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Archaeologists discover oldest wooden structure
- pleb_nz 3y agoAwesome find and I am not surprised at all by the age. I wonder which species it was?
- derbOac 3y agoCombretum zeyheri
- orbital-decay 3y agoThe article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06557-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06557-9
- jl6 3y agoHow do they know the wood was used 476,000 years ago, as opposed to a human 6000 years ago finding and using some 470,000 year old wood? This gives a hint: > They used new luminescence dating techniques, which reveal the last time minerals in the sand surrounding the finds were exposed to sunlight, to determine their age. ... but it seems like there might be other explanations for that sand being there?
- sam_goody 3y agoThey do not have extraordinary evidence, but they believe that the claim is not extra-ordinary.
- varjag 3y agoIt's strange, for a jump from historical to an evolutionary timescale. I find this really hard to believe though naturally archeologists must be knowing what they're doing.
- huthuthike 3y agoWell we know that homo species have been using stone for millions of years because stone doesn't degrade easily. It's not that wild of a jump in logic to think they've been using wood for just as long.
- _a_a_a_ 3y agoRecently it was found monkeys/apes producing chippings that looked very much like what we thought hominids were producing, so that caused some upset. Edit: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/stone-flakes-made-by-monkeys-raise-questions-about-early-human-tools-180981785/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/stone-flakes-made-... (And the wood found here was worked, not just a handy pokey-stick)
- labrador 3y agoWhere do you find 470,000 year old wood that isn't petrified?
- anotheraccount9 3y agoI would really like to know the answer, if anyone wants to share.
- danparsonson 3y agoIt's a rhetorical question - you don't usually find wood that old except in very specific situations like this where conditions happen to have been right for preservation.
- diogenes4 3y ago> How do they know the wood was used 476,000 years ago, as opposed to a human 6000 years ago finding and using some 470,000 year old wood? Seems absurdly unlikely—is there a reason to suspect this is the case? Even if you were to find half-a-million-year-old wood why would you use it to build a structure?
- satvikpendem 3y agoI mean, we use rocks that are millions of years old in our own structures, why wouldn't it be likely that an early human saw some wood and thought that it'd be a strong building material without knowing or considering the age of that wood, or something to that effect?
- pixelfarmer 3y agoJust that wood is organic material and suffers faster degradation vs. rocks when exposed to weather, which is implied in "if you can just find it". Mind you, they were digging up material in the old times already to find the best stuff for making their tools, but they were for sure not looking for old wood in that manner. Plus, well preserved old wood is much harder than its fresh counterparts (better tooling / more time for processing required) and a rare find on top of that, so unlikely to be used for standard utility structures.
- bluehorizon2 3y agoI had the same question but the article said that the wood would have rotted by then. Makes sense since even lumber will dry rot in years if not taken care of. So I can buy the idea that it’s very old because it was preserved in an accidentally special way. I’m just wondering if it being submerged in water would have affected any readings or measurements they made since who knows what hundreds of thousands of years or even thousands of years might do to the things they are measuring.
- danparsonson 3y agoThis is the usual way of dating buried archaeological finds - you work out when the thing was buried by studying the surrounding material. In this case the specific dating technique is new, but the principle is well established. If you find something buried in material that was laid down 470,000 years ago, then the thing was buried at that time. Assuming teleportation doesn't exist, how else could the artefacts get there? The only other option I can think of is deliberate burial and I imagine archaeologists would already have considered that idea. As to finding and using extremely old wood - wood does not survive that long except in cases of very specific environmental conditions like this one; surely another reason to expect that the wood has lain undisturbed for its entire history, rather than having been dug up and turned into some structure a few thousand years ago (then buried again).
- 1letterunixname 3y agoTL;DR: superposition.
- danparsonson 3y agoToo Short; Didn't Understand - the link from your other comment is useful: https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/dating https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/dating
- pixelfarmer 3y agoDepending on the soil (they seem to have rather colorful soil there), you will see disturbances of any kind because refilling a hole will show different colors. The newer the dig is, the clearer the line between undisturbed and disturbed parts, i.e. it "washes out" over time. That is how for example you can figure out locations of house posts despite the wood not being there at all, or finding out that an old grave has been partially robbed in olden times. Which also means it was not really about making sure you have old wood in old soil, but to determine the age of the wood itself by dating how long ago the sand surrounding it was exposed to sunlight (as they had to make a dig or disturb the soil at that point of time).
- SomewhatLikely 3y agoI was wondering instead what their dating method would do with old sand that had been dug up and quickly buried during the construction. Does a very short exposure to sun reset the mineral signature they are looking at? If not, then the structure could be much newer then the last time the sand spent an extended time in the sun. In fact, if the sand digging and moving happened in the evening to avoid the heat of the sun then the sand may have been dug up and used while never being exposed to the sun.
