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Neolithic high mountain settlers were doing complex livestock/farming activities
- mmanfrin 3y agoI would give anything to be able to jump back in time to watch humanity grow. There is so much history pre-metal eras that we simply know nothing about.
- lumost 3y agoDo we even know when the metal eras arrived? It seems like most bronze/iron artifacts would have been destroyed by time if they existed prior to 2-4K BC. In particular, iron /steel artifacts tend towards rust on short timescales.
- wswope 3y agoYes; metalworking is readily detectable through slag and furnace remains.
- 082349872349872 3y agoWe can even distinguish if something that looks like it might have been a firepit actually was one by checking the induced magnetisation via the Curie temperature.
- lumost 3y agoIsn't the caveat here that we would need an archeological site which was last used within the >5k years ago? how many burn pits of any type have been detected on this time scale?
- wswope 3y agoThe number of discovered paleolithic burn sites easily ranges into the thousands. Later occupation of a site wouldn’t change much - substantially different eras are easy to identify by relative stratigraphy, and fires hot enough for metalworking can typically be loosely dated by their archaeomagnetic signatures.
- wolverine876 3y agoThere is plenty of evidence, including in written records (writing dates back ~5,200 yrs). We have actual stone tools from millions of years ago; metal tools from thousands of years ago should be relatively abundant. Take a look online and you can find much written about it. Encyclopedia Britannica is often a good starting point, or the literature review in a scholarly article (via scholar.google.com).
- lumost 3y agoApologies if this question is out of ignorance. But with a stone tool made out of something such as granite, isn't it correct that the only requirement is that the tool is not unduly compressed/crushed for it to survive 10s of thousands to millions of years? Metal tools need to avoid oxidation as well which doesn't seem tractable over timelines greater than a few thousand years.
- wolverine876 3y agoGood questions. I don't happen to know, but don't metals survive in the earth - whence they are mined - for essentially eternity?
- dbingham 3y agoMetal ores are usually oxidized versions of the metal that need to be refined in someway. In other words, the metal in the Earth has already rusted.
- throwup238 3y ago> But with a stone tool made out of something such as granite, isn't it correct that the only requirement is that the tool is not unduly compressed/crushed for it to survive 10s of thousands to millions of years? Stone tools were made mostly from flint due to the way it cleaves with sharp edges. Granite and other stone tools weren't used until the neolithic as ground stones. In order to survive for that long, stone tools mostly just had to avoid moving water. Anything that fell into a river or ocean would be worn away quickly (like beach glass). Unfortunately, until the end of the last glacial period (~12,000 years ago), the sea level was much lower than it is today and most human habitation has long since been flooded by the melting glaciers. Underwater archaeology is a new field that's growing in importance but it's slow going and the ocean is much more dynamic that dry land.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 3y agoPretty clear the ice age wiped away people that were in some ways sophisticated. Took a few thousand years to recover. This idea of humans being primitive but also nearly genetically identical to modern man is absurd
- wolverine876 3y agoI've seen similar claims on HN and I'm puzzled: 1) Are you saying people weren't primitive (and how is that defined) in the early Neolithic or, implied by your claim, the late Paleolithic; or that they weren't genetically identical; or both? 2) How does the OP support that claim? I don't see anything that addresses either issue, unless by 'primitive' you mean something on the level of Acheulean tools - handaxes, essentially stone axeheads held in the hand sans hafts or handles, used for ~1.5 million years until a few hundred thousand years ago. In that case, by the early Neolithic our ancestors had exceeded that for at least a couple hundred thousand years (conservatively, and depending on geography). 3) Most of all, why do people care? Why is there a minor movement to push the capabilities of prehistoric humans? What is the emotional investment here? Why bother to come up with mis/disinformation and spread it about these people (unless such behavior is so ingrained that people do it for any reason)?
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoRe: 3 - because there's an interest in the idea that human history (all of it) is not actually some generally linear, forward-moving story but instead contains (a) parallel, diverse evolution, sometimes with independent discovery of the same thing (b) retrograde motion.
- wolverine876 3y agoThank you for explaining it. Whose theory is that? Is there a name for it? A prominent author? I also wonder how that claim is made to fit the evidence: It seems very hard to claim that our lives and abilities haven't improved generally and significantly over the 7 million years since we divorced the chimpanzee taxa, though certainly there have been many years and millenia where we went backward for a short time (short relative to 7 million years - of course it's not always linear improvement, but that's a strawperson). Also, is the theory part of the modern political attempt to reject the Enlightenment and anything associated with it? (Edit: I'm not trying to discuss that movement, just understand the context of these claims.) > parallel, diverse evolution, sometimes with independent discovery of the same thing Does anyone say otherwise? It seems unavoidable that, without modern global communication, many/all discoveries would be too isolated to be known globally. > retrograde motion Temporarily? Again, who says otherwise?