430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
ETA: Today I learned I had a much much larger gap in knowledge than I thought I did. Thanks to everyone for the information and links!
Even this evidence of woodworking is largely unremarkable. We’ve got phytolith [1] and microwear [2] studies showing unambiguous evidence of woodworking going back at least 1.5 million years. Wood tools just don’t survive very long, so this find is most notable for its preservation.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...
I mostly just read the papers as they are published but I’ve heard good things about those two books (they’re on my reading list but I haven’t read enough to form an opinion)
"We" (Homo sapiens) did not invent fire. Our predecessor species were already using it.
Firestarting is harder to pin down and may be within the scope of homo evolution.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_fire_by_early_human...>
Ever since Earth’s atmosphere had sufficient oxygen to sustain fire given a fuel source and heat, fire has exists.
If we can lay the blame on anyone for having started fire it’s going to be whoever fine tuned the constants such that there is anything here at all.
1. Language already emerged with early hominins (paranthropus and such).
2. Habilis et al developed toolmaking to a level that carrying stuff around was of critical importance.
3. H. erectus emerged from walking, and brought technology to a "civilized" level.
4. Anything post erectus evolved for civilized society.
5. The destruction of soils in eurasia about 24000 BC
6. The destruction of soils in the Americas about 9500 BC
7. Old metallurgy age.
8. Tin bronze age.
9. Recorded history.
Edit: Okay I just found that Human can also refer to other hominids
from: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/human
- a bipedal primate mammal (Homo sapiens) : a person
- broadly : hominid
Then around 2-2.5 million years ago you get the first homo species in the genus homo such as Homo habilis and they created the Oldowan tool culture.
Both Australopithecus afarensis and Homo habilis are our ancestors -- however they are also the ancestors of other homo lines that diverged from us that we are not descendents of (which are now extinct).
People often forget how widespread and varied the Homo genus was before all our cousin species went extinct (likely in part due to us).[1] Homo erectus colonized the entire old world very effectively 1.5 million years ago!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo#/media/File:The_hominin_f...
Also, more than primates use tools: Many corvids (crows, ravens, etc.) do, as do other animals. Look up New Caledonian Crows in particular.
But don't take all this from HN commenters debating each other; find some authoritative sources. A recent review article in a scientific journal would be a great start. Google Scholar lets you search for review articles.
>Flexible use of a multi-purpose tool by a cow
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(25)...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_tools#/media/File:Cow_Tool...
Chimps and New Caledonian Crows (and maybe some other animals) also manufacture their tools, at least sometimes, BTW. IIRC the crows strip sticks and bend them into hooks to grab at objects.
Why would someone imply otherwise if they don't know? What are people trying to prove in this discussion?
[0] There's strong evidence of 3.3 mya; see other comments.
Agreed, though the dividing line is tricky.
(Your prior comment didn't say 95% of that; for example, it doesn't mention animals. Because the parent comments were focused on human ancestors, that's what I thought you were addressing.)
I assume these are made of stone? What kind of tools?
In terms of tools by homonins, there is a roughly ~3million year history of stone tool use by various species, and the main thing preventing that date from being pushed further back is the difficulty in discerning between stones that have been shaped intentionally and those shaped by natural forces.
We have both observational and archaeological evidence of tool use in chimpanzees, macaques, and capuchins so it’s a pretty widespread behavior. I think the archaeological evidence for monkeys only goes back about four thousand years but thats because we havent studied the issue as much in archaeology.
I’m going to use a charged word because Jane Goodall used it.
Goodall asserted that humans and chimpanzees (and wolves) are unique among animals in that we have a genocidal tendency [1]. When a group attacks us (or has “land and resources” we want) we don’t just chase them off. We exterminate them. We expend great resources to track them down to ensure they cannot threaten us.
One reading of pre-history is that we had a number of hominids that were fine sharing the world, and humans, who were not. (I’ve seen the uncanny valley hypothesised as a human response to non-human hominids, as well as other humans carrying transmissible disfiguring diseases.)
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/06/does-...
I honestly have no clue what word you used was 'charged'. Considering any of those words charged makes me worry how far political correctness has gone! (I'm assuming, I suppose, politically charged?)
It’s because it implies that genocide has always been, and will always be, a reality humans will all too frequently find them selves having to contend with.
An aspect of our evolutionary success that will haunt us always, at least while its not busy being indulged in.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ants-and-the-art-...
