Earliest Carpenters: 476k-year-old log structure discovered in Zambia
archaeology.org
archaeology.org
To note, the supposed builders of the structure also left behind other tools that the researchers identify, not just the two logs. All that evidence after nearly half a million years is a miracle of a find.
Also, Homo heidelbergensis was the supposed builder. The wiki page has a lot of good info on these folks. One interesting point is that Homo heidelbergensis was more closely related to neanderthals than to us. We know tool use occurs in a lot of apes, so finding such evidence isn't to be all that unexpected. Still, amazing stuff and amazing work by the research team.
>All that evidence after nearly half a million years is a miracle of a find.
I really hope this doesn't turn out to be one of those too good to be true finds. I hate that the nature of academic research is making me so cynical
And never forget the two main rules of understanding scientific findings:
1) pay no attention to what media reports say about a scientific finding. Read the paper instead. The media almost never gets things right and very often completely misrepresents them.
2) One paper is the same as no paper. Don't even think about entertaining the notion that what a single paper says is actually true. Wait until there are other papers from researchers trying to reproduce results.
While not “modern humans” it’s important not to fall into the trap of thinking those who came prior to us had some degree of lesser intelligence. Truth is they probably just knew different things that were important to their lives then. Instead of knowing how to drive a car or use credit card they knew what plants to eat, how to make tools, hunt, and apparently build houses with logs.
Homo heidelbergensis is the common ancestor between modern humans and Neanderthals. They are pretty darn close to modern humans. And if you took a modern human from, say, 10,000 years ago and raised them in the modern world you’d just have a modern human. While this seems like a long way back, this subspecies probably isn’t that far from that scenario.
And recent research into Neanderthal DNA shows that there was intermingling and an ebb and flow of genetic mixing over long periods of time. I only say that to suggest that things are less linear than we were taught.
https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/genetics/ancient-dna-an....
But we know what people do.
>While not “modern humans"
This wasn't carpentry, this was a sawmill.
Not surprising given what we found in Wonderwerk Cave in the Kalahari Desert, but it is totally challenging to some people’s long held beliefs in archeology.
https://phys.org/news/2021-04-unveil-oldest-evidence-human-a...
Based on my reading of the paper about the sequenced neanderthal bone [1] and a global genetic variation study [2], the difference between neanderthals and modern humans isn't that much bigger than the natural variation within the modern human genome. That difference is much smaller (on the order of 10-40x) than the difference between modern humans and chimpanzees and given the multiple genetic bottleneck events in our evolution, I think it's much more accurate to look at all the different species of archaic humans as breeds of modern humans that happen to show a larger difference with older samples because of the limited founding population and the diversity of our ancestors (of which we have very few biased samples).
Where to draw the line in speciation is always controversial but my theory is that once tool use really got going by the second stone industry, early humans started artificially self-selecting for intelligence just like we later did with dogs and eventually the modern human "breed" was born. By the million year ago mark, roughly the time evidence of fire started showing up in the archaeological record, I think the species that is modern humans was already long spreading and out competing other apes. I think shortly after this point is when we started developing clothing and moving into the colder climates, leaving evidence at places like Atapuerca.
[1] https://sci-hub.se/https://www.nature.com/articles/nature128...
We're not used to seeing diversity in humans, as the extant population is remarkably same-ish apart from very extremely minor traits like skin colour or eyelid variations. There's quite a bit of genetic diversity within the African continent, but even there it's remarkable how well we all cluster together, genetically.
So given a fossil record where we find people without chins and broader shoulders, etc. we go crazy with the species boundaries.
But given how rare fossilization conditions are, we're only seeing a tiny fraction of what was out there anyways, so it seems remarkably bold to classify with such confidence.
The reality is that nature doesn't "care" about species. There were likely bagloads of individuals who sat on a continuum of a diversity of traits that have since disappeared because of population bottlenecks at, disease, famine, homogenization, etc.
The builders were much closer to us than to apes. We separated from great apes (chimpanzee ancestors) 7 million years ago (mya). This structure is from 0.5 mya and Homo sapiens first walked the Earth ~0.2-0.3 mya.
> While not “modern humans” it’s important not to fall into the trap of thinking those who came prior to us had some degree of lesser intelligence. Truth is they probably just knew different things that were important to their lives then.
