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What a crazy week for old things discovered this statue at Göbekli Tepe and the 400,000 year-old notched lumber beams in Zambia. https://www.bbc.com/news/scien

What a crazy week for old things discovered this statue at Göbekli Tepe and the 400,000 year-old notched lumber beams in Zambia. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-66846772 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-66846772

EmilioMartinez 3y ago
From the article: >I was amazed to know that woodworking was such a deep-rooted tradition
silisili 3y ago
Wow, didn't see that Zambia one, that's big news to me. Question - how can they prove that someone in more recent times didn't notch more ancient wood?
- seneca 3y ago
  As I understand it, in that case it is by dating the age of the materials the wood in question was buried in. The minerals are dated using luminescence dating. That tells you when those particles were last exposed to sunlight.
  - facialwipe 3y ago
    I don’t trust any dating technique that requires the combustion of material.
    - defrost 3y ago
      Well, this dating relates to when quartz and|or feldspar crystal were last in strong sunlight .. it's not "combustion" as such. The changes wrought in the material by sun exposure and subsequent changes over time in the dark are strongly repeatable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminescence_dating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminescence_dating
      - pests 3y ago
        > Most luminescence dating methods rely on the assumption that the mineral grains were sufficiently "bleached" at the time of the event being dated. For example, in quartz a short daylight exposure in the range of 1–100 seconds before burial is sufficient to effectively “reset” the OSL dating clock Very interesting
jcpst 3y ago
> Scientists created models to show how overlapping logs could have been used I love how in other words you could also say “played with lincoln logs” :)
LeanderK 3y ago
> And the timber is much older than the earliest modern human - or Homo sapiens - fossils, which are about 315,000 years old. this is what astonished me. I somehow depicted our ancestors or relatives to be purely hunter/gatherers without the means (and will) to build complex wooden structures.

EmilioMartinez 3y ago

From the article: >I was amazed to know that woodworking was such a deep-rooted tradition

silisili 3y ago

Wow, didn't see that Zambia one, that's big news to me. Question - how can they prove that someone in more recent times didn't notch more ancient wood?

seneca 3y ago
As I understand it, in that case it is by dating the age of the materials the wood in question was buried in. The minerals are dated using luminescence dating. That tells you when those particles were last exposed to sunlight.
- facialwipe 3y ago
  I don’t trust any dating technique that requires the combustion of material.
  - defrost 3y ago
    Well, this dating relates to when quartz and|or feldspar crystal were last in strong sunlight .. it's not "combustion" as such. The changes wrought in the material by sun exposure and subsequent changes over time in the dark are strongly repeatable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminescence_dating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminescence_dating
    - pests 3y ago
      > Most luminescence dating methods rely on the assumption that the mineral grains were sufficiently "bleached" at the time of the event being dated. For example, in quartz a short daylight exposure in the range of 1–100 seconds before burial is sufficient to effectively “reset” the OSL dating clock Very interesting

jcpst 3y ago

> Scientists created models to show how overlapping logs could have been used I love how in other words you could also say “played with lincoln logs” :)

LeanderK 3y ago

> And the timber is much older than the earliest modern human - or Homo sapiens - fossils, which are about 315,000 years old. this is what astonished me. I somehow depicted our ancestors or relatives to be purely hunter/gatherers without the means (and will) to build complex wooden structures.