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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

#51

Post by mmooss »

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

> 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 don't think you can find anyone in archaeology who says tool use began less than 1 million years ago (mya). Maybe you mean something else?

The univeral consensus in archaeology says tools emerged either 3.3 mya, which is still subject to debate last I knew, and certainly by 2.58 mya - the Odowan industry famously discovered by the Leakeys in the Oldovai Gorge in Tanzania, in 1969.

The same consensus continues with the development of the more advanced Acheulean industry ~1.76 mya, which dominated until ~ 400,000 years ago (arguably the most successful technology ever).

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

#52

Post by HocusLocus »

I have always believed that the human evolution consensus which is usually based upon finds of advanced toolmaking in absence of culture cues, to be questionable by orders of magnitude. So it seemed natural to simply double generational concepts of the village along a trade route, from ~500kya (like the Nile) to 1 million YA as a hyperstable span of evolution of the 'trade route village'. I even wrote a book about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtxgpaXp9vA that might seem like whole fiction. But science seems not to ask, how many times might we have started over?

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

#53

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

metalman wrote: post #39
drakythe wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 trackw…

> 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

This is very heavily disputed and very much not consensus opinion. (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_naledi#Possible_burials and https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...)

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

#54

Post by mmooss »

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…

> I've worked in museums and research settings

You've worked in those settings, and you think archaeologists reject tool use older than 1 mya?

Also, you don't understand that science is a process, based on evidence, and revision is an essential part of that process? Archaeology especially advances regularly, because evidence can be relatively very rare. If they weren't revising it, it would mean the whole research enterprise - to expand knowledge - was failing.

> how many times has the earliest dates of hominids and tool use and human thresholds of development been pushed back by tens of thousands of years?

I don't know, how many times? Tool use is universally believed, in the field, to have begun at least 2.58 million years ago, and with strong evidence for 3.3 mya. Tens of thousands of years isn't in the debate. See this subthread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46782072

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

#55

Post by andrewflnr »

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.

Because life is short and we have to prioritize the talks we watch. And if you've seen enough bullshit, you can smell it coming. So if someone gives strong signals that they're full of it, we don't bother.

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

#56

Post by dbcurtis »

sophacles wrote: post #40
drakythe wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

When is the first evidence for cooking?

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

#57

Post by bookofjoe »

mmooss wrote: post #42
ryan_j_naughton wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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)...

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

#58

Post by throwup238 »

dbcurtis wrote: post #56
sophacles wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

When is the first evidence for cooking?

That’s a complicated question. The Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa where we found the first evidence of controlled fire also contained burned plant remains and bones, which could be interpreted as evidence of cooking. There were also burned fish remains found at the Gesher Benot Ya’aqov site in Israel, dated to about 780 kYA, which could also be interpreted as evidence of cooking.

By far the strongest evidence is the Qesem Cave in Israel, which had a central hearth and so many burned animal remains that it couldn’t have been accidental. Unfortunately the dating on that is controversial and the error bar is huge at 300 +- 100 kYA (200,000-400,000 years ago).

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

#59

Post by engineer_22 »

eigenspace wrote: post #22
Salgat wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically even archive.is just has the 503 page cached.

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

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

#60

Post by MengerSponge »

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!

You might be old enough to have been taught that Humans are tool-using apes. That's tragically incomplete: lots of apes use tools. Birds use tools. And now, cows use tools!

Cow tools: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj0n127y74go

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_tools

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