15 ms·
430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found
https://archive.ph/mHlUT https://archive.ph/mHlUT
https://apnews.com/article/oldest-wooden-tools-marathousa-1-6e07cfc79f6d8ba648138f805531b933 https://apnews.com/article/oldest-wooden-tools-marathousa-1-...
https://archaeologymag.com/2026/01/430000-year-old-wooden-tools-marathousa/ https://archaeologymag.com/2026/01/430000-year-old-wooden-to...
- drakythe 10mo ago430,000 years? Am I reading this headline correctly? (since the site seems to have fallen victim to the HN-hug-of-death). That seems wildly further back than I understood humans to have tools, or even homo sapiens to have existed. ETA: Today I learned I had a much much larger gap in knowledge than I thought I did. Thanks to everyone for the information and links!
- dyauspitr 10mo agoIt wasn’t Homo sapiens most likely. We have found stone tools made by Erectus.
- doctoboggan 10mo agoYes it's definitely further back than homo sapiens have existed (200k - 300k years), but our ancestor species were known to have used tools and control fire. I believe we have evidence of tool use going back 1 million years. So this article is referencing the oldest known _wooden_ tools, which are obviously much less likely to be preserved across the ages.
- throwup238 10mo agoWe have evidence of control over fire (but not fire starting) at about 1 million years. Stone tools go even further back, at least 2 million years.
- drakythe 10mo agoWait hang on, would they "control" file by finding natural sources (volcano, lightning strike wildfire, etc.) and then make use of that source for controlled sources of light/heat/etc? I guess I've always thought of "control" of fire including the intentional starting thereof.
- adgjlsfhk1 10mo ago> Wait hang on, would they "control" file by finding natural sources (volcano, lightning strike wildfire, etc.) and then make use of that source for controlled sources of light/heat/etc? Pretty much. Being able to transfer/build a fire is a lot easier than starting one. Fire starting requires bow/flint&steel and a lot of patience. Control basically means using simple torches to transfer fire from one place to another (where the initial source is either lightning/wildfire or embers of a previous fire).
- walkerbrown 10mo agoSome very recently published research (Dec 2025) claims evidence of fire starting among homo neanderthalensis. This would push back fire starting know-how (not only control) from 50k to 400k years ago. Cool stuff! [1] https://www.nhm.ac.uk/press-office/press-releases/groundbreaking-discovery-shows-humans-were-making-fire-350-000-y.html https://www.nhm.ac.uk/press-office/press-releases/groundbrea...
- sophacles 10mo agoThere's pretty strong evidence that the use of fire to cook food is what enabled modern humans, with their short (and relatively fragile) digestive systems and giant energy hungry brains to evolve. Cooking food makes more calories bio-available in food and also reduced the amount of energy the body needs to expend on that food to harvest calories... so there's more energy available for thinking (etc).
- dbcurtis 10mo agoWhen is the first evidence for cooking?
- adgjlsfhk1 10mo agoWe have 3.3 million year old stone tools https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14464 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14464. They're very simple (even more so than the Oldowan stone tools https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldowan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldowan) and basically just look like rocks, but there is clear evidence of intentional shaping by hominins (somewhere in the fuzzy late Australopthis/early homo transition).
- drakythe 10mo agoThanks for these sources. Archeology definitely is a big known unknown for me, so even getting started reading basic info about this is rough. I appreciate the links and terms.
- sophacles 10mo agoThis youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/stefanmilo https://www.youtube.com/stefanmilo has a lot of good stuff. I don't know enough to know where he's right or wrong, but provides entry points for to looking more into it. I have gone down a couple rabbit holes based on his videos and while it seems like he's occasionally gotten some facts wrong or misunderstood an argument, I'm pretty confident he's doing a decent job accurately representing the archaeology.
- drakythe 10mo agoAwesome. I've watched plenty of Miniminuteman (Milo Rossi) videos, but his tend to be more pop-sci/debunking outrageous claims and less foundationally educational. I'll check this channel out too.