Related, I think this is also the mechanism for how religion tends to stabilize societies/give them cohesion. Rather than having an eventual positive feedback loop of division, the division is placed between some type of "good" and "evil" rather than your neighbor. The "us vs them" division that switch craves is put on something more metaphysical (and sometimes a net benefit, like defining evil as behavior destructive to societies).
The line between good and evil runs straight down the centre of every human heart.
And dogs / wolves too, and definitely many / all cetaceans, because they are also cursed with the ability to be deeply affected by the presence, and absence / loss, of those they form bonds with. And that drives us all to be prepared to kill, or at least encourage others to, not out or physical necessity (nutrition) but retribution.
I’ve always considered the criminal justice system to be a euphemism for the codified retribution system.
We live in an unjust realm. All we can ever hope for is something approximating an appropriate level of retribution.
And it is a would appear as fact that that not infrequently rises to the level of not just genocide as we are familiar with it most recently, but proper extermination.
We were a large family [1].
> Real "are we the baddies?" moment
We were animals. We acted in accordance with our natures. Wolves and chimpanzees aren’t baddies any more than bees or hyenas. Nature is brutal.
Today, however, we are more than our natures. We have the capacity to criticize it when it arises in ways we disapprove of. In a certain sense, humans have a unique capacity to reduce suffering in a way without precedent in Earth’s natural history.
Your argument, written here and As far as I understand it at the moment, goes along with the other argument that everything is a simulation, or that everything that we do is preordained based upon physics. All mindbenders.
I want to believe that I have the ability to make an educated decision when faced e.g. with impulses to suppress or oppress others, I do know that I can consider ramifications and benefits outside of those which directly impact me.
So, perhaps it's better to say, we can be unanimal like rather than simply not animal, at all? What do you think?
You eat, sleep, procreate, go to the grocery store (hunt). You honk at others they are preventing you from getting where you're going. You size up other males if you're male, females if you're female. Your favorite food is your favorite food and not mine because YOUR biology dictates that to you based on your experience. You consider ramifications as a self-preserving defense mechanism, not as some social cordiality.
I see what you mean by being able to consider the worth of harming something for your own gain. But doesn't this apply to all animals? If a bear was hungry I'm sure they would happily eat you, but they would probably think twice if they weren't. Same for early humans, it's just we have our technologies (which our intellectual nature has enabled) now to prop us up and not have to really think about survival.
The main thing I'm curious to hear your thoughts on is what are we if not animals? Gods? That's surely completely relative, like an anteater to an ant.
I'm pretty sure governments know this and want to prevent it at all costs beyond a certain point.
The "simulation" is indistinguishable from god.
What?
This isn't a mindbender. You're just drawing lines.
Edit: I slightly misread your comment as advocating that we're not animals. However, whether one describes us as not animals or able to be "unanimal like" is still a matter of drawing lines.
humans have a unique capacity to reduce suffering in a way
> Our advances in logistical transportation and food production allow us to be kinder and more plentiful than ever before.
Are the fisheries not overfished? Are the chickens not caged inhumanely? Is last-mile logistics not a problem? Are microplastics in the water not giving 20-year olds cancer?
This really depends on how you define nature. Attempts to delineate what is and is not nature tend to be motivated.
Invaders of days gone by knew that even the young kids would grow up to "avenge their people", so to avoid problems (violence/killing against their tribe) in 10-15 years, it's better to just totally erase the population.
Humans have a well-earned nickname: "murder apes"
Everything selectively bred due to environmental or artificial pressures to have big eyes, big heads, high vocal sounds, attributes of human babies
It is very strange and an aberration amongst species, one being tolerating other beings because of their entertainment value and the joy they give from looking at them, but seems to be consistent and validate what's happened over eons of homo sapien propagation
And lions. And banded mongooses. And meerkats. And ants. Lots and lots of ant species - they’re actually by far the worst, following colony pheromones to the end of the earth just to get a single ant. Ants that aren’t genocidal to their own species tend to be some of the worst invasive species (like Argentinian ant supercolonies).
I love me some Jane Goodall as much as the next guy but that hypothesis is not taken seriously by primatologists and using the word “genocidal” in this context would get you laughed out of the room. Lethal intergroup aggression, coalitionary killing, and raiding are all different aspects of violent behavior in animals and hominins are far from unique in demonstrating them.
What part of the study strikes you as unsubstantiated?
That's 250,000 years of coexistence. We know that we sheboinked with at least two other species, probably more, because we still carry their genes to this day. So much so that it couldn't have been just a sheboink or two; we sheboinked over extended periods of time, i.e. we formed families with Neanderthals and Denisovens.