- Maxion 3y ago> How do they know the wood was used 476,000 years ago, as opposed to a human 6000 years ago finding and using some 470,000 year old wood? Surely we have not fallen this far away from nature as a species? Wood rots. IMO you're just being facetious about the find.
- greatpostman 3y agoTimelines of all human achievements keep getting pushed back.
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- foota 3y agoHow amazing would it be to discover that an ancient civilization existed with a technology level on par with the iron age or so? I guess if we were finding dinosaurs though the odds we wouldn't have found anything from that time are maybe slim.
- counterintuitiv 3y ago[flagged]
- tshaddox 3y agoIt could have been a long time before dinosaurs, and/or limited geographically in areas where the geological activity over tens of millions of years would make finding traces of them even more rare than average.
- _a_a_a_ 3y agoIron artefacts are likely to last much better than wood ones, so if that was so we'd likely have much evidence collected.
- foota 3y agoYeah, I guess it would have to have either been long enough ago that it's been erased by geology (which seems somewhat infeasibly long ago wrt the evolutionary timeline) or recent enough that we would likely have found a trace of it by now. I guess the only chance is for some missing link far in the evolutionary past that was erased by e.g., one of the past mass extinctions.
- kijin 3y agoActually, iron rusts away so quickly that it's hard to recover them from the ground after only a millennium or two. Bronze tends to fare much better in that regard. Wood can last quite a while if it's buried in an environment that inhibits microbial degradation, such as a highly acidic bog, where iron doesn't stand a chance.
- alehlopeh 3y agoWe have found many ancient civilizations with a technology on par with the Iron Age. They’re called Iron Age civilizations.
- pvaldes 3y agoDon't understand why they had seen a refuge there. Looks much more like a bonfire to me. This wood looks cut in a tip and partially burnt in the other, and the fire makes this notches easily when two logs overlap. Also explains the preservation of the wood, as it was sterilized by fire (maybe minutes before a rain fell or a flood hit). Also the size of the logs (1,5m is too short for a home, but perfect to be carried and stored. Plus the near presence of the classical fire hardened sticks. Is pretty obvious. So first evidence of "structural use" of wood is a too premature claim. nope. I don't think so.
- twobitshifter 3y agoThere are chopping marks and striations that show the notches were worked with tools. It’s only two logs so I can’t jump to structure but it’s wood that was worked to lock together for some purpose. Maybe structure is meant in the more general sense?
- pvaldes 3y agoI would need to see it. Marks in wood would be totally expected in a bonfire used to create and test tools with fire hardened tips If we are both talking about the same structure, I don't see striations, but the photo mentions two cracks. If those are really cracks (and not engravings carved superficially) this would reinforce my theory.
- paulrouget 3y agoThe logs are "joined transversely by an intentionally cut notch". And I don't think researcher would just confuse bonfire and modified wood :) That's their expertise. Read the (peer reviewed) research paper. You'll see how serious the research is: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06557-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06557-9
- pvaldes 3y ago> You do know that this paper is published in Nature, right? Unless you're an archeologist with a credible track record I doubt that you have the expertise to effectively argue that this is find is not credible. > I don't think researcher would just confuse bonfire and modified wood :) That's their expertise. Appeal to the authority. I'm not scared, baby. I'd go anywhere. If is printed in nature then is true, right? gods speak... noope We need to understand that articles published in nature can be retracted. Here is a small list of five pages: https://www.nature.com/nature/articles?type=retraction https://www.nature.com/nature/articles?type=retraction There is a detail in that photo that opens a door to the possibility that the datation could be incorrect all the way long. I wrote yesterday about it at home, but will reserve my opinion until ruminating a little more about it.
- sudofail 3y agoConsidering beavers make wooden structures for their own benefit and survival, it's not really surprising that ancestors of Homo Sapiens did as well.
- diogenes4 3y ago> Considering beavers make wooden structures for their own benefit and survival It's more like they have a compulsion to stack wood where they hear running water. The implication here is intention and a cognizance of purpose, which is not unheard of in the animal kingdom but is fairly rare.
- steve_adams_86 3y agoWe don’t know that it’s purely compulsion, do we? Perhaps they know that still pools of water are best for survival so they’re motivated to prevent water from running away. The level of compulsion could be more sophisticated than we imagine. This seems to be true with many mammals. Not long ago in North America, it wasn’t uncommon to think of dogs as meat-headed automatons. Today it’s common to recognize that they have emotions and personalities much like we do, and there’s little evidence to suggest otherwise. I’m not convinced beavers are like giant fruit flies trying to plug holes.