- Hikikomori 10mo agoDavid Miano and Flint Dibbles channels are also great. Both educational and debunking. https://www.youtube.com/@worldofantiquity https://www.youtube.com/@worldofantiquity https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC27vDmUZpQjuJFFkUz8ujtg https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC27vDmUZpQjuJFFkUz8ujtg
- throwup238 10mo agoTools predate homo sapiens (which emerged about 300 kYA) by millions of years. The first stone industry - Oldowan - is at least two million years old and might be as old as three million. They predate what we call “archaic humans” by a long time. Even this evidence of woodworking is largely unremarkable. We’ve got phytolith [1] and microwear [2] studies showing unambiguous evidence of woodworking going back at least 1.5 million years. Wood tools just don’t survive very long, so this find is most notable for its preservation. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047248400904664 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472... [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047248415001906 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...
- drakythe 10mo agoWell, today I learned something! Thanks for the information, I guess I know which rabbit hole I'm going down today.
- throwup238 10mo agoJust edited to add two paper citations for the phytoliths and microwear studies. Have fun! It’s a deep rabbit hole largely ignored by popsci publications so there’s lots to explore.
- drakythe 10mo agoThanks! I'll add them to my reading list for today. Its going to be interesting, I can already tell.
- niwtsol 10mo agoAs you seem knowledgeable of this topic and it is super interesting, any books you would recommend that gives a good broad overview of all of this?
- throwup238 10mo agoI don’t read popsci but if you’re interested in a rigorous treatment I’d recommend The Human Career by Klein which has the broad overview and The Human Past edited by Scarre which is more of a textbook. I mostly just read the papers as they are published but I’ve heard good things about those two books (they’re on my reading list but I haven’t read enough to form an opinion)
- j_bum 10mo agoWe have evidence that non Homo sapiens bipeds (e.g., Neanderthals, Homo habilis) used tools far before we came onto the scene. A long lineage of hominin species came before humans!
- Insanity 10mo agoAnd even today, our species' cousins (Chimps) are rudimentary tool users. Recently saw a documentary where they evolved their 'tools' to get honey from a 1-stick approach to a 3-stick approach.
- abetusk 10mo agoAs others mentioned, tool use wasn't restricted to homo sapiens. I think this makes sense, no? We didn't spontaneously use tools, it must have evolved incrementally in some way. I think we see shades of this today. Bearded Capuchin monkeys chain a complex series of tasks and use tools to break nuts. From a brief documentary clip I saw [0], they first take the nut and strip away the outer layer of skin, leave it dry out in the sun for a week, then find a large soft-ish rock as the anvil with a heavier smaller rock to break open the nut. So they had to not only figure out that nuts need to be pre-shelled and dried, but that they needed a softer rock for the anvil and harder rock for the hammer. They also need at least some type of bipedal ability to carry the rock in the first place and use it as a hammer. Apparently some white-faced Capuchins have figured out that they can soak nuts in water to soften it before hammering it open [1]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFWTXU2jE14 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFWTXU2jE14 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7sJq2XUiy8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7sJq2XUiy8
- awesome_dude 10mo ago[flagged]
- dh2022 10mo agoThis process also display coordination within a group and memory. Quite impressive.
- xandrius 10mo agoNo, we could have had something which other previous species didn't that unlocked the use of tools. Otherwise if no species could be the first, or it would be deemed spontaneous, no new skills could be unlocked.
- MengerSponge 10mo agoYou might be old enough to have been taught that Humans are tool-using apes. That's tragically incomplete: lots of apes use tools. Birds use tools. And now, cows use tools! Cow tools: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj0n127y74go https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj0n127y74go https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_tools https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_tools
- drakythe 10mo agoI was homeschooled in a particular conservative area. Much of what I have been taught was... woefully inadequate, we'll say. Lots of my learning has come in university and afterwards, so what I've picked up is pretty obviously incomplete and leaves me with many unknown unknowns in this area. Today has begun filling in many of those gaps so they get to be known unknowns now!
- hearsathought 10mo ago> Lots of my learning has come in university and afterwards That's true for pretty much everybody. Homeschooled or not. You think everyone shocked by this news was all homeschooled?
- dpc050505 10mo agoI'm relearning a lot of stuff I was told visiting natural history museums as a kid reading this thread and the linked articles. I doubt I'm the only person in this forum who had a couple of educated parents who wanted their kids to learn more than what is taught in basic public k-12 curriculum.
- drakythe 10mo agoNo, but I do think it more likely they got a more accurate world history class somewhere along the line. I was taught creationism thanks to the conservatism nature of my family and the area I grew up in. It took a long while to know and accept the world (and universe) is as old as it is.