We have no evidence of warfare between the species. I.E. We have found no Neanderthal skull with an arrowhead in it, for example. Besides the fact that we are the only ones left, I don't see any substantiation at all.
It is a mystery why they are not still here. But the last 50,000 years, since the end of the last Ice Age, has been very hard on human species, for some reason. We are the only humans left, what every got them might get us too if we let it.
Thats not correct.
We have a neanderthal slain by spear, at a time and place where it was only carried by modern humans. [0]
This isn't a singular event. We have a history on injuries consistent with war, on both sides.
Yes, we "sheboinked". We also took women as prizes of war and raped them. As humanity has continued to do for most of their history.
Sure, the story is probably more complex. Some tribes at war, others at trade. Some who intermingle, and others who raged. That's... Just history of a people. That's normal.
But we absolutely have a history of war between the species.
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...
The cited article certainly is evidence of conflict. The Neanderthal's bone lesion was consistent with the kinds of bone lesions on pig carcases from projectile weapons, so perhaps even interspecies conflict. Maybe.
But the original claim, that Homo Sapiens conducted some kind of uncanny valley-fueled genocide of every other variety of human, is not supported by the article. "Injuries consistent with war" are also injuries consistent with with not-war. I mean, if we had a single example of a neanderthal bone with an arrowhead in it....but we don't.
// We also took women as prizes of war and raped them //
There is absolutely no evidence of this. You've got to remember, every single Neanderthal fossil we've ever found could fit on a large dining room table. They lived light on the land, and left hardly a trace.
There probably was only on the order of 10k Neanderthals alive at any one point, and that population was spread over all of Europe and half of Asia. The vast majority of Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals would go their whole lives, generations, without even seeing a member of the other species.
We can speculate, but that's all it is, speculation. Theories of the "uncanny valley" and raids by women-raping, spear-throwing humans are fanciful, and say a lot more about what our psychological hang ups are. Cf. with historical speculations about Neanderthals as brutish and stupid. Any theory which gets too far ahead of the evidence has a very short shelf life.
Dismissing half of academia's findings with a wave of your hand and an alternate speculation is... Leaning on speculation.
You said specifically "We have no evidence of warfare between the species."
I showed that to be incorrect. I followed the evidence, where you followed your gut.
> The vast majority of Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals would go their whole lives, generations, without even seeing a member of the other species.
This is an absolutely ridiculous assertion, and entirely speculative. We have Neanderthal DNA intermixed with our own. For it to be possible, then the numbers intermixing cannot be some one in a lifetime event - its a global phenomena.
We have evidence of war, trade, and sex. There is no great division that these people rarely met.
That's akin to saying the Chinese never meet the Americans.
But to go further than just genetic history, Tinshemet Cave and Nesher Ramla show that we traded and lived together. (Which incidentally are neither in Europe nor Asia). We built societies together. We were not nearly as isolated as you speculate.
> Theories of the "uncanny valley" and raids by women-raping, spear-throwing humans are fanciful, and say a lot more about what our psychological hang ups...
No. Flatly no. It speaks to the consistency of human history. Our ability to trace genetic legacy, is not because of a psychological hangup.
The Rape of Nanjing was not a one time moment. And machine guns are hardly spears. The Crusades through the Middle East did not leave behind no legacy. Kidnapping prizes was the norm for so very long, it was a norm of our mythology. Who was Helen of Troy? How did the Chu marry his wife?
Why did the Assyrians put record of these spoils into stone? Anyone who disregards the massive historical evidence that mankind has always raped its way through war, is one who is utterly blind to all evidence before them.
Saying homo sapiens kidnapped Neanderthal woman, and vice versa, is not a claim of intelligence. It is an understanding of historical behaviour.
... All of our evidence points towards not homo sapiens and Neanderthals doing things. Rather, it points towards people acting as people. Tribal boundaries, but not species. They made war, crime, love and trade. They were people.
Even the authors of the original article didn't claim this was evidence of conflict between the species. They only claimed that it was evidence consistent with conflict between the species.
You are extrapolating far, far, beyond what the evidence would support.
There's one bone which is fractured in a way which is *consistent* with its being caused by a homo sapiens-style rock hitting it.
And nobody is claiming that we never got into the pleistocene version of a bar fight. Of course we did. Perhaps the bone mentioned in the article you cited was the result of such a fight. Perhaps not.
