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!
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 1.5 million years. Wood tools just don’t survive very long, so this find is most notable for its preservation.
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?
> 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 cannot threaten us.
One reading of pre-history is that we had a number of hominids that were fine sharing the world, and humans, who were not. (I’ve seen the uncanny valley hypothesised as a human response to non-human hominids, as well as other humans carrying transmissible disfiguring diseases.)
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.
> 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.
As others mentioned, tool use wasn't restricted to homo sapiens. I think this makes sense, no? We didn't spontaneously use tools, it must have evolved incrementally in some way.
I think we see shades of this today. Bearded Capuchin monkeys chain a complex series of tasks and use tools to break nuts. From a brief documentary clip I saw [0], they first take the nut and strip away the outer layer of skin, leave it dry out in the sun for a week, then find a large soft-ish rock as the anvil with a heavier smaller rock to break open the nut. So they had to not only figure out that nuts need to be pre-shelled and dried, but that they needed a softer rock for the anvil and harder rock for the hammer. They also need at least some type of bipedal ability to carry the rock in the first place and use it as a hammer.
Apparently some white-faced Capuchins have figured out that they can soak nuts in water to soften it before hammering it open [1].
No, we could have had something which other previous species didn't that unlocked the use of tools. Otherwise if no species could be the first, or it would be deemed spontaneous, no new skills could be unlocked.
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!
I was homeschooled in a particular conservative area. Much of what I have been taught was... woefully inadequate, we'll say. Lots of my learning has come in university and afterwards, so what I've picked up is pretty obviously incomplete and leaves me with many unknown unknowns in this area. Today has begun filling in many of those gaps so they get to be known unknowns now!
Honestly I would have expected a pig or horse to be discovered to use tools, rather than a cow. Cattle are generally... not thought of as particularly intelligent.
Yes it's definitely further back than homo sapiens have existed (200k - 300k years), but our ancestor species were known to have used tools and control fire. I believe we have evidence of tool use going back 1 million years. So this article is referencing the oldest known _wooden_ tools, which are obviously much less likely to be preserved across the ages.
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).
We have evidence that non Homo sapiens bipeds (e.g., Neanderthals, Homo habilis) used tools far before we came onto the scene. A long lineage of hominin species came before humans!
And even today, our species' cousins (Chimps) are rudimentary tool users. Recently saw a documentary where they evolved their 'tools' to get honey from a 1-stick approach to a 3-stick approach.
The original link when I commented was to archeologymag.com -- it was later updated to NYTimes because of the hug of death that went on for multiple hours on archeologymag
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.
This isn't a problem for evolutionary theory. It's literally a necessary prediction of it. Most recent common ancestor of humans and chimps is 5-10 million years ago. Since we have observed tool usage in modern chimps and lots of very complicated tool use in humans, the necessary prediction is that some amount of tool use goes back at least ~5-10 million years, with increased complexity roughly tracking with the continuous increase in braincase size.
I don't understand why you think it'd be an issue?
Dumbed down understanding of mine: evolutionary theory predicts that graph goes from (0.1; 0) to (very high; in a million years). X axis: years, Y axis: progress or evolution. The only difference such discoveries make is to further refine the slope of the graph. Was the development linear or exponential? How fast did it progress? Obviously, in the past 500 years we didn't change as humans but our technological progress accelerated beyond belief.
Then ... you find out that smoking was introduced to the new world in the 16th c, and indigenous North Americans didn't start using the bow & arrow ubiquitously until after the year 1000. But! Native North Americans were using copper contemporaneously with the old world.
It might be just my perception, but it seems like every single time anthropologist make statements to the effect that complex human development didn't start until XX they are proven wrong. It wouldn't bother me so much if it wasn't for the fact that those "estimates" are generally used as proof to dismiss alternative timelines for human progression. I'm certainly not trying to say the planet had Atlantis with flying cars 300,000 years ago; but it certainly seems plausible that there were large/complex societies beginning long before the advent of our current written history... an idea that is regularly dismissed as foolish.
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.