- roysting 10mo ago[dead]
- thechao 10mo agoThen ... you find out that smoking was introduced to the new world in the 16th c, and indigenous North Americans didn't start using the bow & arrow ubiquitously until after the year 1000. But! Native North Americans were using copper contemporaneously with the old world.
- llmslave 10mo agoThe big secret: certain pools of ancient humans have been smart for alot longer than modern evolutionary theory wants to admit
- adgjlsfhk1 10mo agoThis isn't a problem for evolutionary theory. It's literally a necessary prediction of it. Most recent common ancestor of humans and chimps is 5-10 million years ago. Since we have observed tool usage in modern chimps and lots of very complicated tool use in humans, the necessary prediction is that some amount of tool use goes back at least ~5-10 million years, with increased complexity roughly tracking with the continuous increase in braincase size.
- foxglacier 10mo agoBeing in a common ancestor is certainly compatible with evolution but it's not necessary because it could have evolved independently in each branch.
- adgjlsfhk1 10mo agoif it were only 2 primates that's a plausible explanation, but when it's pretty much every simean using tools, and all the old world apes making tools, it's pretty hard to argue for convergent evolution rather than a trait that exists ancestrally.
- PinkSheep 10mo agoI don't understand why you think it'd be an issue? Dumbed down understanding of mine: evolutionary theory predicts that graph goes from (0.1; 0) to (very high; in a million years). X axis: years, Y axis: progress or evolution. The only difference such discoveries make is to further refine the slope of the graph. Was the development linear or exponential? How fast did it progress? Obviously, in the past 500 years we didn't change as humans but our technological progress accelerated beyond belief.
- trebligdivad 10mo agoThere's a 476k year old wooden structure in Zambia, and includes some tools somewhere around 3x0k years old: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalambo_structure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalambo_structure Fascinating stuff!
- caymanjim 10mo agoOthers already clarified the confusion about your question. Just wanted to note that the HN audience is not going to hug-of-death nytimes.com.
- drakythe 10mo agoThe original link when I commented was to archeologymag.com -- it was later updated to NYTimes because of the hug of death that went on for multiple hours on archeologymag
- nandomrumber 10mo agoWhat if the meaning / definition of ETA when used like this?
- pas 10mo agolikely "edited to add"
- nephihaha 10mo agoIt depends how loosely you want to define "tool". Certain other primates, birds etc use very primitive tools out in the wild. More sophisticated ones, with multiple parts etc turn up much later in the record.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- an0malous 10mo agoThere is archaeological evidence of tools going back even further, potentially over a million years, but it's ignored for the usual reasons of dogma and not conveniently fitting into the paradigm of the current priestly class. I'd highly recommend this talk Michael Cremo (author of "Forbidden Archaeology") gave for this "Authors at Google" program in 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKfGC3P9KoQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKfGC3P9KoQ
- lmf4lol 10mo agowhy do you think would this info be surpressed?
- bflesch 10mo ago"extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". As long as there is low number of samples with such age you should always assume methodological mistakes in measurement
- an0malous 10mo agoI think it just doesn't fit into the accepted timeline so it's mostly ignored. This is a common pattern with scientific discovery where evidence that contradicts the prevailing paradigm is ignored and builds up until it can no longer be ignored and causes a paradigm shift. This idea comes from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn.
- 3RTB297 10mo agoI'm not the person you asked this of, but I've worked in museums and research settings and can lob a response your way. Ultimately, it's that scientists are humans, too. Despite some of them really making their research data-forward, things like tenure, career, funding, and even who would publish your work now and in the future all create normal human environments that reward small, incremental changes to a body of knowledge that don't upset the apple cart, not discoveries that suggest huge changes. In fact, large changes and discoveries can be resisted and denied further research in favor of the status quo. This is not a new phenomenon by any means: Both warm-blooded dinosaurs and the Chicxulub impact were both theories dismissed as fringe for decades before overwhelming evidence led to them being accepted as likely. In no small way thanks to Jurassic Park. Recall that eugenics and phrenology both used to be widely accepted scientific "fact." 100 fairly prominent scientists signed a letter stating emphatically that Einstein's Theory of Relatively was categorically wrong and should be retracted. Plate tectonics was seen as fanciful crackpot musings for decades. The author of the original theory died 30 years before plate tectonics was even considered possible. Germ theory was dismissed for most of Louis Pasteur's lifetime, despite being able to literally show people yeast in a microscope. Helicentrism has a storied past. Quantum theory was also denied heavily at first. Now it saves photos to our hard drives. And how many times has the earliest dates of hominids and tool use and human thresholds of development been pushed back by tens of thousands of years? This is not an exhaustive list, by any means. So we have ancient examples and modern ones - and everything in between. So the level of education or scientific progress or equipment are not the cause. Humans are. Humans do this all the time. So until overwhelming evidence surfaces, which can take decades or longer, claims like this shouldn't be dismissed out of hand until proven solidly in error. A theory is a theory, so let it be a theory.
- alsetmusic 10mo agoThere's bound to be a lot of vital archeological evidence of the development of humans and our cousins below the water. Past peoples probably lived near the coasts and the rising water would have obscured or destroyed a lot of the evidence of their existence. I think a lot about what must be or have been just out of reach of our current studies.
- throwup238 10mo agoThat’s rapidly changing. Underwater archaeology has been going through a mini-Renaissance in the last thirty years thanks to multibeam and side scan sonar. Now with the proliferation of underwater drones capable of high-resolution 3D photogrammetry, that is rapidly accelerating into a full blown revolution. As usual the problem is lack of funding to do excavations. There are far more known sites than there are funds to study them.
- HocusLocus 10mo agoI have always believed that the human evolution consensus which is usually based upon finds of advanced toolmaking in absence of culture cues, to be questionable by orders of magnitude. So it seemed natural to simply double generational concepts of the village along a trade route, from ~500kya (like the Nile) to 1 million YA as a hyperstable span of evolution of the 'trade route village'. I even wrote a book about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtxgpaXp9vA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtxgpaXp9vA that might seem like whole fiction. But science seems not to ask, how many times might we have started over?
- tootie 10mo agoThat's ridiculous. Scientists absolutely ask these questions. We just don't have the answers so we don't make assumptions. It is implicitly assumed there is an enormous amount of proto- and pre-human culture and technology that is undiscovered or undiscoverable. We have very long known that hominins made tools, art and structures out of organic material that has decayed beyond our ability to detect.
- riazrizvi 10mo agoThat's how these evolutionary scientists do read it - 'the race to find the evidence to backup our concepts of intelligent hominid behavior has achieved another breakthrough'. The journalists frame it as 'scientists are shocked again' to get more views/engagement. No doubt some 'scientists', being people, probably get taken in by the journalists framing too.
- notorandit 10mo agoI wonder how would we react with tools dating back to, say, 5MY ago ... That would shake our knowledge from the foundations.
- uriegas 10mo agoI don't think so, have you read 'The Bonobo and the atheist'? Humans are not the only ones using tools and in reality there isn't much difference between humans and animals. The conclusion I get from the book is that the only difference is religion. Although, I have a feeling that humans do have a more developed intellect (problem solving) but this was not explored in the book.
- marcd35 10mo ago5 Million years ago would be insane... but what about.. 5 BILLION years ago...
- croisillon 10mo agowe might find some, in 4,5 billion years
- mkl 10mo agoNo it wouldn't, as we already think it's pretty likely. Chimpanzees use tools, so our most recent common ancestor with them, something like 6 million years ago, may well have used tools too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_use_by_non-humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_use_by_non-humans, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee%E2%80%93human_last_common_ancestor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee%E2%80%93human_last_...
- dang 10mo ago[stub for offtopicness]
- eigenspace 10mo agoWebsite appears to be down from too much traffic
- bookofjoe 10mo agohttps://imgur.com/a/1cIZVDi https://imgur.com/a/1cIZVDi
- itsamario 10mo agoGod made things earlier than previously thought. Ha
- jolt42 10mo agoFinding red blood cells in 70 million year old bones. Still find that incomprehensible. Not sure King George didn't kill a dinosaur.
- drakythe 10mo agoFor anyone else absolutely baffled by this statement: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jun/09/75-million-year-old-dinosaur-blood-and-collagen-discovered-in-fossil-fragments https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jun/09/75-million-y... Red blood cells, and collagen from dinosaur bones. With the idea that even current museum hosted bones might have more??? Today is a wild day for me.