We have no evidence whatsoever of war between the species. None. Zero. A bar fight is not a war. And we have absolutely no evidence of any kind of genocidal berzerking. Any attempt to recruit the Assyrians or the rapists of Nanjing is anachronistic. That kind of warfare requires social coordination on the a scale which we wouldn't even invent until the Assyrians.
sigh it is an easy mistake to make---the evidence is consistent with what you want to believe. Therefore, it must support what you believe. :-( You have to resist the temptation. The more you want something to be true, the more suspicious you should be that it isn't true.
All of their history.
Assuming we still aren't letting bots post their own opinions here.
Not only are we the only species to reach this kind of technology but among humans the first group to reach space was the Nazis. Today the innovation in that area seems driven by militaristic states and by people who seem ideologically adjacent. In other words it’s driven by very aggressive territorial members of one of the most aggressive territorial species.
We can’t generalize from one example of evolution, but if this is indicative of a common pattern then there might be some scary MFs out there. Our radio signals have been spreading for a while, so for all we know something is on its way to cleanse the universe of all forms of life that offend its god (or whatever its genocidal rationalizations is).
If this is true then we die. There is zero chance of resisting something with the technology to travel the stars and perhaps a million years or more head start on us. It’d be like an Apache attack helicopter versus a termite mound.
I had this thought when I saw the ideological turn (or mask removal) of certain people in the space industry. I found it metaphysically disturbing. Again… if there is other advanced life and if this is the pattern of how you evolve to become spacefaring, then we are doomed.
Today it's Musk driving space technology forward, and I don't see him acting militaristic.
Surely, you jest. He's heavily entwined his companies with the US military. StarLink is used heavily in battlefield communications [1]. He sought to deny the courtesy to one of our allies when Russia disrupted Ukraine's satellite communications, but eventually reversed course over the optics of it [2].
Musk's Grok is going to be used by the Pentagon for the usual pursuits of police states everywhere [3].
1. https://spacenews.com/spacexs-expanding-role-in-u-s-defense/
2. https://irregularwarfare.org/articles/when-a-ceo-plays-presi...
3. https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-gains-favor-as-pentagon-emb...
As for the Ukraine thing, I read that Musk was trying to comply with US law in avoiding making foreign policy.
It's no surprise that the military uses Starlink, just like they use cars.
As for grok, of course the military is going to buy what they want.
0. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/18/musk-starlin...
1. https://www.npr.org/2025/04/15/nx-s1-5355896/doge-nlrb-elon-...
2. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/doge-roof-elon-musk-st...
But I find it unlikely the exact combination of factors, of which there are dozens or more, will be present such that it’s any place anyone actually wants to settle. Like what if the planet was much like Earth except the gravity was 1.2G. Or the atmosphere was only 500 mb, or surface temp was just barely above freezing. That would be deal breaker for just about everyone
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/mar/03/afghanistan.lu...
The thought experiment I’m doing is asking what happens if there is a link between hyper aggressive species and certain kinds of intelligence and technological development.
It could just be a fluke of our evolution and history that there seems to be a link, but what if it’s a pattern. If true this would mean any spacefaring intelligence is likely to be quite scary.
That's an unsupported generalization.
The article describes "behaviors" that include "perhaps even genocide", and notes that wiping out populations exists in chimps and wolves too.
So not unique, there's a "perhaps", and it's not a tendency. There's no evidence we have a "gene" for it or anything.
In the vast, vast, vast majority of conflicts between two groups, we don't exterminate the "enemy". Otherwise, the human race would have gone extinct a long time ago. Wiping out entire populations is by far the exception, not the rule, of human societies. It happens, but the situations are notable precisely for their extremity, precisely because they're not the norm.
As vapid as the movie (intentionally) is, "Mean Girls" does a really good break-down of things, and perhaps the main issue is that unlike some other animal groups, people don't always stop.
Entirely wiping out an enemy population can be incredibly risky as they'll try to also wipe you out in response. It consumes enormous resources as people on your own side get killed, your resources get used up, etc. It weakens your group making you more vulnerable to attack from third parties.
Most of the time, it's just bad strategy.
You don't need to invent instincts or tendencies or claim something is more subtle or targeted when the vastly simpler explanation is just that it's all just cost-benefit.
Which is why you either wipe out the whole population, or not at all.
If you have the type of enemy that holds a grudge across generations, that is.
Should be true for hominids. I have no theory for the wolves.