- jstanley 3y agoBeavers lack the social mechanisms to transmit knowledge across time and space. So either they are all independently inventing exactly the same solution to the problem... or it's some sort of instinctual compulsion.
- asdff 3y agoWe have similar compulsions too. Humans have an instinct to seek shelter, for example. You might say "well thats because we are taught this etc etc" but at the same time, all great apes shelter, our hominid ancestors sheltered, we shelter today, there is clearly an instinct to shelter even if we have these conscious thoughts around it. I bet if you had a perfectly feral human and had them in a clearing in a rain storm, they would try and find some shelter from it in the forest without being taught any wilderness survival basics.
- readthenotes1 3y agoThat river has been running there for 0.5 million years? That's incredibly stable!
- jacquesm 3y agoParts of The Grand Canyon took 40 times longer to be carved out by a river.
- rhelz 3y agoWhat struck me is that the two pieces of wood were found notched together at a 90-degree angle. This has got to be the first-known 90-degree angle in history. Virtually nothing in nature has a 90-degree angle. This is an invention of the highest order. EDIT: thanks for all the good responses; I should have written a bit more carefully--I meant to say that this might be the first-known time a 90-degree angle was deliberately constructed.
- greggsy 3y agoSurely stone tools have demonstrated perpendicular attributes. It’s not too far of a stretch to imagine a Palaeolithic hunter aligning an axe head against a handle in a way that made it even on either side.
- rhelz 3y agoI haven't seen any stone tools with perpendicular sides. In fact, I don't know of any other 90-degree stonework until the T-stones at Gobekle Tepe. If you could point me to some examples I'd be very much interested in knowing about them.
- rajamaka 3y agoNaturally occuring cubic crystal systems might beat it by a few million years wouldn't they?
- fsckboy 3y agoplants frequently come out of the ground and go straight up. things fall straight down, which is why bipedal humans stand straight up. our bilateral symmetry (arms out!) is at right angles to our bifocal vision, and we have people to our right and to our left. birds' beaks and dogs' muzzles are a vector notation from their bodies. various types of axeheads affixed to axehandles... I'm not saying the discovery is not amazing, nor that you're wrong, this could be the first. Just saying that right angles are going to come pretty quickly after the discovery of angles.
- throwaway892238 3y agoThere are millions of mineral and rock formations around the world with 90 degree angles. A tree/flower stem/etc and the ground form a 90 degree angle. A branch coming straight out of a tree trunk (common in pines, or some other evergreen) makes a right angle. A vine or spanish moss dangling from a branch makes a right angle. Two logs or branches that fall on each other in the forest serendipitously form a right angle. An arm, leg, etc sticking out of an animal with arms forms a right angle when extended. Water running down from two different points on a hill toward a central point could easily join as a right angle. I'm pretty sure right angles existed before this log.
- mlhpdx 3y agoTwo logs connected for some purpose near a River == must be a house? Not a raft, which would be much easier and obvious and helpful?
- xeromal 3y agoI think a raft would still be considered a structure or at least more than just used for fire or spears. It's a purpose-build device that was constructed to achieve a problem. I don't think what it is matters more than it was built in the first place to solve a problem. Those logs look too big for a raft though
- mlhpdx 3y agoIn the video they specifically talk about a platform for building on, and there is mention of this find contracting conclusions about the nomadic nature of “folks” at the time. Both indicate they went straight to the abode idea. The youngest of children will start assembling logs near shore when swimming at a lake. The crossing of the logs would help stabilize them so crossing would be safer and dry, which is critical in transporting some goods. The raft is more consistent with existing evidence, but less compelling to the modern world which expects homes to have floors.
- xeromal 3y agoI guess my point was less about what the structure is and more that it'd a significant discovery regardless of what it is.
- DabbyDabberson 3y agoWoah, every new discovery really makes Graham Hancock seem a bit less crazy. 476,000 years is a HUGE jump. They called him crazy for thinking that the Egyptians had structures 12,000 years ago.
- api 3y agoThe crazy stuff he says is not the stuff about civilization going back further than conventional models. There are numerous archeologists who argue that and their positions are usually considered outside the mainstream but not insane. Hancock says a lot of other things that are actually crazy, and like many people he’s gotten much worse lately.
- bagels 3y agoWhat are the actual crazy things?
