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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

#231

Post by nephihaha »

drakythe wrote: post #5

430,000 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!

It depends how loosely you want to define "tool". Certain other primates, birds etc use very primitive tools out in the wild. More sophisticated ones, with multiple parts etc turn up much later in the record.

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

#232

Post by ErroneousBosh »

anthk wrote: post #184
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Way back when I was in high school doing history (Money for Nothing was on heavy rotation on the radio and Bob from Stranger Things was still Mikey from the Goonies), our teacher explained that there was evidence of stone tools being used by early hominids, then nothing much except maybe fragments of rock that may have been used as hammers or axe heads, and then into an era where simple bronze tools emerged. What arc…

EDIT: Use XSane for it, as if it were an scanner. Look up on how to edit the config files in /etc https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-hardware-18/k...

Getting serial comms to it isn't the problem I'm trying to solve because the photos are on a CF card. There are 320x240 images that are just a plain JPEG, and some larger ones, about 500-odd by whatever, that are in a funny proprietary format.

I had this working about 25 years ago...

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

#233

Post by nandomrumber »

wil421 wrote: post #185
Sharlin wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You and everyone else know exactly what I meant but whatever. Not sure why I train AI on this site anymore.

How can I be certain I know what you mean.

Ever since Earth’s atmosphere had sufficient oxygen to sustain fire given a fuel source and heat, fire has exists.

If we can lay the blame on anyone for having started fire it’s going to be whoever fine tuned the constants such that there is anything here at all.

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

#234

Post by sam_goody »

Do we know if these were formed intentionally or just happened to be in such a form and were used by those that found them?

Do we know if these were used more than once, or if they were in a convenient shape that was grabbed by a local for one time use?

How do we know that these were actually used as tools and not just pieces of wood that coincidentally in the site?

Do we have any reason to think these were used by (precursor to) humans more than ravens, beavers or any other number of animals that use tools?

Because of the paywall I could not read the whole article, but the pictures and intro leave a lot unanswered.

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

#235

Post by nandomrumber »

jackdawipper wrote: post #206
contingencies wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Utah it's 4:20PM

I still dream of Orgonon https://youtu.be/m97WlpsuU74?si=g77UHyI8aEmiH-k8

Amazing! What a gift. I really enjoyed that, and will continue to really enjoy that for years to come.

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

#236

Post by nandomrumber »

throwup238 wrote: post #216
Incipient wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>going to use a charged word I honestly have no clue what word you used was 'charged'. Considering any of those words charged makes me worry how far political correctness has gone! (I'm assuming, I suppose, politically charged?)

“Genocidal” is charged because it projects human morality onto non-human animals. It’s about basic scientific hygiene, not political correctness.

That’s not why genocidal is a charged word in my opinion.

It’s because it implies that genocide has always been, and will always be, a reality humans will all too frequently find them selves having to contend with.

An aspect of our evolutionary success that will haunt us always, at least while its not busy being indulged in.

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

#237

Post by eigenspace »

engineer_22 wrote: post #59
eigenspace wrote: post #22

Earlier 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

Thank you!

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

#238

Post by nandomrumber »

nomel wrote: post #106
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…

I think this is part of the reason humans are so stupid during any sort of divisions where "sides" emerge. To be able to do commit this genocide, you need a very ugly "switch" in your head that can make your actions justifiable/right. I think this switch is the same, emotional, unthinking one that makes some people so religion about teams sports, phone OS, political alignment, etc. Related, I think this is also the m…

This was worth reading, thank you.

The line between good and evil runs straight down the centre of every human heart.

And dogs / wolves too, and definitely many / all cetaceans, because they are also cursed with the ability to be deeply affected by the presence, and absence / loss, of those they form bonds with. And that drives us all to be prepared to kill, or at least encourage others to, not out or physical necessity (nutrition) but retribution.

I’ve always considered the criminal justice system to be a euphemism for the codified retribution system.

We live in an unjust realm. All we can ever hope for is something approximating an appropriate level of retribution.

And it is a would appear as fact that that not infrequently rises to the level of not just genocide as we are familiar with it most recently, but proper extermination.

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

#239

Post by api »

joquarky wrote: post #214
api wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But why would a species that built an Apache helicopter want to waste its resources on attacking a termite mound?

It doesn’t need to be rational.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/mar/03/afghanistan.lu...

The thought experiment I’m doing is asking what happens if there is a link between hyper aggressive species and certain kinds of intelligence and technological development.

It could just be a fluke of our evolution and history that there seems to be a link, but what if it’s a pattern. If true this would mean any spacefaring intelligence is likely to be quite scary.

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

#240

Post by Hikikomori »

3RTB297 wrote: post #222
Hikikomori wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

>dismissed as fringe >I mean that's how science works. So you're saying it's a good thing to dismiss potential new discoveries because of feels? Not investigate further, not look for additional data to refute the theory or not. Just dismiss as crackpot BS? IIRC, that's not how science works.

Yes you can dismiss things when a theory doesn't have any evidence and also doesn't work with current evidence. Like you can dismiss my theory of the moon being made of cheese, there might be some under the crust, we haven't looked.
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