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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

#71

Post by throwup238 »

niwtsol wrote: post #63
throwup238 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don’t read popsci but if you’re interested in a rigorous treatment I’d recommend The Human Career by Klein which has the broad overview and The Human Past edited by Scarre which is more of a textbook.

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)

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

#72

Post by MarcelOlsz »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #69
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…

> 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 c…

The worst part of reading this thread is I know I won't be able to google image anything interesting related to "non-human hominids" :( Your comment was oddly depressing lol. Real "are we the baddies?" moment this morning.

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

#74

Post by ecshafer »

an0malous wrote: post #37
drakythe wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why not just watch the talk and hear his argument from himself? 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.

The self professed skeptic community is pretty extreme. Their arguments so often go beyond occams razor that is essentially absurdism to get around anything non-material or unexplained by current science / thinking.

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

#75

Post by hahahahhaah »

cpncrunch wrote: post #73
wumms wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Website has problems, NYT version: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/26/science/archaeology-neand...

That is paywalled. Try https://archive.ph/mHlUT

Recommend mods change it to this (or parent)

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

#76

Post by JumpCrisscross »

MarcelOlsz wrote: post #72
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 c…

The worst part of reading this thread is I know I won't be able to google image anything interesting related to "non-human hominids" :( Your comment was oddly depressing lol. Real "are we the baddies?" moment this morning.

> won't be able to google image anything interesting related to "non-human hominids"

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo

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

#77

Post by dang »

wumms wrote: post #24
dang wrote: post #78

[stub for offtopicness]

Website has problems, NYT version: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/26/science/archaeology-neand...

Thanks, we've switched to that from https://archaeologymag.com/2026/01/430000-year-old-wooden-to... and put a couple extra links in the toptext.

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

#79

Post by dang »

throwup238 wrote: post #47
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

[flagged]

> Am I taking crazy pills, or are you?

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.

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

#80

Post by riffraff »

drakythe wrote: post #16
throwup238 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have evidence of control over fire (but not fire starting) at about 1 million years. Stone tools go even further back, at least 2 million years.

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.

ah, there's a very good movie about this exact topic (not scientifically accurate, one presumes, but still very good)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_for_Fire_(film)

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