Huh? Most of human history is battles here and there -- gain a little more land and stop, deter the enemy then stop, maybe conquer some people and rule them and extract some resources rather than kill them. Not total peace vs genocide. The idea of it being all-or-nothing is neither usually reality nor usually good strategy.
Mostly that there's a lot that goes on in society where a single person can't necessarily genocide a 'race' but a single person can certainly fuck up a single person of family's life over the long term intentionally and not care, even if doing so does not gain them any real advantage.
But hey if you want to look at 'bigger picture', 'societal' cruelty...
Reaching even further back than WW2, we may look at the Armenian Genocide and the circumstances.
> You don't need to invent instincts or tendencies or claim something is more subtle or targeted when the vastly simpler explanation is just that it's all just cost-benefit.
Part of the human condition used to be the idea that we had evolved beyond short term cost-benefit, however the last 15 years, might be proving you right.
And she told us that would likely happen again, there would be a gap where our technology proved to be insufficiently durable to last throughout history. Unsurprisingly not everyone in the class thought this was likely, but I figured it was possible.
Anyway, I could go on about the archeology of tech all night, but I've got to figure out how to get the photos off this Kodak DC25 camera card. Something about a DLL from the original installer that you wrap in a Linux library? Can't remember.
I had this working about 25 years ago...
I heard that fear being muttered mostly about everything going digital and that's much harder for archaeologists to dig up than paper or stone tablets.
However, that's all nonsense, of course: the stuff that people bother to write down is seldom all that interesting. Who cares about who was king or whatever? The real juicy bits are all in our garbage dumps, and we are producing garbage that'll last much longer than anything the ancients could muster. What with all our metal, glass, plastic etc.
I'm convinced that in a not-too-distant few tens of thousand years, archeologists will be baffled at all these massive deposits of iron, copper, and aluminium - well on its way back to the oxides from whence it came, but chunks of highly refined stuff in among it, presumably at great expense - and for some reason labelled with extremely durable placards made out of ridiculously tough plastic with letters embossed in them. The precise meanings of "SJ12 YPF", "Y196 NBA", "RFS 131Y", or "R420 BRL" will remain lost to the depths of time.
Try this: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/26/science/archaeology-neand...
This somewhat contradicts the subheading, no?
> The finding, along with the discovery of a 500,000-year-old hammer made of bone, indicates that our human ancestors were making tools even earlier than archaeologists thought.
The original paper's abstract is much more specific (ignore the Significance section, which is more editorializing):
> Here, we present the earliest handheld wooden tools, identified from secure contexts at the site of Marathousa 1, Greece, dated to ca. 430 ka (MIS12). [1]
Which is true. Before this the oldest handheld wooden tool with a secure context [2] was a thrusting spear from Germany dated ~400kYA [3]. The oldest evidence of woodworking is at least 1.5 million years old but we just don't have any surviving wooden tools from that period.
[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2515479123
[2] This is a very important term of art in archaeology. It means that the artefact was excavated by a qualified team of archaeologists that painstakingly recorded every little detail of the excavation so that the dating can be validated using several different methods (carbon dating only works up to about 60k years)
[3] https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/behavior/getting-food/o...
I think we see shades of this today. Bearded Capuchin monkeys chain a complex series of tasks and use tools to break nuts. From a brief documentary clip I saw [0], they first take the nut and strip away the outer layer of skin, leave it dry out in the sun for a week, then find a large soft-ish rock as the anvil with a heavier smaller rock to break open the nut. So they had to not only figure out that nuts need to be pre-shelled and dried, but that they needed a softer rock for the anvil and harder rock for the hammer. They also need at least some type of bipedal ability to carry the rock in the first place and use it as a hammer.
Apparently some white-faced Capuchins have figured out that they can soak nuts in water to soften it before hammering it open [1].
That's true for pretty much everybody. Homeschooled or not. You think everyone shocked by this news was all homeschooled?
Just for fun, ask some high schoolers who were the major combatants in WW2.
That is an example of poor teaching of historical facts. It's bad (especially in our current times when people have forgotten the perils of fascism), but it's different than what the GP describes, which sounds like the biblical literalist timeline of life on Earth (with creation happening only 6000 years ago).
That is not just poor education, but instead direct contradiction of widely understood knowledge that much of our modern world is built on.
To use your WW2 example, it's similar to explicitly teaching someone that the Holocaust didn't happen. Or in the scientific realm teaching that the earth is flat.
(The middle class thrived in colonial America.)
