mention comes from) and australopithecus (responsible for Lomekwian) as "not-homo".

Tool use is of course much older (other primates) and other animals also do it : dolphins, crows...

Can this capuchin-monkey example be called "tool industry" ?

Who wrote that? They seem clear that they have no expertise.

https://tauromachy.wordpress.com/2018/06/06/a-kind-of-introd...

Lou Keep.

Also known for :

https://loukeep.substack.com/p/vagaries

But especially :

https://samzdat.com/

They might not have expertise, but they know how to write. And (from my own, admittedly layman's searches) I haven't seen anything contradicting the main claims.

> They might not have expertise, but they know how to write.

That describes the sophists (by the modern meaning), those who can communicate persuasively but are liars. I'd much rather have the opposite.

No, it doesn't : to be able to lie you need to have expertise. You can bullshit though. Or, and so far this is my impression here, you can also take the expertise of others and present it better (that's what the best science journalists do !)

Question for any archaeologists or zoologists. Do seagulls using the coastal rocks to break open oysters and clams by dropping them from the air qualify as using tools? If not, what is this type of activity considered?

IIRC that should count as using tools, but that's still a step away from making tools.

Are nests tools for child-rearing? Or is that making furniture without the use of tools?

Beavers make dams and build lodges. Bees build hives and have division of labor… at dome point we have to declare a cutoff.

Sure, I just think it's interesting, and that surely you do need to think about why you're interested in whether an animal 'makes' or uses 'tools' to know where that cut-off should be, otherwise it's a bit arbitrary and self-fulfilling ('only humans and some apes use tools' ... 'where tool is defined as a manufactured object held in the hand'!) isn't it?

IIRC, Bees build their hives with their own secretions. I see this as categorically different than animals that make nests out of various items laying around. In the case of a beaver I think it is more advanced than a birds nest because they actually harvest specific trees instead of using what’s on the ground already.

That's a good question (I think, I'm not one of those either) - it's about as close as they could possibly come with the body parts available, so if we're interested in the intelligence and ability to reason about using things to do other things ('tools') then surely it is.

Surely it's possible for an animal even to know its limitations, and desire to do something outside of them. Like I might think 'if only I could fly up and fix my gutter', say.

> but I get the impression that theirs is a profession where you must constantly revise in light of new evidence

We call it “science”.

I think the difference being that in for example maths, once something is proven, that’s it. but very little is so concrete in archaeology, and even when something can be said confidently, new evidence can come to light and change those norms

Mathematics is not a science. Every science has the potential for what you describe, perhaps more or less depending on its sparsity of data. The sparsity of data in archaeology is extremely high.

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