What struck me is that the two pieces of wood were found notched together at a 90-degree angle. This has got to be the first-known 90-degree angle in history. Virtually nothing in nature has a 90-degree angle. This is an invention of the highest order. EDIT: thanks for all the good responses; I should have written a bit more carefully--I meant to say that this might be the first-known time a 90-degree angle was delib…
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?
That Atlantis was real and probably had steam engines and lasers and psychic powers when everyone else was still hunting dinosaurs but then a global catastrophe wiped out the world (again) and here we are, half their size and half their glory. I don’t think it’s that crazy. What’s crazy is thinking eggs are bad for you and that the fabric of reality itself is nothing but a social construct
One cannot have lasers without a lot of other advanced technology and precursors. There's zero evidence of that.
Unless reptilian space overlords somehow gave it to us in their contrived crazy planet-scale experiments, of course.
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 t…
> 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.
We don’t know that it’s purely compulsion, do we? Perhaps they know that still pools of water are best for survival so they’re motivated to prevent water from running away. The level of compulsion could be more sophisticated than we imagine. This seems to be true with many mammals. Not long ago in North America, it wasn’t uncommon to think of dogs as meat-headed automatons. Today it’s common to recognize that they ha…
Beavers lack the social mechanisms to transmit knowledge across time and space.
So either they are all independently inventing exactly the same solution to the problem... or it's some sort of instinctual compulsion.
That Atlantis was real and probably had steam engines and lasers and psychic powers when everyone else was still hunting dinosaurs but then a global catastrophe wiped out the world (again) and here we are, half their size and half their glory. I don’t think it’s that crazy. What’s crazy is thinking eggs are bad for you and that the fabric of reality itself is nothing but a social construct
One cannot have lasers without a lot of other advanced technology and precursors. There's zero evidence of that.
I agree, which is the reason I don’t buy Hancocks theories or for that matter, the idea that aliens and UFOs exist.
I admit I went too far with the lasers but my thinking is that the fact that we are alone in the universe gives a lot of credence to the theory that we live in a simulation, and wouldn’t “Age of Atlantis” be a fun mod?
How amazing would it be to discover that an ancient civilization existed with a technology level on par with the iron age or so? I guess if we were finding dinosaurs though the odds we wouldn't have found anything from that time are maybe slim.
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.
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...
Agriculture seems a prerequisite for most other technologies because you can't invent much if you're constantly following 4 legged food. The transition to ag (small-scale gardening) began before 21k BCE (23k years ago) predating Natufian culture.
I think this is a bit of a fallacy. There was plenty invented in pre farming times, just these inventions were tailored to the task at hand which was hunting and foraging rather than other goals. For instance, the spear thrower. With that invention the act of spear hunting became orders of magnitude easier for less able bodied people. Spear throwers can be used to send a projectile 100m, and as fast as an MLB pitcher. You can imagine how this might have significantly improved the kill rates of the hunt, and could be thought of as significant of an invention as perhaps the plow was.
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? This gives a hint: > They used new luminescence dating techniques, which reveal the last time minerals in the sand surrounding the finds were exposed to sunlight, to determine their age. ... but it seems like there might be other explanations for that sand being there?
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).
Up till now there has been substantial pushback against the idea that homo heidelbergensis built small villages in France 400,000 years ago: small huts surrounding a giant long, thin building, 15 meters long but less than 3 meters wide. Up till now that find has been earliest finding of a possible gathering of human buildings, but many archeologists have had difficulty believing it and have criticized every aspect of the evidence. But now with this new find, the claims about the heidelbergensis village also becomes more believable: