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:
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"
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.
I agree with the other comment that it's rather absurd to rebuff a reviewed paper with such an armchair view.
https://www.customshingles.com/blog/wood-burning-for-wood-ro....
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!
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.