What makes that 'truth'? Evidence: It depends on how far back you go, of course, but between ~7 million and ~2.6 mya (with some uncertain evidence from 3.3 mya), none of our ancestors figured out how to make or use tools. Around 1.8 mya we figured out Acheulean tools, which were made by finding an appropriate hand-sized rock, knocking flakes off one edge to sharpen it, and voila - a 'handaxe'. Acheulean tools, arugably the most relatively successful technology in history, dominated world-wide Homo tool market for a long time: We didn't improve on them for about 1.3 million years, when we figured out how to use make tools from the sharp flakes, and to attach the tools to hafts.
That's just one example, and it all speaks cleary to ability. More importantly, there is no evidence of ability approaching ours, afaik.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/374057808_Evidence_...
Humans tend to stick to good places until climate change forces their hand! Not even war is enough to make us migrate.
Perhaps not even an animal. I could imagine several scenarios where a perpendicular placed log could rub back and forth across another log creating a notch over time.
I guess it comes down to tool marks on the logs notched area but the whole thing is so weathered I can't imagine that evidence is crystal clear either. Its worth noting that the other tools, which the article mentions were found at the same site, are ~100k years younger.
Almost all known non-human tool use is for obtaining food, afaik.
Other primates use tools, but it's on the level of a stick stripped of leaves to poke into a termite nest (termites crawl on stick, remove stick, eat).
Avians are the other main category; some only have been observed using tools in captivty. Corvids (crows, ravens, rooks) are particularly interesting. New Caledonian Crows will actually bend the end of a tool to make a hook, good for prying out grubs from under bark. Rooks have handled some particularly complex problems in captivity.
There is no evidence of any non-human doing anything like making axes, chopping wood, and constructing something. If I understand the paper correctly, the 'axes' were 'handaxes' - archaeologist-speak for an unhafted axes, i.e., axes sans handles, i.e., effectively just the axe head which you hold in the palm of your hand. Our ancestors took > 2 million years to figure out how to attach tools to hafts, succeeding by ~200,000 years ago (but only in one place - 'the future is here, it's just not widely distributed yet'.)
> Prior to this discovery, the oldest known surviving wooden structures were built by people living in northern England around 11,000 years ago.
> "We found several other instances of people making similar statements at around the same time, indicating that this was a popular opinion at that time that was evidently shared by Albert Einstein. However, we have been unable to find a direct quote from the physicist that matches this particular meme."
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/einstein-world-war-iv-stic...
-- Voltaire
well, the clashes on the India-Chinese border in the Himalayas comes to mind...
With the look of real wood!
Roddenbury’s vision is quickly coming to life. Ship’s computer AI, pocket communicators, advanced medicine… surely some of this matters (barring the ongoing threat nuclear apocalypse, granted).
So we'd better get it right this time because it's our only chance.
A sentence I'd never thought I'd ever write, but we can actually look at the Nazis for an answer. They too had the problem that there was barely any oil available, so they turned to a recent-ish French invention - wood gas - instead [1] and scaled the technology up to hundreds of thousands of deployed units, including locomotives.
Wood is perfectly fine to kickstart a re-industrialization, it was how the original industrialization went on as well with giant steam power plants in the first place. The largest benefit of oil was that it was waaay cheaper to extract and handle than to deal with wood, and you can make plastics out of it.
A future civilization may actually have an easier path, by using either power-to-gas technology to create energy-dense fuel, or by letting plants do the job instead (biofuel). The only thing that will be really short in supply is plastics - for now, we make cheap plastics out of the byproducts of oil refineries, but in a society that doesn't have oil, they will be limited to plastics that do not require oil (e.g. PVC) as part of the supply chain.
During the past 40 years the amount of oil and natural gas remaining in known reserves:
- Was cut in half
- Stayed about the same
- More than doubled
If you answered more than doubled you’d be right.
More and more oil and natural gas reserves have been discovered and much of it in just the last 10 years (including off the coast of Gaza, go look it up).
This means they are not running out like most people think.
We need to switch to cleaner energy now, we can’t just wait for the dirty stuff to run out. But because we are constantly discovering new accessible supplies the threshold for running out keeps getting pushed further back, and we haven’t even really started to tap several suspected massive reserves in the arctic and elsewhere and Russia is rumored to be sitting on discoveries that they haven’t even announced to the world.
People wrongly think that as we use more oil and gas, the reserves will run lower. They hadn’t realized that as technology improves, it becomes more possible to find and extract fossil fuels.
To prevent the absolute worst effects of climate change, oil and gas reserves must stay in the ground. But they will never run out, just become more expensive to extract.
We just need to create alternatives that are cheap enough that extracting oil for burning and not manufacturing isn’t cost effective to do anymore.