Freshman physics in college blew through 2 years of high school honors physics in a week.
What's taught in public schools is pretty thin gruel. That said, I enjoyed school, as all my friends were there and we had a good time.
It's pretty thin gruel at many private schools too. The limiting factor in either case is that most kids are there because they are made to go, not self directed. Money does not buy motivation, but it buys access.
Though you just reminded me of a co-worker I had while I was in University. She had attended a private Christian High School and apparently world history was optional there because (we worked at a movie rental place) when Valkyrie released I commented on how I didn't care to watch it because I already knew how it would end. She asked what I meant and how I knew, and I had to explain that since Hitler survived the bombing attempt to shoot himself in his bunker at the end of WW2 (or be shot, or fake it, whatever your chosen explanation/conspiracy) in Europe that Tom Cruise's character pretty obviously had to fail. She had _no idea_. I was pretty baffled. My grandad enlisted in the army in the tail end of WW2. 2 generations back. And she knew nothing about it except that it had happened.
However, I knew a lot about WW2 because my dad (and relatives) was heavily involved in it, and also became a historian when he left the AF. He had a mountain of history books, mostly about aviation and WW2. I read some of them, and watched movies like "The Blue Max" and "The Battle of Britain", the "World At War" series, and so on. There are also endless WW2 documentaries on TV.
My neighbor was a paratrooper who lost his leg, my dad's best friend was a P-51 pilot who had his face burned off in combat. WW2 vets were everywhere. They're all dead now, and WW2 is ancient history.
Honestly I would have expected a pig or horse to be discovered to use tools, rather than a cow. Cattle are generally... not thought of as particularly intelligent.
I have gone down a couple rabbit holes based on his videos and while it seems like he's occasionally gotten some facts wrong or misunderstood an argument, I'm pretty confident he's doing a decent job accurately representing the archaeology.
Milo is great! Stefan Milo is also a great resource on youtube, i also really enjoy a youtuber called Fig Tree. there is a lot of good educational stuff on early humanity and early civilizations out there!
Pretty much. Being able to transfer/build a fire is a lot easier than starting one. Fire starting requires bow/flint&steel and a lot of patience. Control basically means using simple torches to transfer fire from one place to another (where the initial source is either lightning/wildfire or embers of a previous fire).
[1] https://www.nhm.ac.uk/press-office/press-releases/groundbrea...
https://wildlife.org/australian-firehawks-use-fire-to-catch-...
By far the strongest evidence is the Qesem Cave in Israel, which had a central hearth and so many burned animal remains that it couldn’t have been accidental. Unfortunately the dating on that is controversial and the error bar is huge at 300 +- 100 kYA (200,000-400,000 years ago).
Fascinating stuff!
Dumbed down understanding of mine: evolutionary theory predicts that graph goes from (0.1; 0) to (very high; in a million years). X axis: years, Y axis: progress or evolution. The only difference such discoveries make is to further refine the slope of the graph. Was the development linear or exponential? How fast did it progress? Obviously, in the past 500 years we didn't change as humans but our technological progress accelerated beyond belief.
https://evolution.earthathome.org/grasses/andropogoneae/maiz...
Hominin tools that are millions of years old have already been found by archeologists.
e.g., recent news: Scientists uncover 3-million-year-old tools but they weren’t made by our ancestors: https://www.futura-sciences.com/en/scientists-uncover-3-mill...
A list of findings of earliest known hominin tools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earliest_tools
edit: I am not sure backupping to 'Mars', with its lack of magnetic field, inhospitality, and necessity to live underground is a positive idea
I am tired of this. No. Archeologist only claim what they have discovered. They don't speculate because they work based on evidences. Journalists should better. This wording sounds like archeologists were wrong. That only fuel the narrative that layman's opinion is more informed than professionals.
Science works by scientist having a model of reality and then testing that model against reality, gathering evidence that fits or doesn't fit the model, evaluating how well the model corresponds to reality.
If there is a widely accepted model in the archaeological community, and the new data contradicts it, the wording "than archaeologists thought" seems plausible enough.
Of course, depending on the model, the model itself might admit regimes of "non-applicability", or have some measure of confidence... If archeologists have large uncertainty whether human ancestors made tools 500,000 years back or not, then they shouldn't be surprised upon finding evidence that the ancestors did.
I don't know any specifics about this case, just arguing that that kind of wording by itself is not always wrong by default.
