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Website appears to be down from too much traffic
I actually saw the website, pictures of the tools and text and everything before it gave me the database error message. It would have been totally fine.
430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found
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Re: 430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found
#62[stub for offtopicness]
the site never loads
Re: 430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found
#63Earlier 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.
As you seem knowledgeable of this topic and it is super interesting, any books you would recommend that gives a good broad overview of all of this?
Re: 430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
When is the first evidence for cooking?
That’s a complicated question. The Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa where we found the first evidence of controlled fire also contained burned plant remains and bones, which could be interpreted as evidence of cooking. There were also burned fish remains found at the Gesher Benot Ya’aqov site in Israel, dated to about 780 kYA, which could also be interpreted as evidence of cooking. By far the strongest evidence is the…
Thanks! That is much farther back than I thought, even 200 kYA.
Re: 430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 Australo…
Last I knew, the 3.3 mya evidence from the site Lomekwi 3 in Kenya was debatable, though a serious possibility, and the 2.58 mya evidence from the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania was considered the sure thing. 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 au…
We are talking about tool manufacture here, however, not just about tool use.
Re: 430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Top box: my url is alive and I want to archive it's contents 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
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Re: 430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wait hang on, would they "control" file by finding natural sources (volcano, lightning strike wildfire, etc.) and then make use of that source for controlled sources of light/heat/etc? I guess I've always thought of "control" of fire including the intentional starting thereof.
There's pretty strong evidence that the use of fire to cook food is what enabled modern humans, with their short (and relatively fragile) digestive systems and giant energy hungry brains to evolve. Cooking food makes more calories bio-available in food and also reduced the amount of energy the body needs to expend on that food to harvest calories... so there's more energy available for thinking (etc).
And cooking kills like 99+% of pathogens, which freed us from much of the parasite/disease stress other animals must live with.
Re: 430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found
#68430,000 years? Am I reading this headline correctly? (since the site seems to have fallen victim to the HN-hug-of-death). That seems wildly further back than I understood humans to have tools, or even homo sapiens to have existed. 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!
You might be old enough to have been taught that Humans are tool-using apes. That's tragically incomplete: lots of apes use tools. Birds use tools. And now, cows use tools! Cow tools: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj0n127y74go https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_tools
I was homeschooled in a particular conservative area. Much of what I have been taught was... woefully inadequate, we'll say. Lots of my learning has come in university and afterwards, so what I've picked up is pretty obviously incomplete and leaves me with many unknown unknowns in this area. Today has begun filling in many of those gaps so they get to be known unknowns now!
Re: 430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found
#69430,000 years? Am I reading this headline correctly? (since the site seems to have fallen victim to the HN-hug-of-death). That seems wildly further back than I understood humans to have tools, or even homo sapiens to have existed. 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!
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…
> Tools predate homo sapiens (which emerged about 300 kYA)
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-...
Re: 430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
You might be old enough to have been taught that Humans are tool-using apes. That's tragically incomplete: lots of apes use tools. Birds use tools. And now, cows use tools! Cow tools: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj0n127y74go https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_tools
I was homeschooled in a particular conservative area. Much of what I have been taught was... woefully inadequate, we'll say. Lots of my learning has come in university and afterwards, so what I've picked up is pretty obviously incomplete and leaves me with many unknown unknowns in this area. Today has begun filling in many of those gaps so they get to be known unknowns now!
> Lots of my learning has come in university and afterwards
That's true for pretty much everybody. Homeschooled or not. You think everyone shocked by this news was all homeschooled?