The technology to replace fossil fuels is coming, and it’s been dropping in cost profoundly in recent years. There’s every reason to believe that we will make this transition, it’s just a question of getting better energy density with existing technologies and getting them widely deployed with less exotic materials.
When electric cars have a 2000 kilometer range and cost 1/2 of the price to refill, gas vehicles won’t stand a chance.
Have faith. Things are dire but they are far from lost. We do need to shift society, and quickly, but that only happens when the system that got us in trouble gets used to cause the transition to sustainability.
I am not a doomer so perhaps we don’t see eye to eye on things. But the idea that we are going to run out of oil anytime soon is a falsehood that’s widely perpetuated, and it means that a lot of our thinking needs to change from “before the end of oil” to “proactively change towards a defined and sustainable solution” as we won’t be forced to stop using it as it won’t run out…
>
> This means they are not running out like most people think.
You seem to be missing the point - I never said anything was running out. You seem to be arguing about our current civilization. If you imagine a future upcoming civilization (post-apocalypse, whatever), having progressed to an iron age stage, how on earth would they even discover those deposits hidden deep beneath the sea? They would have no reason to drill there in the first place.
The easy-to-extract close-to-land-surface deposits are long gone. Humanity would have to somehow progress to industrial stages without the help of fossil fuels that we've enjoyed, which seriously restricts growth. And thus we're talking about much wider timescales than what we've so far experienced.
The other reply had a very interesting idea regarding wood gas and that could be an option for a cool future cyberpunk civilization that would allow for somewhat constrained population growth (assuming balance is found and it doesn't lead to another Easter Island).
> But they will never run out, just become more expensive to extract.
You are very much correct here. It's more expensive (= complex & energy-intensive) both to extract and to discover in the first place. A future civilization wouldn't make these discoveries by chance, like we happened to discover oil. Unless we'd store a Rosetta Stone type thing for future civilizations instructing them how to do so. And even then they'd require tools that would likely not be viable without first having fossil fuels.
But maybe they'll be doing so... in outer space
I will shamelessly self-quote:
"wood looks cut in a tip and partially burnt in the other. Fire makes this notches easily when two logs overlap. Also explains the preservation of the wood, sterilized by fire (maybe minutes before a rain fell or a flood hit).
Previous discussion here:
Or is this some Quadrant sourced opinioning?
If Antikythera devices were common, with say every ship having one, every town and village temple having one, every school having one, and so on we'd have a big mystery because we don't think the Greeks had the technology for mass production of mechanisms with the necessary accuracy and precision.
But we've only found one, and we don't know how long it took to build.
The Antikythera device could be the work of one builder and his assistants over a lifetime, financed by someone very wealthy and able to supply as many slaves as the builder wanted. It could even have been built over more than one lifetime, if the sponsor was a government.
When you are not in a hurry and you have a lot of laborers you can make very precise mechanisms with little more technology than blocks of metal and hand files.
As Teller of Penn & Teller once observed, "Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect". Penn has said "The only secret of magic is that I’m willing to work harder on it than you think it’s worth".
The story there is more complex and there's a faction in Austalia that would insist that Australian aboriginals were on the decline when Europeans arrived.
We lose stuff all the time.
If we're talking about modern times, Damascus steel can be easily forged and replicated by modern hobbyist smiths.
If we're talking about being lost at some point between 0AD and, say...1900 AD, then it was probably just not economically viable to make it. Damascus steel is very labor-intensive to produce and does not offer significant structural advantages compared to regular mild or tempered steel. Certainly not in applications where most metal was used in the middle ages (hint: it was warfare).
For example, it makes no sense to make a full-plate armor or a musket out of Damascus steel. It would be mostly a status item, rather than a practical tool.
Hence when we say "lost", it likely just means people looked at it and decided it wasn't worth the time outside of niche applications. And since it was niche, there is very few historical artifacts, that make it look "lost", when in reality, there just weren't too many of these items to begin with.
Many people in Europe saw these steels and tried to recreate the effect through processing. However, they could not discover the secret, and could not make it. Though there was a demand for Damascus steel, in the 19th century it stopped being made. This steel had been produced for 11 centuries, and in just about a generation, the means of its manufacture was entirely lost. The reason it disappeared remained a mystery until just a few years ago.
As it turns out, the technique was not lost, it just stopped working. The "secret" that produced such high quality weapons was not in the technique of the swordsmiths, but rather on the composition of the material they were using. The swordsmiths got their steel ingots from India. In the 19th Century, the mining region where those ingots came from changed.
