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45000 years ago in Ethiopia humans built a paint workshop; used it for millennia

194 points by xaedes 9y ago

JPLeRouzic 9y ago
It is an incredibly long time, but places like Ounjougo in Mali have been inhabited for hundred of thousand years by several species of humans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ounjougou https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ounjougou An explanation lies in the fact that in those ancient times there was little numbers of humans, sometimes less than 20,000 (on the whole earth) so it is not surprizing they inhabited the same places over and over. They had no manpower to even build a village. That would come much later with neolithics when population will explode in numbers, but perhaps not in quality of life.
- FilterSweep 9y ago
  > they inhabited the same places over and over It must be jarring for a new cohort of humans to come across artifacts invented and developed by predecessor that they can't understand. Our archival-based approach to history is a complete opposite, but I wonder if the relics of the past helped influence the future generations of ancient human.
  - marcosdumay 9y ago
    You mean, like the pyramids? I could imagine everything around being like them.
    - InitialLastName 9y ago
      It blows my mind every time I remember that the Great Pyramid was the tallest building on earth from ~2560 BC to 1311 CE. Also, at the point that some apocryphal Israelites left Egypt, the Giza Pyramids would have already been 1000 years old.
      - jerrylives 9y ago
        The Romans looked upon the New Kingdom the way we look at the Romans. And the New Kingdom looked upon the Old Kingdom the way we view the New Kingdom.
        ashark 9y ago
        I've got Lichtheim's 3-volume Literature of Ancient Egypt. The time between the earliest and latest entries in that collection? Something like 2400-2500 years (IIRC). And (again IIRC) it stops a few hundred years shy of crossing the BC/AD boundary. It spans 4-5 related, but distinct, major civilizations living on roughly the same land, only the last couple of which are recent enough to squeeze onto the leading edge of where we usually start the narrative of recorded history. The "ancient world" had its own ancient world.
        jerrylives 9y ago
        Absolutely. Even before the Pyramids, imagine being an ancient nomadic human circa 5000-4000 BCE and coming across the ruins of Göbekli Tepe. Also another perspective fun fact: Stonehenge is older than the Pyramids
        nerfhammer 9y ago
        They wouldn't understand how old it is. They would just say "huh, some people must have been here long ago."
        jerrylives 9y ago
        I think you underestimate our ancestors
        bbctol 9y ago
        They'd be more likely to say "Some gods lived here long ago."
        9y ago
  - gumby 9y ago
    > It must be jarring for a new cohort of humans to come across artifacts invented and developed by predecessor that they can't understand. As others have pointed out your position is a modern one; the "wonders of the ancients" is a several thousand year old perspective. And in fact for a good chunk of recent European history (last couple of millennia) the prevailing view was one of declinism when compared to the Romans of the late Republic and early empire. But we don't know if the users of this cave had that jarring experience. 4500 years is a long time but it's quite possible -- likely even -- that there was continuous use, so it was "just part of the landscape" with knowledge accreting and being passed on. The reason I say "likely" is that presumably the color technology evolved over some period of time, and if the users died off and the cave was later rediscovered after a gap, the new discoverers would have to re-invent a bunch of the tech somewhat from scratch (although results and possibly raw materials would be right there to provide hints). It's interesting to speculate what kind of speech and culture they might have had.
    - simonh 9y ago
      Technology development was unbelievably slow back then, so re-inventing tech, which seems like a routine thing to do to us, was next to unimaginable back then. We see exactly the same artifices made exactly the same way over stretches of eover a million years (the Acheulian had axe). In that era lost technology was simply gone for all intents and purposes at a community level. This site lies in the Middle Palaeolithic era which lasted about 300 thousand years.
      - gumby 9y ago
        Even with good communication that remained true until very recently: read the debates on the constitutional roots of the US patent system and it was an explicit "bribe" that you received a government-guaranteed monopoly in exchange for explaining how to make your invention. Otherwise the information could easily be lost. Obviously that's not how the system works today
- Retric 9y ago
  The 20 thousand is based on a rather fuzzy boundary for what is human. Neanderthal for example could still breed with Homosapiens and produce viable offspring at least some of the time. So, they are arguably the same species, though arguably not.
  - Crito 9y ago
    >So, they are arguably the same species, though arguably not. Nature has no respect for our discrete classifications.
    - MR4D 9y ago