Wood lasts for fucking ever under the proper conditions. Old construction in Europe often only had the beams made of wood, and I always thought that was orders of magnitude more durable than wooden houses, like thousands of years vs decades. I don’t think that’s true anymore.
And this might be one of the few environmentally friendly decisions that Americans got better than Europeans, I guess. Wood is still prevalent in construction here, and as far as I know concrete and cement production are quite bad.
BTW, I’m a total ignorant about all this so just intuition and probably wrong
Most of Europe long ago exhausted easily accessible natural forest resources, and where it's not densely populated tends to prefer using land to do other stuff (like grow food). Hence, stone and concrete and similar materials in European construction.
The part that I don't quite know how to make sense of is why Canadian producers seem to have a near monopoly on sandpaper products.
Sandpaper requires specific grades of corundum; Ontario happens to have several notable large deposits of extremely fit-for-purpose corundum. The Canadian deposits were also a conveniently close source for what would become America's largest abrasives products producer, 3M, after its attempt to mine corundum in Minnesota failed (3M stands for Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing company).
Modern concrete construction uses iron rebar liberally. That means every concrete structure built today will crack and crumble in a few hundred years at most, as the iron absorbs oxygen, it swells from the rust. Which is a shame, roman concrete buildings without rebar will still be standing 1000s of years from now.
I bet we could do fairly well. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of years. We've learned a lot about how to form exceptionally long lasting cement. We just choose not to do it that way, most of the time.
Wood is a composite material, strong under both compression and tension. It's the fibres in wood (lignans) which provide the latter. Stone (and unreinforced concrete) lack such fibre elements, and are strong only under compression.
With stone it's necessary to build compression structures such as arches and domes for heavy load-bearing, and taller structures must be significantly flared out at the base (or utilise buttresses, as with gothic cathedrals) for stability. Structures under tension can be far more lightweight and compact.
Steel-box construction and reinforced concrete both offer tension-based strength, but are also susceptible to metallic oxidation (rust), which limits the life of such structures. A nonmetallic fibre (natural or synthetic) might offer an alternative to this, and I've seen some work investigating this, though there may be other issues (e.g., depolymerisation of plastics over long periods of time).
A big problem with houses is we never rebuild. It's kind of crazy. We replace almost everything else eventually, including commercial buildings. Skyscrapers only last a few decades. But we expect houses to last forever. But they're only getting older. Is it possible to strip a wood building right back to the frame and start again?
There is of course a large stock of extant housing which pre-dates best-standards insulation practices, though much of this can be improved dramatically at relatively low cost, especially by improving siding ("wrapping") and insulating attics. Thicker walls (nominal 2x6 rather than 2x4, or greater) can also be retrofit, either extending the exterior or interior wall dimension, though at considerably greater cost, and with trade-offs to either exterior or interior dimensions (lot size, environment, or reduced interior volume).
That would shake our knowledge from the foundations.
5 BILLION years ago...
Do we know if these were used more than once, or if they were in a convenient shape that was grabbed by a local for one time use?
How do we know that these were actually used as tools and not just pieces of wood that coincidentally in the site?
Do we have any reason to think these were used by (precursor to) humans more than ravens, beavers or any other number of animals that use tools?
Because of the paywall I could not read the whole article, but the pictures and intro leave a lot unanswered.
Bottom box: I want to search the archive for saved snapshots
I have defaulted to using the bottom box first, since it's usually much faster
Red blood cells, and collagen from dinosaur bones. With the idea that even current museum hosted bones might have more??? Today is a wild day for me.
This is very heavily disputed and very much not consensus opinion. (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_naledi#Possible_burials and https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...)
? I don't think you can find anyone in archaeology who says tool use began less than 1 million years ago (mya). Maybe you mean something else?
The univeral consensus in archaeology says tools emerged either 3.3 mya, which is still subject to debate last I knew, and certainly by 2.58 mya - the Odowan industry famously discovered by the Leakeys in the Oldovai Gorge in Tanzania, in 1969.
The same consensus continues with the development of the more advanced Acheulean industry ~1.76 mya, which dominated until ~ 400,000 years ago (arguably the most successful technology ever).
Wikipedia has a bias against everything outside of mainstream academia, there are activist groups like Guerrilla Skeptics that go through articles and rewrite them to undermine anything remotely fringe. It's not as objective as people like to think it is.
Ultimately, it's that scientists are humans, too. Despite some of them really making their research data-forward, things like tenure, career, funding, and even who would publish your work now and in the future all create normal human environments that reward small, incremental changes to a body of knowledge that don't upset the apple cart, not discoveries that suggest huge changes. In fact, large changes and discoveries can be resisted and denied further research in favor of the status quo.