That’s rapidly changing. Underwater archaeology has been going through a mini-Renaissance in the last thirty years thanks to multibeam and side scan sonar. Now with the proliferation of underwater drones capable of high-resolution 3D photogrammetry, that is rapidly accelerating into a full blown revolution. As usual the problem is lack of funding to do excavations. There are far more known sites than there are funds to study them.
The thing I’m continually surprised by is the usage of obsidian by nearly every ancient-ish civilization. The usage of bow & arrow predates farming, insane.
Not really that insane, hunting is a much faster reward cycle than farming. On the surface, it makes sense that tools for hunting are produced earlier than tools for farming
Ancient crops were also pathetic to a modern eye. Before thousands of years of selective breeding, corn had six or seven kernels on a cob. Doubtful that it would be possible to survive on a field of wild cultivars without at least a few generations pushing towards more productive specimens.
Perhaps the key word is "wooden"? Which is not to say much older wooden tools didn't exist, but it's likely extremely rare that they would be preserved this long.
Without assuming correctness, assuming instead "risk probability" - if previous advanced civilizations have risen and fallen on Earth, after evolving here naturally - what should we do as a species to not share their fate?
edit: I am not sure backupping to 'Mars', with its lack of magnetic field, inhospitality, and necessity to live underground is a positive idea
> 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 that layman's opinion is more informed than professionals.
True but every science headline is misleading, loaded or exaggerated. My pet peeve "X found where it should not exist". What they mean is "scientists are pleased because there's some new evidence that is not explained by their current models and that means they get to improve their models which is the goal of science anyway, so pretty much just another day for science but glad to keep you updated"
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.
Readit News
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!
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 1.5 million years. Wood tools just don’t survive very long, so this find is most notable for its preservation.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...
Edit: Okay I just found that Human can also refer to other hominids
from: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/human
- a bipedal primate mammal (Homo sapiens) : a person
- broadly : hominid
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 cannot threaten us.
One reading of pre-history is that we had a number of hominids that were fine sharing the world, and humans, who were not. (I’ve seen the uncanny valley hypothesised as a human response to non-human hominids, as well as other humans carrying transmissible disfiguring diseases.)
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/06/does-...
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.
I think we see shades of this today. Bearded Capuchin monkeys chain a complex series of tasks and use tools to break nuts. From a brief documentary clip I saw [0], they first take the nut and strip away the outer layer of skin, leave it dry out in the sun for a week, then find a large soft-ish rock as the anvil with a heavier smaller rock to break open the nut. So they had to not only figure out that nuts need to be pre-shelled and dried, but that they needed a softer rock for the anvil and harder rock for the hammer. They also need at least some type of bipedal ability to carry the rock in the first place and use it as a hammer.
Apparently some white-faced Capuchins have figured out that they can soak nuts in water to soften it before hammering it open [1].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFWTXU2jE14
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7sJq2XUiy8
Dead Comment
Cow tools: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj0n127y74go
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_tools
Honestly I would have expected a pig or horse to be discovered to use tools, rather than a cow. Cattle are generally... not thought of as particularly intelligent.
Fascinating stuff!
Dumbed down understanding of mine: evolutionary theory predicts that graph goes from (0.1; 0) to (very high; in a million years). X axis: years, Y axis: progress or evolution. The only difference such discoveries make is to further refine the slope of the graph. Was the development linear or exponential? How fast did it progress? Obviously, in the past 500 years we didn't change as humans but our technological progress accelerated beyond belief.
Dead Comment
https://evolution.earthathome.org/grasses/andropogoneae/maiz...
Hominin tools that are millions of years old have already been found by archeologists.
e.g., recent news: Scientists uncover 3-million-year-old tools but they weren’t made by our ancestors: https://www.futura-sciences.com/en/scientists-uncover-3-mill...
A list of findings of earliest known hominin tools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earliest_tools
edit: I am not sure backupping to 'Mars', with its lack of magnetic field, inhospitality, and necessity to live underground is a positive idea
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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 that layman's opinion is more informed than professionals.
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.
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