- rdp36 3y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iCIZQX9i1A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iCIZQX9i1A
- ulizzle 3y agoThat Atlantis was real and probably had steam engines and lasers and psychic powers when everyone else was still hunting dinosaurs but then a global catastrophe wiped out the world (again) and here we are, half their size and half their glory. I don’t think it’s that crazy. What’s crazy is thinking eggs are bad for you and that the fabric of reality itself is nothing but a social construct
- hutzlibu 3y agoI think for steam engines and laser tech, there would have to be some sort of evidence to be found. The only slightly "plausible" theory might be, if a advanced civilisation would have had psychic powers (quantumnwaves something) and no need for conventional tech, then there is a reason nothing can be found today. And then of course there was a global mage war, with all the psychic powers burned out of the minds of human. (I do recommend the Illuminatus! Trilogy from Wilson and Shea, for interesting alternative history fantasy and all kinds of crazy stuff)
- WalterBright 3y ago> Forget the label ‘Stone Age,’ look at what these people were doing: they made something new, and large, from wood. ??? The "Stone Age" refers to using stone tools, which these people did.
- Archelaos 3y agoThat the "Stone Age" should better be called the "Wood Age" is an adage that has been used so often over the years that it has lost its appeal for me. Here, for example, is a summary of a paper from 1985 that argues this case: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0160932785900079 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/016093...
- 1letterunixname 3y agoAgriculture seems a prerequisite for most other technologies because you can't invent much if you're constantly following 4 legged food. The transition to ag (small-scale gardening) began before 21k BCE (23k years ago) predating Natufian culture.
- asdff 3y agoI think this is a bit of a fallacy. There was plenty invented in pre farming times, just these inventions were tailored to the task at hand which was hunting and foraging rather than other goals. For instance, the spear thrower. With that invention the act of spear hunting became orders of magnitude easier for less able bodied people. Spear throwers can be used to send a projectile 100m, and as fast as an MLB pitcher. You can imagine how this might have significantly improved the kill rates of the hunt, and could be thought of as significant of an invention as perhaps the plow was.
- defrost 3y ago> if you're constantly following 4 legged food. This is such a weirdly persistent bizzaro notion of hunter-gather lifestyles. I grew up in the Kimberley region surrounded by and outnumbered by traditional hunter gathers ( some sea | some river | and we'd move south and interact with some of desert folk ) who had their food for the day in hand in under six hours, easily. It makes more sense to think of Hunter-gathers as quasi nomadic across an estate that reaches to the horizon and beyond filled with animals they watch and both eat and protect, along with edible plants they harvest and encourage (by churning up soil and throwing seeds and husks back into). The days are filled with story telling and walking a circuit looking for fresh tracks, hacking a few thick plants, digging out roots, sifting low tide mud for molluscs, pinging a few lizards in the head with rocks from a basketball court distance away, etc. Hunter-Gatherers do practice agriculture, it just doesn't look like western european agriculture, more like ripping out 'bad' plants and spreading the seeds of good plants. There's plenty of free time.
- 1letterunixname 3y agoI assume that they're also using superposition because radiocarbon dating is useless here. Other dating methods: https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/dating https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/dating
- lkrubner 3y agoUp till now there has been substantial pushback against the idea that homo heidelbergensis built small villages in France 400,000 years ago: small huts surrounding a giant long, thin building, 15 meters long but less than 3 meters wide. Up till now that find has been earliest finding of a possible gathering of human buildings, but many archeologists have had difficulty believing it and have criticized every aspect of the evidence. But now with this new find, the claims about the heidelbergensis village also becomes more believable: https://books.google.com/books?id=LXmY3Q8qBngC&pg=PT74&lpg=PT74&dq=homo+heidelbergensis+france+structure+15+meters&source=bl&ots=OjlUErbR0u&sig=ACfU3U3f24Ipw1Clulwo9bCUefxCtLwblA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwia1Mn6iJX3AhXhg-AKHU3IDek4ChDoAXoECB8QAw#v=onepage&q=homo%20heidelbergensis%20france%20structure%2015%20meters&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=LXmY3Q8qBngC&pg=PT74&lpg=P...
- yieldcrv 3y agoWe’ve had 8,000 relatively continuous relatively good years for humankind’s continuity and civilization advancement. Within that, in some regions there were societies far more advanced than others, before falling and causing complete disruptions on that happening again for another thousand years Within 496,000 years, there are 61 other 8,000 year time periods The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence, on this topic
- Sparkyte 3y agoOldest so far. I mean let's be legit, wood decomposes easy. We know there is older, just not preserved.
- INTPenis 3y agoAnd statistically, considering how easy wood decomposes, the fact that we find one means there was probably a lot of worked wood.
- brianpan 3y ago> dated by luminescence to at least 476 ± 23 kyr ago ...for those wonder about the precision of the date like I was.