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430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found

nytimes.com

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Re: 430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found

#21

Post by throwup238 »

drakythe wrote: post #13
throwup238 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tools predate homo sapiens (which emerged about 300 kYA) by millions of years. The first stone industry - Oldowan - is at least two million years old and might be as old as three million. They predate what we call “archaic humans” by a long time. 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…

Well, today I learned something! Thanks for the information, I guess I know which rabbit hole I'm going down today.

Just edited to add two paper citations for the phytoliths and microwear studies. Have fun! It’s a deep rabbit hole largely ignored by popsci publications so there’s lots to explore.

Re: 430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found

#22

Post by eigenspace »

Salgat wrote: post #15
eigenspace wrote: post #2

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Website appears to be down from too much traffic

Ironically even archive.is just has the 503 page cached.

Yeah, that was me. I threw the link into archive.is to check if it had a snapshot, but it just created a shanpshot of the 503 before I could figure out how to cancel it.

Re: 430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found

#23

Post by drakythe »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #12
doctoboggan wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it's definitely further back than homo sapiens have existed (200k - 300k years), but our ancestor species were known to have used tools and control fire. I believe we have evidence of tool use going back 1 million years. So this article is referencing the oldest known _wooden_ tools, which are obviously much less likely to be preserved across the ages.

We have 3.3 million year old stone tools https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14464 . They're very simple (even more so than the Oldowan stone tools https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldowan ) and basically just look like rocks, but there is clear evidence of intentional shaping by hominins (somewhere in the fuzzy late Australopthis/early homo transition).

Thanks for these sources. Archeology definitely is a big known unknown for me, so even getting started reading basic info about this is rough. I appreciate the links and terms.

Re: 430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found

#25

Post by bflesch »

lmf4lol wrote: post #19
an0malous wrote: post #18

There is archaeological evidence of tools going back even further, potentially over a million years, but it's ignored for the usual reasons of dogma and not conveniently fitting into the paradigm of the current priestly class. I'd highly recommend this talk Michael Cremo (author of "Forbidden Archaeology") gave for this "Authors at Google" program in 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKfGC3P9KoQ

why do you think would this info be surpressed?

"extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".

As long as there is low number of samples with such age you should always assume methodological mistakes in measurement

Re: 430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found

#26

Post by drakythe »

an0malous wrote: post #18

There is archaeological evidence of tools going back even further, potentially over a million years, but it's ignored for the usual reasons of dogma and not conveniently fitting into the paradigm of the current priestly class. I'd highly recommend this talk Michael Cremo (author of "Forbidden Archaeology") gave for this "Authors at Google" program in 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKfGC3P9KoQ

That book name is... off putting, and his wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Cremo) isn't encouraging in a quick scan...

Re: 430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found

#27

Post by drakythe »

throwup238 wrote: post #21
drakythe wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, today I learned something! Thanks for the information, I guess I know which rabbit hole I'm going down today.

Just edited to add two paper citations for the phytoliths and microwear studies. Have fun! It’s a deep rabbit hole largely ignored by popsci publications so there’s lots to explore.

Thanks! I'll add them to my reading list for today. Its going to be interesting, I can already tell.

Re: 430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found

#28

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

thinkingtoilet wrote: post #14
throwup238 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tools predate homo sapiens (which emerged about 300 kYA) by millions of years. The first stone industry - Oldowan - is at least two million years old and might be as old as three million. They predate what we call “archaic humans” by a long time. 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…

That's wild! Thanks for sharing. I didn't realize these things went so far back. So are you saying these were straight up non-human primates using tools? Or is this all traceable to our lineage?

Even today there's plenty of non humans (and non-primate) tool use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_use_by_non-humans.

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.

Re: 430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found

#29

Post by ryan_j_naughton »

thinkingtoilet wrote: post #14
throwup238 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tools predate homo sapiens (which emerged about 300 kYA) by millions of years. The first stone industry - Oldowan - is at least two million years old and might be as old as three million. They predate what we call “archaic humans” by a long time. 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…

That's wild! Thanks for sharing. I didn't realize these things went so far back. So are you saying these were straight up non-human primates using tools? Or is this all traceable to our lineage?

The first identified tools were 3.3 million years ago, which is before the homo genus emerges. Thus, those were either by Australopithecus afarensis or by a yet unidentified hominid species -- they were still very likely our ancestors (but technically TBD).

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...

Re: 430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found

#30

Post by an0malous »

lmf4lol wrote: post #19
an0malous wrote: post #18

There is archaeological evidence of tools going back even further, potentially over a million years, but it's ignored for the usual reasons of dogma and not conveniently fitting into the paradigm of the current priestly class. I'd highly recommend this talk Michael Cremo (author of "Forbidden Archaeology") gave for this "Authors at Google" program in 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKfGC3P9KoQ

why do you think would this info be surpressed?

I think it just doesn't fit into the accepted timeline so it's mostly ignored. This is a common pattern with scientific discovery where evidence that contradicts the prevailing paradigm is ignored and builds up until it can no longer be ignored and causes a paradigm shift. This idea comes from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn.
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