      Your statement nailed it. I think that 100 years from now we won't be teaching biology and it's existing classification system of Kingdom/Phylum/Class, but something much more accurate based on genetics (i.e. DNA). It might still fit the hierarchy, but the delineation will be much better aligned with nature.
      - olavk 9y ago
        I think classifications are necessary even though nature is fuzzy and gradual.
      - marcosdumay 9y ago
        We are already reviewing species, gender, family and sometimes even class classification based on DNA. It didn't change things that much.
      - GlennS 9y ago
        This has already happened, and is called cladistics. So, pretty good prediction.
      - sedachv 9y ago
        That is already how biology is being taught: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_m4Gvu90Ydw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_m4Gvu90Ydw [Lec 1 | MIT 7.012 Introduction to Biology, Fall 2004]
- dghughes 9y ago
  The Dakhleh Oasis in southern Egypt has supposedly been inhabited by humans for at least 200,000 years without interruption. http://www.muzarp.poznan.pl/en/exhibitions/permanent/rock-art-of-the-dakhleh-oasis/in-search-of-prehistoric-saharan-art-the-petroglyphs-decoding/ http://www.muzarp.poznan.pl/en/exhibitions/permanent/rock-ar...
- mc32 9y ago
  For reference, it's believed people were in Australia, prior to 45,000 years ago. But there were bottlenecks several times before that.
interfixus 9y ago
"Then they treated the powder by heating it or mixing it with other ingredients to create the world's first paint" Nitpick. "The world's first known paint". Future-proof and more to my taste.
- phailhaus 9y ago
  You should comment on the article, unlikely that the author is going to read the comments here.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
hanselot 9y ago
Good thing paintings are so tasty.
ilamont 9y ago
There are other sites that served similar functions for ancient peoples over long periods of time. I recently learned about one of them in the Blue Hills just south of Boston; it was a quarry used by native people for thousands of years to make stone tools such as spears and axes: Wampatuk hill, one of the many that make up the ridges of the Blue Hills, is made entirely out of a material called rhyolite. Essentially this hill represents a portion of the lava column located within the volcano that solidified so quickly that it’s silica (or glass)- rich magma turned into a crystalline fine grained blue rock with tiny flecks of quartz. It is the natural blue color of the stones of the Blue Hills that gave the area its name, and it is this one particular type of blue stone that brought Native people from the surrounding area to Wampatuk to mine and work its natural stone. The entire area surrounding the hill consists of massive boulders and outcrops of blue hills rhyolite, each one slightly different, and each one a type of stone that I have found turned into tools that we excavate on archaeological sites throughout the area. These range from the deep blue-black stones east and south of Wampatuk to the oddly speckled material you find on Wampatuk itself. This hill was a Mecca of stone tool production. As you walk the Sawcut Notch path along the northern boundary of the park, you will pass great dome and little dome. These two small hills are made out of Braintree slate and Massachusett hornfels. Keep an eye open for scoop-like marks in the stone where thousands of years before a Massachusett Native person was standing exactly where you are striking the slate to remove portions of it to turn into tools. Turn around and behind you will be small mounds of stone fragments. These mounds are not natural deposits, but heaps of stone waste, each the result of stone striking stone working raw slate down to a spear preform or perhaps a stone adz. These are all viewable from the path and artifacts lie within the path itself. ... ... The natural hillside was not in fact natural, it was, and IS, a quarry of truly monumental proportions. The terraces I had walked were not simply erosional, but were in fact carved into the raw rock by Massachusett Native people quarrying stone from the hillside for thousands of years, and the mounds and pathways I had been climbing over were mountains of stone debris consisting of Millions upon millions of stone flakes each individually struck by human hands. http://friendsofthebluehills.org/keynote/ http://friendsofthebluehills.org/keynote/
- camelNotation 9y ago
  Exact same thing at Morrow Mountain in North Carolina. It was a quarry used by natives for thousands of years to obtain Rhyolite for tools and weapons. Apparently Rhyolite was a big deal everywhere. Who knew? It feels as if I'm missing out on some sort of universal human experience of making sharp stuff out of Rhyolite.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
carlob 9y ago
Funny that the main researcher on this study on ochre would be called Rosso (red in Italian).
nradam123 9y ago
How many things we don't know from that age! I heard Indus Valley Civilization used to domesticate animals and had a network of sewage system in place. Pretty cool for 3000 BC.
kkoomi 9y ago
4,500 years
sneak 9y ago
They made paint here for 4500 years. People have been programming computers for 70. That is a terrifying thought.

