Archaeologists discover oldest wooden structure

Surely stone tools have demonstrated perpendicular attributes. It’s not too far of a stretch to imagine a Palaeolithic hunter aligning an axe head against a handle in a way that made it even on either side.

Naturally occuring cubic crystal systems might beat it by a few million years wouldn't they?

plants frequently come out of the ground and go straight up. things fall straight down, which is why bipedal humans stand straight up. our bilateral symmetry (arms out!) is at right angles to our bifocal vision, and we have people to our right and to our left. birds' beaks and dogs' muzzles are a vector notation from their bodies. various types of axeheads affixed to axehandles... I'm not saying the discovery is not amazing, nor that you're wrong, this could be the first. Just saying that right angles are going to come pretty quickly after the discovery of angles.

There are millions of mineral and rock formations around the world with 90 degree angles. A tree/flower stem/etc and the ground form a 90 degree angle. A branch coming straight out of a tree trunk (common in pines, or some other evergreen) makes a right angle. A vine or spanish moss dangling from a branch makes a right angle. Two logs or branches that fall on each other in the forest serendipitously form a right angle. An arm, leg, etc sticking out of an animal with arms forms a right angle when extended. Water running down from two different points on a hill toward a central point could easily join as a right angle.

I'm pretty sure right angles existed before this log.

Just arrange two branches in a bonfire. Most humans will tend to create a 90 degree angle.

As any other animals, we are brain wired to recognize symmetry. Is our main way to find a desirable mate with good genetics or to detect a predator ambushed so is essential in our survival.

Not sure how you can surmise that. The earliest human-made tools are from 2.6 million years ago. You think nothing starting from then to this wood house had a deliberately constructed right angle?

Bismuth!

They do not have extraordinary evidence, but they believe that the claim is not extra-ordinary.

Where do you find 470,000 year old wood that isn't petrified?

> How do they know the wood was used 476,000 years ago, as opposed to a human 6000 years ago finding and using some 470,000 year old wood?

Seems absurdly unlikely—is there a reason to suspect this is the case? Even if you were to find half-a-million-year-old wood why would you use it to build a structure?

I had the same question but the article said that the wood would have rotted by then. Makes sense since even lumber will dry rot in years if not taken care of. So I can buy the idea that it’s very old because it was preserved in an accidentally special way.

I’m just wondering if it being submerged in water would have affected any readings or measurements they made since who knows what hundreds of thousands of years or even thousands of years might do to the things they are measuring.

This is the usual way of dating buried archaeological finds - you work out when the thing was buried by studying the surrounding material. In this case the specific dating technique is new, but the principle is well established. If you find something buried in material that was laid down 470,000 years ago, then the thing was buried at that time. Assuming teleportation doesn't exist, how else could the artefacts get there? The only other option I can think of is deliberate burial and I imagine archaeologists would already have considered that idea.

As to finding and using extremely old wood - wood does not survive that long except in cases of very specific environmental conditions like this one; surely another reason to expect that the wood has lain undisturbed for its entire history, rather than having been dug up and turned into some structure a few thousand years ago (then buried again).

Depending on the soil (they seem to have rather colorful soil there), you will see disturbances of any kind because refilling a hole will show different colors. The newer the dig is, the clearer the line between undisturbed and disturbed parts, i.e. it "washes out" over time. That is how for example you can figure out locations of house posts despite the wood not being there at all, or finding out that an old grave has been partially robbed in olden times.

Which also means it was not really about making sure you have old wood in old soil, but to determine the age of the wood itself by dating how long ago the sand surrounding it was exposed to sunlight (as they had to make a dig or disturb the soil at that point of time).

I was wondering instead what their dating method would do with old sand that had been dug up and quickly buried during the construction. Does a very short exposure to sun reset the mineral signature they are looking at? If not, then the structure could be much newer then the last time the sand spent an extended time in the sun. In fact, if the sand digging and moving happened in the evening to avoid the heat of the sun then the sand may have been dug up and used while never being exposed to the sun.

> How do they know the wood was used 476,000 years ago, as opposed to a human 6000 years ago finding and using some 470,000 year old wood?

Surely we have not fallen this far away from nature as a species? Wood rots.

IMO you're just being facetious about the find.

It could have been a long time before dinosaurs, and/or limited geographically in areas where the geological activity over tens of millions of years would make finding traces of them even more rare than average.