The actual paper about the impurities: https://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/9809/Verhoeven-9809.ht...
And, like I said before, it did not offer any significant structural advantages for its labor inefficiency. So "Damascus steel" is just 1 minor technique of producing a specific steel alloy, with many substitutes that had been used in its place.
It's not like human civilization suddenly lost the technology of steel production and forging.
Lost tech is a meme. I could say the modern humanity lost the tech of making horse armor, but it is just inaccurate semantics. We can still make metal and we can still make armor in the shape of a horse, we just don't, because there's no demand for it.
My memory on the specifics is vague. I remember him saying they had lost fish hooks (maybe just some fishing technique in general?). And that further losses occurred in the migration to Tasmania, leaving the settlers there even further behind.
I don't know what "Quadrant" references.
Well, wood is not exactly known to survive for hundreds, much less thousands or hundreds of thousand of years.
Given such a large period with nothing found in it, and given that in this period wood needed to survive considerable less long than 476K, makes me want to look for other explanations.
Uppercase YES.
Second question, carbon 14 method has intervals of confidence. Show me the intervals
It's irrelevant to the OP because radiocarbon dating doesn't go back that far, but your general skepticism is very much misplaced. The people who have been using and improving radiocarbon dating for the last century do in fact know more about it than your superficial armchair doubts.
Maybe, if we assume that C14 is not distributed homogeneously in the log; that is the logical assumption by default
As we know that C14 had spikes in production in some particular years, Is trivial to assume that rings formed in those years stored more C14.
The main question is if we have this years registered on our log or not. If we would have it; and they fall on the outer part of the log (AKA the partially charred part), then is perfectly doable
Perhaps read about the actual technique more? A tree will be at equilibrium with atmospheric c14 throughout its lifetime.
> As we know that C14 had spikes in production in some particular years, Is trivial to assume that rings formed in those years stored more C14.
We have very solid time series data on the background C14 levels from multiple independent techniques. Spectroscopy based methods count the total number of C14 atoms in the sample throughout its entire volume as well.
> The main question is if we have this years registered on our log or not. If we would have it; and they fall on the outer part of the log (AKA the partially charred part), then is perfectly doable
As I said above, the entire radiocarbon dating discussion is irrelevant to the original article. I just wanted to reply against zero content lowbrow dismissals of the technique in general. It's disappointing to see commentators here posting the exact same FUD as young earth creationists.
The earliest known wood artefact is a fragment of polished plank from the Acheulean site of Gesher Benot Ya’aqov, Israel, more than 780 ka (refs. 2,3). Wooden tools for foraging and hunting appear 400 ka in Europe, China and possibly Africa. At Kalambo we also recovered four wood tools from 390 ka to 324 ka, including a wedge, digging stick, cut log and notched branch.
I also don't understand the general idea. So there are humans capable of generating tools out of stones (the oldest flint tools are 3 millions of years old), but the idea that they use these tools to work wood to help making something structural out of wood - like some notches to be able to easier put some sticks of wood together - is debatable?
The problem for archeologists is of course to prove that these wooden "structures" existed by, well, finding traces(Oh, what a pun!) of them.
This isn't like modern humans - billions of individuals each generating tons of waste materials over their lifetime, stuff like concrete, plastic, glass, and metals. This is a few hundred thousand individuals who are sometimes making things out of sticks, grasses, and hide.
As far as I can tell from some quick googling, there only were ever a few hundred thousand homo heidelbergensis, and that's the high estimate.
We only have a few hundred specimens of the bones of homo heidelbergensis and some of those are from extremely bizarre circumstances, like a pit in a cavern where people seem to have been deliberately disposed of.
If we only have a few bits and pieces of bone left, consider how much less likely it is for a structure of plant and animal materials to survive. If it was in use by people, eventually it would wear out and be replaced, and get broken down to reuse its materials in various ways. If people abandon it, they probably won't bury it like they would a human being (very convenient to future archeologists). Abandoned structures will just stay on the surface, where the elements and decomposing organisms will eventually reduce it to dust.
According to the researchers here, the wooden structures only survived due to being preserved in fine sediment in the water.
So we're only ever going to find structures like this due to wildly improbable events. It's amazing we've found any!
Am I being serious? I have no idea.
The fact is, programming at a high level means analyzing thousands of dimensions of information and flattening them out into something executable by a dumb machine.
We are literally expert at becoming experts.