194 points by xaedes 9y ago

It is an incredibly long time, but places like Ounjougo in Mali have been inhabited for hundred of thousand years by several species of humans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ounjougou https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ounjougou An explanation lies in the fact that in those ancient times there was little numbers of humans, sometimes less than 20,000 (on the whole earth) so it is not surprizing they inhabited the same places over and over. They had no manpower to even build a village. That would come much later with neolithics when population will explode in numbers, but perhaps not in quality of life.

FilterSweep 9y ago
> they inhabited the same places over and over It must be jarring for a new cohort of humans to come across artifacts invented and developed by predecessor that they can't understand. Our archival-based approach to history is a complete opposite, but I wonder if the relics of the past helped influence the future generations of ancient human.
- marcosdumay 9y ago
  You mean, like the pyramids? I could imagine everything around being like them.
  - InitialLastName 9y ago
    It blows my mind every time I remember that the Great Pyramid was the tallest building on earth from ~2560 BC to 1311 CE. Also, at the point that some apocryphal Israelites left Egypt, the Giza Pyramids would have already been 1000 years old.
    - jerrylives 9y ago
      The Romans looked upon the New Kingdom the way we look at the Romans. And the New Kingdom looked upon the Old Kingdom the way we view the New Kingdom.
      - ashark 9y ago
        I've got Lichtheim's 3-volume Literature of Ancient Egypt. The time between the earliest and latest entries in that collection? Something like 2400-2500 years (IIRC). And (again IIRC) it stops a few hundred years shy of crossing the BC/AD boundary. It spans 4-5 related, but distinct, major civilizations living on roughly the same land, only the last couple of which are recent enough to squeeze onto the leading edge of where we usually start the narrative of recorded history. The "ancient world" had its own ancient world.
        jerrylives 9y ago
        Absolutely. Even before the Pyramids, imagine being an ancient nomadic human circa 5000-4000 BCE and coming across the ruins of Göbekli Tepe. Also another perspective fun fact: Stonehenge is older than the Pyramids
        nerfhammer 9y ago
        They wouldn't understand how old it is. They would just say "huh, some people must have been here long ago."
        jerrylives 9y ago
        I think you underestimate our ancestors
        bbctol 9y ago
        They'd be more likely to say "Some gods lived here long ago."
        9y ago
- gumby 9y ago
  > It must be jarring for a new cohort of humans to come across artifacts invented and developed by predecessor that they can't understand. As others have pointed out your position is a modern one; the "wonders of the ancients" is a several thousand year old perspective. And in fact for a good chunk of recent European history (last couple of millennia) the prevailing view was one of declinism when compared to the Romans of the late Republic and early empire. But we don't know if the users of this cave had that jarring experience. 4500 years is a long time but it's quite possible -- likely even -- that there was continuous use, so it was "just part of the landscape" with knowledge accreting and being passed on. The reason I say "likely" is that presumably the color technology evolved over some period of time, and if the users died off and the cave was later rediscovered after a gap, the new discoverers would have to re-invent a bunch of the tech somewhat from scratch (although results and possibly raw materials would be right there to provide hints). It's interesting to speculate what kind of speech and culture they might have had.
  - simonh 9y ago
    Technology development was unbelievably slow back then, so re-inventing tech, which seems like a routine thing to do to us, was next to unimaginable back then. We see exactly the same artifices made exactly the same way over stretches of eover a million years (the Acheulian had axe). In that era lost technology was simply gone for all intents and purposes at a community level. This site lies in the Middle Palaeolithic era which lasted about 300 thousand years.
    - gumby 9y ago
      Even with good communication that remained true until very recently: read the debates on the constitutional roots of the US patent system and it was an explicit "bribe" that you received a government-guaranteed monopoly in exchange for explaining how to make your invention. Otherwise the information could easily be lost. Obviously that's not how the system works today
Retric 9y ago
The 20 thousand is based on a rather fuzzy boundary for what is human. Neanderthal for example could still breed with Homosapiens and produce viable offspring at least some of the time. So, they are arguably the same species, though arguably not.
- Crito 9y ago
  >So, they are arguably the same species, though arguably not. Nature has no respect for our discrete classifications.
  - MR4D 9y ago
    Your statement nailed it. I think that 100 years from now we won't be teaching biology and it's existing classification system of Kingdom/Phylum/Class, but something much more accurate based on genetics (i.e. DNA). It might still fit the hierarchy, but the delineation will be much better aligned with nature.
    - olavk 9y ago
      I think classifications are necessary even though nature is fuzzy and gradual.
    - marcosdumay 9y ago
      We are already reviewing species, gender, family and sometimes even class classification based on DNA. It didn't change things that much.
    - GlennS 9y ago
      This has already happened, and is called cladistics. So, pretty good prediction.
    - sedachv 9y ago
      That is already how biology is being taught: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_m4Gvu90Ydw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_m4Gvu90Ydw [Lec 1 | MIT 7.012 Introduction to Biology, Fall 2004]
dghughes 9y ago
The Dakhleh Oasis in southern Egypt has supposedly been inhabited by humans for at least 200,000 years without interruption. http://www.muzarp.poznan.pl/en/exhibitions/permanent/rock-art-of-the-dakhleh-oasis/in-search-of-prehistoric-saharan-art-the-petroglyphs-decoding/ http://www.muzarp.poznan.pl/en/exhibitions/permanent/rock-ar...
mc32 9y ago
For reference, it's believed people were in Australia, prior to 45,000 years ago. But there were bottlenecks several times before that.

