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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

#31

Post by anonymous908213 »

drakythe wrote: post #26
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

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

It instantly destroys all credibility. Any serious theory would present itself on its own merits rather than going for the victimhood angle. When you title your book in such a way as to push the perceived victimhood to the forefront, it indicates that there is no convincing evidence and therefore the only option left to you is to play at the conspiracy angle, cursing the shadowy figures who are suppressing the "forbidden truth".

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

#32

Post by alsetmusic »

There's bound to be a lot of vital archeological evidence of the development of humans and our cousins below the water. Past peoples probably lived near the coasts and the rising water would have obscured or destroyed a lot of the evidence of their existence. I think a lot about what must be or have been just out of reach of our current studies.

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

#33

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

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.

> 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?

Pretty much. Being able to transfer/build a fire is a lot easier than starting one. Fire starting requires bow/flint&steel and a lot of patience. Control basically means using simple torches to transfer fire from one place to another (where the initial source is either lightning/wildfire or embers of a previous fire).

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

#34

Post by thinkingtoilet »

ryan_j_naughton wrote: post #29
thinkingtoilet wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's wild! Thanks for sharing. I didn't realize these things went so far back. So are you saying these were straight up non-human primates using tools? Or is this all traceable to our lineage?

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…

So cool! Thanks for the info.

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

#35

Post by throwup238 »

thinkingtoilet wrote: post #14
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…

That's wild! Thanks for sharing. I didn't realize these things went so far back. So are you saying these were straight up non-human primates using tools? Or is this all traceable to our lineage?

Our last common ancestor with our closest non-human primates (Pan genus) diverged about 6-8 million years ago, so what constitutes “human” is murky and I don’t think archaeologists give the matter much thought. “Human” means homo sapiens, “archaic human” means a few subspecies like neanderthals up to about 600 kYA, and the rest are just “hominins”.

We have both observational and archaeological evidence of tool use in chimpanzees, macaques, and capuchins so it’s a pretty widespread behavior. I think the archaeological evidence for monkeys only goes back about four thousand years but thats because we havent studied the issue as much in archaeology.

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

#36

Post by sophacles »

drakythe wrote: post #23
adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have 3.3 million year old stone tools https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14464 . They're very simple (even more so than the Oldowan stone tools https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldowan ) and basically just look like rocks, but there is clear evidence of intentional shaping by hominins (somewhere in the fuzzy late Australopthis/early homo transition).

Thanks for these sources. Archeology definitely is a big known unknown for me, so even getting started reading basic info about this is rough. I appreciate the links and terms.

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 archaeology.

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

#37

Post by an0malous »

drakythe wrote: post #26
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

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.

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

#39

Post by metalman »

drakythe wrote: post #20
jolt42 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finding red blood cells in 70 million year old bones. Still find that incomprehensible. Not sure King George didn't kill a dinosaur.

For anyone else absolutely baffled by this statement: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jun/09/75-million-y... Red blood cells, and collagen from dinosaur bones. With the idea that even current museum hosted bones might have more??? Today is a wild day for me.

It gets wilder, all of the finds mentioned so far are stuff I have heard of, then there are the intentional burials from millions of years agoby a tiny hominum in SA, deap in a cave complex that requires extream cave crawling to get into, and also from SA, there is strong evidence for the manufacture of red pigment @400kyr ago. And if you like, you can wander around certain sea sides and pick, little tiny dino trackways that have fallen out of the cliff, :)

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

#40

Post by sophacles »

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.

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).
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