For any given data set there are a number of possible interpretations. Is that notch natural? They say yes, but I'm sure others in the field disagree as well.
His claim was that programming is a simple kind of thinking. He gives two representative examples:
* The consideration of sorting algorithms (which in all fairness _is_ a staple in teaching algorithms), and
* The use of simple logic - such is representative of programming language specs.
I'd say that this is a fair summary - real life tends to be a lot more complicated that the problems faced by most programmers.
Even more brutally: he is aiming quite high, a lot of programming is the minor stitching together of APIs without making too big of a mess.
Few programmers ever seriously actually need to analyse thousands of dimensions of information - and I'd say that it is a safe bet that the ones who do are probably using numbers.
To "We are literally expert at becoming experts.", I'd reply with https://xkcd.com/1112/
"Software engineers often have an unjustified belief that they are intuitive experts in fields in which they have no training or experience."
Including, very frequently, understanding written text.
By someone else in the field, not by some jackass online.
It's hard to spot the difference between a good paper and a charlatan who carefully paints a picture that supports his claim or even outright fabricates data, unless you've read dozens or hundreds of papers in the field and know the lay of the land on who tends to be reliable and who are the well known cranks who have been publishing academic fan fiction for decades.
if the original claim is assumed bogus, why is the HN dismissal assumed true?
This is explanation 1.
I proposed a much more simple explanation, that explains the notches, and also the position of the pieces, and also why the logs didn't root; and also a reasonable purpose for this structure that does not depend on extraordinary claims. This particular structure can be also easily replicated today
This is explanation 2
One of this explanations can be published on Nature. One is more probable than the other. One, or none, of this explanations are correct
I keep seeing people claiming that explanation 1 is correct "because experts are right, because they are experts (and know better)". A circular reasoning known in logic as fallacy of appeal to authority. Check the definition if you think that is used here incorrectly.
Nope, this is not an acceptable proof of anything
"You can't be right because, who do you think that you are, jackass?" is also an equally ludicrous response. Sorry If I broke your little Indiana Jones heart. Who do you assume that I am is not relevant. (LOL, you don't even know me).
I see the experts proposing that as there is a notch, it must be an imaginary rope, glue or whatever to join the logs, to support their narrative. My explanation does not rely on hypothetical proofs like an imaginary rope (that lets admit it, nobody has found)
Chop marks on firewood are expected, but don't imply necessarily "Tell Nature that they were trying to build a boudoir".
I once read an article relating to farming practices which evoked from me reaction similar to yours, those smartypants archeologists are surely imagining entire worlds on the basis of small piece of insignificant broken metal. I read the entire paper just to prove myself I was right, and reading the forensic methods used for corroborating the thesis was very effective humbling lesson
This is called "appeal to false authority" fallacy. A member of this family (but not the only member)
> It is not a fallacy to assign higher credence to a statement of an expert in the relevant field relative to outsider with no relevant expertise.
Wrong. It depends on context. Check the definition again, is wider than you think.
No ones presuming idiocy, more dishonesty.
What makes a better paper? Bonfire or "Earliest carpenters"
I agree with the other comment that it's rather absurd to rebuff a reviewed paper with such an armchair view.
Given we know stone tools were used for more than 2.5 million years by the genus homo, I don't see why it's a stretch to say they were using stone tools on wood 2 million years into having stone tools. Lack of evidence does not mean lack of occurrence. It is very difficult to find organic matter from so long ago given that it normally decays. Furthermore, this is not a radically complex structure either. Something a child could make.
> We interpret the notch as intentional, made by scraping and adzing1 to create a join between the log and trunk, forming a construction of two connected parts. Infrared spectroscopy (Supplementary Information Section 5) provides indeterminate evidence for use of fire in shaping the notch. Clark17 described a similar find, from the Acheulean in Site B, of comparable length (165 cm long) with a “wide and deepish groove” transverse to the long axis, with tapered ends. He interpreted the groove as anthropogenic and suggested it was part of a structure. The excavation of two interlocking logs in BLB5, with shaped ends on both objects supports this interpretation. We know of no comparable construction in the early archaeological record.
True intellectuals are skeptic. Try being a little skeptical, like the parent comment above. I'd sooner trust a freeman like the parent commenter than a chained academic and their redditor fanbase.
https://www.customshingles.com/blog/wood-burning-for-wood-ro....
On the other hand AlphaZero played millions of self play games under an evolutionary tournament style, imitating human cultural evolution, and reaching superhuman level. AI can do it too, if given the exploratory budget.</>