interfixus 9y ago

"Then they treated the powder by heating it or mixing it with other ingredients to create the world's first paint" Nitpick. "The world's first known paint". Future-proof and more to my taste.

phailhaus 9y ago
You should comment on the article, unlikely that the author is going to read the comments here.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

hanselot 9y ago

Good thing paintings are so tasty.

ilamont 9y ago

There are other sites that served similar functions for ancient peoples over long periods of time. I recently learned about one of them in the Blue Hills just south of Boston; it was a quarry used by native people for thousands of years to make stone tools such as spears and axes: Wampatuk hill, one of the many that make up the ridges of the Blue Hills, is made entirely out of a material called rhyolite. Essentially this hill represents a portion of the lava column located within the volcano that solidified so quickly that it’s silica (or glass)- rich magma turned into a crystalline fine grained blue rock with tiny flecks of quartz. It is the natural blue color of the stones of the Blue Hills that gave the area its name, and it is this one particular type of blue stone that brought Native people from the surrounding area to Wampatuk to mine and work its natural stone. The entire area surrounding the hill consists of massive boulders and outcrops of blue hills rhyolite, each one slightly different, and each one a type of stone that I have found turned into tools that we excavate on archaeological sites throughout the area. These range from the deep blue-black stones east and south of Wampatuk to the oddly speckled material you find on Wampatuk itself. This hill was a Mecca of stone tool production. As you walk the Sawcut Notch path along the northern boundary of the park, you will pass great dome and little dome. These two small hills are made out of Braintree slate and Massachusett hornfels. Keep an eye open for scoop-like marks in the stone where thousands of years before a Massachusett Native person was standing exactly where you are striking the slate to remove portions of it to turn into tools. Turn around and behind you will be small mounds of stone fragments. These mounds are not natural deposits, but heaps of stone waste, each the result of stone striking stone working raw slate down to a spear preform or perhaps a stone adz. These are all viewable from the path and artifacts lie within the path itself. ... ... The natural hillside was not in fact natural, it was, and IS, a quarry of truly monumental proportions. The terraces I had walked were not simply erosional, but were in fact carved into the raw rock by Massachusett Native people quarrying stone from the hillside for thousands of years, and the mounds and pathways I had been climbing over were mountains of stone debris consisting of Millions upon millions of stone flakes each individually struck by human hands. http://friendsofthebluehills.org/keynote/ http://friendsofthebluehills.org/keynote/

camelNotation 9y ago
Exact same thing at Morrow Mountain in North Carolina. It was a quarry used by natives for thousands of years to obtain Rhyolite for tools and weapons. Apparently Rhyolite was a big deal everywhere. Who knew? It feels as if I'm missing out on some sort of universal human experience of making sharp stuff out of Rhyolite.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

carlob 9y ago

Funny that the main researcher on this study on ochre would be called Rosso (red in Italian).

nradam123 9y ago

How many things we don't know from that age! I heard Indus Valley Civilization used to domesticate animals and had a network of sewage system in place. Pretty cool for 3000 BC.

kkoomi 9y ago

4,500 years

sneak 9y ago

They made paint here for 4500 years. People have been programming computers for 70. That is a terrifying thought.