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430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found
131–140 of 277 posts
Re: 430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found
#132I wonder how would we react with tools dating back to, say, 5MY ago ... That would shake our knowledge from the foundations.
5 Million years ago would be insane... but what about..
5 BILLION years ago...
Re: 430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
To put it into perspective, we did not invent fire.
Well, nobody did, because fire was likely used for tens or hundreds of thousands of years before anyone figured out how to make fire on demand.
Which is what the comment you’re replying to means by “invent”.
Re: 430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
We are talking about tool manufacture here, however, not just about tool use.
The people of the Olduvan industry from 2.58 mya tools (the earliest accepted by consensus [0]) manufactured their tools - that's exactly what archaeologists are talking about. 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…
Not sure what you are asking. My point was that animals using objects as tools is a different thing than the Oldowan stone tool manufacturing “industry”. I wasn’t saying that tool manufacture is exclusive to primates. However, pointing out mere tool use by non-primates is sort of beside the point of the TFA topic, IMO.
Re: 430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found
#135430,000 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…
The submission's subheading seems to imply that there was a gap where homo* emerged but weren't using tools then though? I can't read the article or copy-paste it due to pay wall, but it says something along the lines of the find suggesting our human ancestors were using tools longer ago than we thought.
Re: 430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found
#136Re: 430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found
#137What's incredible about this too is they found it in England, which means they had to first build a boat to get there and leave the tools on the island
Re: 430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found
#138[dead]
Re: 430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Most recently (January 19, 2026): cows >Flexible use of a multi-purpose tool by a cow https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(25)...
Did they look like this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_tools#/media/File:Cow_Tool...
Re: 430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
> sounds all very unsubstantiated. Speculation it seems to me What part of the study strikes you as unsubstantiated?
Every part is unsubstantiated. For starters, for the vast majority of H. Sapiens existence on earth--from 300,000 years ago to about 45,000 years ago, we shared the world with 4 or 5 other hominids that we know about. (Neanderthal, Denisoven, H. Luzonensis, H. Floresiensis, and still perhaps a few H. Erectus, and no doubt even more we haven't found yet.) That's 250,000 years of coexistence. We know that we sheboinked…
> We have no evidence of warfare between the species.
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...