This is not a new phenomenon by any means:
Both warm-blooded dinosaurs and the Chicxulub impact were both theories dismissed as fringe for decades before overwhelming evidence led to them being accepted as likely. In no small way thanks to Jurassic Park.
Recall that eugenics and phrenology both used to be widely accepted scientific "fact."
100 fairly prominent scientists signed a letter stating emphatically that Einstein's Theory of Relatively was categorically wrong and should be retracted.
Plate tectonics was seen as fanciful crackpot musings for decades. The author of the original theory died 30 years before plate tectonics was even considered possible.
Germ theory was dismissed for most of Louis Pasteur's lifetime, despite being able to literally show people yeast in a microscope.
Helicentrism has a storied past.
Quantum theory was also denied heavily at first. Now it saves photos to our hard drives.
And how many times has the earliest dates of hominids and tool use and human thresholds of development been pushed back by tens of thousands of years?
This is not an exhaustive list, by any means.
So we have ancient examples and modern ones - and everything in between. So the level of education or scientific progress or equipment are not the cause. Humans are. Humans do this all the time. So until overwhelming evidence surfaces, which can take decades or longer, claims like this shouldn't be dismissed out of hand until proven solidly in error. A theory is a theory, so let it be a theory.
The main rejection of the impact hypothesis was that the dinosaurs had already died off by the time of the impact, the idea that the iridium in the layer came from an impact was reasonably well received. In 1984 a survey found 62% of paleontologists accepted the impact occurred, but only 24% believed it caused the extinction. The Alvarez duo, who proposed the impact hypothesis, were proposing to redefine where the cretaceous ended based on a new dating method (at the time the end of the cretaceous was believed to be a layer of coal a few meters off from the now accepted boundary), and fossil evidence at the time seemed to show gradual decline. A big part of the acceptance of the theory was the development of new analysis methods that showed the evidence for a gradual extinction prior to the impact to be illusory. By the time the impact crater was identified, it was already the dominant theory. Actually in the early 90s major journals were accused of being unfairly biased in favor of the impact hypothesis, with many more papers published in favor than against.
Completely coincidentally, the theory that the chixulub structure was an impact crater was initially rejected and it wasn't until 1990 that cores sampled from the site proved it was.
Dinosaurs being warm blooded was well accepted by the late 70s.
You've worked in those settings, and you think archaeologists reject tool use older than 1 mya?
Also, you don't understand that science is a process, based on evidence, and revision is an essential part of that process? Archaeology especially advances regularly, because evidence can be relatively very rare. If they weren't revising it, it would mean the whole research enterprise - to expand knowledge - was failing.
> how many times has the earliest dates of hominids and tool use and human thresholds of development been pushed back by tens of thousands of years?
I don't know, how many times? Tool use is universally believed, in the field, to have begun at least 2.58 million years ago, and with strong evidence for 3.3 mya. Tens of thousands of years isn't in the debate. See this subthread:
I do, and the process is exactly the point. That human emotions affect the process far more often than we like to admit. Not always, but it's not completely removed from the process by any means.
In each of those cases, it's that no one says, "Oh, new theory, new evidence. Cool, let's test the hell out of it!"
People in positions of relative power sometimes say, "New theory? Nope. Not even going to look at it. No, in fact, you're crazy and you're wrong and get outta here!"
In each of those examples, to some degree the eventual more accurate theory met emotional resistance by people adhering to the status quo, not resistance because of questionable data or poor research methods or non-reproducibility.
I like how the word “overwhelming” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
I mean that's how science works. Things can be dismissed until they're proven true. If there's a valid path to finding out it's true then you can try to get funding, it just takes work and convincing people as you're competing for sparse resources. And getting egg on your face is also part of the process.
>I mean that's how science works.
So you're saying it's a good thing to dismiss potential new discoveries because of feels? Not investigate further, not look for additional data to refute the theory or not. Just dismiss as crackpot BS? IIRC, that's not how science works.
Bill Bryson's book A Short History of Nearly Everything is where I'm taking that from. It's a great read and shows all the ways in which scientists failed to see what was under their nose for decades before finally figuring out, which makes one wonder what's currently ripe for the picking.
As long as there is low number of samples with such age you should always assume methodological mistakes in measurement
Please edit out swipes, as the site guidelines ask (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are.
Your comment would be fine without that first bit.