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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

#191

Post by WalterBright »

api wrote: post #176
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…

Sometimes when I think about this it makes me wonder if we should take the dark forest hypothesis seriously (re: Fermi paradox). Not only are we the only species to reach this kind of technology but among humans the first group to reach space was the Nazis. Today the innovation in that area seems driven by militaristic states and by people who seem ideologically adjacent. In other words it’s driven by very aggressive…

> Today the innovation in that area seems driven by militaristic states and by people who seem ideologically adjacent.

Today it's Musk driving space technology forward, and I don't see him acting militaristic.

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

#192

Post by Hikikomori »

drakythe wrote: post #44
sophacles wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/stefanmilo has a lot of good stuff. I don't know enough to know where he's right or wrong, but provides entry points for to looking more into it. I have gone down a couple rabbit holes based on his videos and while it seems like he's occasionally gotten some facts wrong or misunderstood an argument, I'm pretty confident he's doing a decent job accurately representing the…

Awesome. I've watched plenty of Miniminuteman (Milo Rossi) videos, but his tend to be more pop-sci/debunking outrageous claims and less foundationally educational. I'll check this channel out too.

David Miano and Flint Dibbles channels are also great. Both educational and debunking.

https://www.youtube.com/@worldofantiquity

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC27vDmUZpQjuJFFkUz8ujtg

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

#193

Post by to11mtm »

crazygringo wrote: post #186
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…

> unique among animals in that we have a genocidal tendency That's an unsupported generalization. The article describes "behaviors" that include "perhaps even genocide", and notes that wiping out populations exists in chimps and wolves too. So not unique, there's a "perhaps", and it's not a tendency . There's no evidence we have a "gene" for it or anything. In the vast, vast, vast majority of conflicts between two gr…

We are far more subtle and targeted about it as a whole, possibly due to our social structures.

As vapid as the movie (intentionally) is, "Mean Girls" does a really good break-down of things, and perhaps the main issue is that unlike some other animal groups, people don't always stop.

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

#194

Post by crazygringo »

to11mtm wrote: post #193
crazygringo wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> unique among animals in that we have a genocidal tendency That's an unsupported generalization. The article describes "behaviors" that include "perhaps even genocide", and notes that wiping out populations exists in chimps and wolves too. So not unique, there's a "perhaps", and it's not a tendency . There's no evidence we have a "gene" for it or anything. In the vast, vast, vast majority of conflicts between two gr…

We are far more subtle and targeted about it as a whole, possibly due to our social structures. As vapid as the movie (intentionally) is, "Mean Girls" does a really good break-down of things, and perhaps the main issue is that unlike some other animal groups, people don't always stop .

No. We simply engage in cost-benefit analysis, because we have limited resources.

Entirely wiping out an enemy population can be incredibly risky as they'll try to also wipe you out in response. It consumes enormous resources as people on your own side get killed, your resources get used up, etc. It weakens your group making you more vulnerable to attack from third parties.

Most of the time, it's just bad strategy.

You don't need to invent instincts or tendencies or claim something is more subtle or targeted when the vastly simpler explanation is just that it's all just cost-benefit.

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

#195

Post by throwup238 »

alecbz wrote: post #158
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…

> Even this evidence of woodworking is largely unremarkable .... this find is most notable for its preservation. This somewhat contradicts the subheading, no? > The finding, along with the discovery of a 500,000-year-old hammer made of bone, indicates that our human ancestors were making tools even earlier than archaeologists thought.

That subheading is complete nonsense and I can't think of a single charitable reading of that sentence that in any way makes sense. Archaeologists have known that our ancestors have been making tools for over a million years since the Acheulean industry was conclusively dated in the 1850s. It took half a century for archaeologists to figure that out after William Smith invented stratigraphy. Scientists didn't even know what an isotope was yet.

The original paper's abstract is much more specific (ignore the Significance section, which is more editorializing):

> Here, we present the earliest handheld wooden tools, identified from secure contexts at the site of Marathousa 1, Greece, dated to ca. 430 ka (MIS12). [1]

Which is true. Before this the oldest handheld wooden tool with a secure context [2] was a thrusting spear from Germany dated ~400kYA [3]. The oldest evidence of woodworking is at least 1.5 million years old but we just don't have any surviving wooden tools from that period.

[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2515479123

[2] This is a very important term of art in archaeology. It means that the artefact was excavated by a qualified team of archaeologists that painstakingly recorded every little detail of the excavation so that the dating can be validated using several different methods (carbon dating only works up to about 60k years)

[3] https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/behavior/getting-food/o...

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

#196

Post by GolDDranks »

lugu wrote: post #126

> The finding, along with the discovery of a 500,000-year-old hammer made of bone, indicates that our human ancestors were making tools even earlier than archaeologists *thought*. I am tired of this. No. Archeologist only claim what they have discovered. They don't speculate because they work based on evidences. Journalists should better. This wording sounds like archeologists were wrong. That only fuel the narrative…

I'm not so sure if that's too wrong.

Science works by scientist having a model of reality and then testing that model against reality, gathering evidence that fits or doesn't fit the model, evaluating how well the model corresponds to reality.

If there is a widely accepted model in the archaeological community, and the new data contradicts it, the wording "than archaeologists thought" seems plausible enough.

Of course, depending on the model, the model itself might admit regimes of "non-applicability", or have some measure of confidence... If archeologists have large uncertainty whether human ancestors made tools 500,000 years back or not, then they shouldn't be surprised upon finding evidence that the ancestors did.

I don't know any specifics about this case, just arguing that that kind of wording by itself is not always wrong by default.

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

#197

Post by Hikikomori »

melenaboija wrote: post #114

Ok, since I moved to the US from Europe a few years ago my perception of wood has changed a lot, especially for construction. Seeing this reinforces my view. Wood lasts for fucking ever under the proper conditions. Old construction in Europe often only had the beams made of wood, and I always thought that was orders of magnitude more durable than wooden houses, like thousands of years vs decades. I don’t think that’s…

Northern Europe still uses wood, se have a lot of it.

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

#198

Post by WalterBright »

drakythe wrote: post #123
hearsathought wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

No, but I do think it more likely they got a more accurate world history class somewhere along the line. I was taught creationism thanks to the conservatism nature of my family and the area I grew up in. It took a long while to know and accept the world (and universe) is as old as it is.

I went through public elementary and high school. The amount of world history taught there is vanishingly small.

Just for fun, ask some high schoolers who were the major combatants in WW2.

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

#200

Post by Hikikomori »

3RTB297 wrote: post #48
lmf4lol wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why do you think would this info be surpressed?

I'm not the person you asked this of, but I've worked in museums and research settings and can lob a response your way. Ultimately, it's that scientists are humans, too. Despite some of them really making their research data-forward, things like tenure, career, funding, and even who would publish your work now and in the future all create normal human environments that reward small, incremental changes to a body of k…

>Both warm-blooded dinosaurs and the Chicxulub impact were both theories dismissed as fringe for decades before overwhelming evidence led to them being accepted as likely. In no small way thanks to Jurassic Park.

I mean that's how science works. Things can be dismissed until they're proven true. If there's a valid path to finding out it's true then you can try to get funding, it just takes work and convincing people as you're competing for sparse resources. And getting egg on your face is also part of the process.

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