Iron artefacts are likely to last much better than wood ones, so if that was so we'd likely have much evidence collected.

We have found many ancient civilizations with a technology on par with the Iron Age. They’re called Iron Age civilizations.

We find many dinosaur fossils because there were so many dinosaurs over so long of a time. The actual events that lead to a dead dinosaur fossilizing and then having it be in a place we find it all these years later is astoundingly rare, and speaks to the scale of numbers we are working here when we find these fossils. There were probably orders of magnitude less humans over orders of magnitude smaller amounts of time in question here than say, dinosaur finds. Then you have the issue of early humans generally settling in places that are poor for long term preservation, like along shifting coastlines. The fact we find so many hominid remains in places like caves isn't really because that's where people spent a lot of time, but that these people were all over the environment and of all the places for their remains to end up, in the cave is a good place for it to not only survive the elements but to be found by spelunkers in modern times. Most people probably died and left evidence of their life in places exposed to the elements or to time.

The Bronze Age. I think the best entry for that is via the "Late Bronze Age collapse" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse), which gives you an indication of how networked things were back then already. That includes trade of amber: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber_Road

Parts of The Grand Canyon took 40 times longer to be carved out by a river.

There are chopping marks and striations that show the notches were worked with tools. It’s only two logs so I can’t jump to structure but it’s wood that was worked to lock together for some purpose. Maybe structure is meant in the more general sense?

You do know that this paper is published in Nature, right? Unless you're an archeologist with a credible track record I doubt that you have the expertise to effectively argue that this is find is not credible.

Just because you find something hard to believe, does not mean it isn't true.

> Considering beavers make wooden structures for their own benefit and survival

It's more like they have a compulsion to stack wood where they hear running water. The implication here is intention and a cognizance of purpose, which is not unheard of in the animal kingdom but is fairly rare.

Maybe this one of many half a million year old wooden beaver structures, given that they build in water.

I find it completely unsurprising. Many animal species construct shelters/nests using available materials such as sticks, leaves, mud, etc. Humans are smart, so they do it more creatively, but no doubt our less-intelligent ancestors constructed shelters of some sort.

And statistically, considering how easy wood decomposes, the fact that we find one means there was probably a lot of worked wood.

That the "Stone Age" should better be called the "Wood Age" is an adage that has been used so often over the years that it has lost its appeal for me. Here, for example, is a summary of a paper from 1985 that argues this case: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/016093...

The crazy stuff he says is not the stuff about civilization going back further than conventional models. There are numerous archeologists who argue that and their positions are usually considered outside the mainstream but not insane.

Hancock says a lot of other things that are actually crazy, and like many people he’s gotten much worse lately.

It should be evident that, with effort, the date of all firsts (and lasts) will continue to approach (but probably never reach) the date of The Oldest (or Newest) Artifact We Can Plausibly Find.

It doesn't take genius, intellectual courage, or prescience to expect this to continue.

There's certainly room for theorizing about what we may find and where, but archaeologists should in some fundamental way be more limited by proof than their imaginations.

Aside: I'd love to see the citation for "They called him crazy for thinking that the Egyptians had structures 12,000 years ago", as I'm a bit flummoxed by who's stupid enough to get any further out over their skis than "we don't have any evidence for that."

One thing Hancock is undeniably right about; "Stuff keeps getting older"

Well he also thinks that Egyptians used Sonic energy of their chants to build the pyramids.

Hancock is a charlatan of the worst kind, in that I firmly believe he fully knows the vast majority of what he says is utter bullshit, but he keeps on saying it because it's garnering him a ton of money and attention. "They" (rightly, mind you) call him crazy for claiming the pyramids are 12000 years old, despite huge volumes of verifiable evidence strongly refuting such claims (Literally 100s of carbon dates from organic materials in mortar remnants between blocks, stratigraphy, lexical references like the Merer texts, etc.), and despite the lack of single shred of credible evidence for any of his claims other than his typical "This rock here looks like that rock on the other side of the world so the pyramids are 12000 years old and Atlantis is real" nonsense.

Combretum zeyheri

I think a raft would still be considered a structure or at least more than just used for fire or spears. It's a purpose-build device that was constructed to achieve a problem. I don't think what it is matters more than it was built in the first place to solve a problem. Those logs look too big for a raft though