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Shiyu discovery reveals East Asia's advanced materials dating to 45,000 BCE
- backspace_ 3y agoIn this context, what does BDE stand for?
- kirubakaran 3y agoProbably a typo for BCE (Before Common Era)?
- dang 3y agoFixed above. Thanks!
- jfoutz 3y agoit's such a weird phrasing. the article just says, 45000 years ago. There are a few more refined dates, but, like 45k seems good enough. maybe too long for the title? I think more likely, a programmer so frustrated with relative time handling the refuse not to give a relative time, but fat-fingered the anchor.
- AlotOfReading 3y agoThe actual paper uses 47 kiloanni, so the HN title is correct. It's the phys.org author that got the numbers wrong.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- engineer_22 3y ago-> Radiocarbon methods precisely dated the main cultural layer of Shiyu to between 45,800 and 43,200 years ago. ->"Our new study identified an Initial Upper Paleolithic archaeological assemblage from the Shiyu site of North China dating to 45,000 years ago that includes blade technology, tanged and hafted projectile points, long-distance obsidian transfer, and the use of a perforated graphite disk," said associate Prof. Yang Shixia, first and corresponding author of the study and a researcher at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- blacksqr 3y agoNot advanced materials, advanced material culture. Natural materials.
- huytersd 3y agoIs this really all that old? The Levallois technique has been found in India dating to 385,000 years ago. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/01/31/582102242/discovery-in-india-suggests-an-early-global-spread-of-stone-age-technology#:~:text=The%20more%20recent%20tools%2C%20which,a%20flake%20with%20sharp%20edges https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/01/31/5821022....
- InSteady 3y agoThe article discusses many different techniques, applied to several different materials: >The people inhabiting the region had a remarkably advanced tool kit, with a range of innovative tools from the Upper Paleolithic, including end-scrapers, awls, and tools of former times, including Middle Paleolithic Levallois points, various tanged tools, denticulates, and borers. Sounds noteworthy not necessarily for being the oldest example of any particular tool/technique so much as using all of them together, as well as making use of graphite and collecting toolmaking materials from hundreds of kilometers away. Apparently this diverse toolkit allowed them to thrive by specializing in hunting horses.
- huytersd 3y agoYeah I saw that. The article I linked to points to the tools found used as knives, scrapers, borers and axes. The only new thing I saw was the use of graphite but besides that most of it was already happening 350,000 years(!) before that point which is why it didn’t seem all that remarkable to me. What I found especially remarkable was that the hominid that made all those tools in India wasn’t even Homo sapiens and it is kind of unknown who made them at this point. What’s even more interesting is that these tools were found significantly under the layer of deposits left behind from the Toba eruption 74,000 years ago. There’s so much we don’t know, it’s all very interesting.
- wolverine876 3y agoThe number I know is about 500,000 years ago. https://askananthropologist.asu.edu/stories/chipping-away-tools-stone-age https://askananthropologist.asu.edu/stories/chipping-away-to...