- metalman 10mo agoIt gets wilder, all of the finds mentioned so far are stuff I have heard of, then there are the intentional burials from millions of years agoby a tiny hominum in SA, deap in a cave complex that requires extream cave crawling to get into, and also from SA, there is strong evidence for the manufacture of red pigment @400kyr ago. And if you like, you can wander around certain sea sides and pick, little tiny dino trackways that have fallen out of the cliff, :)
- khalic 10mo agoI can’t be the only one that saw the aforementioned tools and thought: did I misread stool?
- riazrizvi 10mo agoYou're the only one.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- melenaboija 10mo agoOk, since I moved to the US from Europe a few years ago my perception of wood has changed a lot, especially for construction. Seeing this reinforces my view. Wood lasts for fucking ever under the proper conditions. Old construction in Europe often only had the beams made of wood, and I always thought that was orders of magnitude more durable than wooden houses, like thousands of years vs decades. I don’t think that’s true anymore. And this might be one of the few environmentally friendly decisions that Americans got better than Europeans, I guess. Wood is still prevalent in construction here, and as far as I know concrete and cement production are quite bad. BTW, I’m a total ignorant about all this so just intuition and probably wrong
- NoImmatureAdHom 10mo agoIt's not totally a "decision" on the part of the Americans to use a lot of wood in construction. It's just that America has tons of space, including space useful for growing Douglas Fir and Southern Yellow Pine, which then can be turned in to 2x4s and other construction lumber. Most of Europe long ago exhausted easily accessible natural forest resources, and where it's not densely populated tends to prefer using land to do other stuff (like grow food). Hence, stone and concrete and similar materials in European construction.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- bdamm 10mo agoWhile some lumber production happens in the United States, most lumber is imported from Canada. That's because while the USA does have good tracts of land on which lumber is grown, Canada has much, much more. This is why you see "Made in Canada" stamped on quite a lot of plywood and plenty of timer used in residential construction. The part that I don't quite know how to make sense of is why Canadian producers seem to have a near monopoly on sandpaper products.
- jjk166 10mo agoThe US imports about 30% of its lumber. Canada is the largest source of imported lumber, but it's still less than a quarter of all lumber consumed in the US. Surprisingly, the limit on US production is not trees but sawmill capacity. Sandpaper requires specific grades of corundum; Ontario happens to have several notable large deposits of extremely fit-for-purpose corundum. The Canadian deposits were also a conveniently close source for what would become America's largest abrasives products producer, 3M, after its attempt to mine corundum in Minnesota failed (3M stands for Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing company).
- joe8756438 10mo agoEstimates will continue to go earlier, and more things that were, or are, alive will be considered exceptional. Seems to be a function of looking.
- shay_ker 10mo agoThe thing I’m continually surprised by is the usage of obsidian by nearly every ancient-ish civilization. The usage of bow & arrow predates farming, insane.
- tim333 10mo agoI guess that before metal working, obsidian would have been the best knife edge available.
- caymanjim 10mo agoIt's a far, far better knife edge than metal even now. It's used in some specialized scalpels. It's just fragile.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- KaseKun 10mo agoNot really that insane, hunting is a much faster reward cycle than farming. On the surface, it makes sense that tools for hunting are produced earlier than tools for farming
- 3eb7988a1663 10mo agoAncient crops were also pathetic to a modern eye. Before thousands of years of selective breeding, corn had six or seven kernels on a cob. Doubtful that it would be possible to survive on a field of wild cultivars without at least a few generations pushing towards more productive specimens. https://evolution.earthathome.org/grasses/andropogoneae/maize-domestication/ https://evolution.earthathome.org/grasses/andropogoneae/maiz...
- tiku 10mo agoNow find the tools used by the Egyptians or the people before that lived there and made the tool markings..
- lugu 10mo ago> The finding, along with the discovery of a 500,000-year-old hammer made of bone, indicates that our human ancestors were making tools even earlier than archaeologists *thought*. I am tired of this. No. Archeologist only claim what they have discovered. They don't speculate because they work based on evidences. Journalists should better. This wording sounds like archeologists were wrong. That only fuel the narrative that layman's opinion is more informed than professionals.
- niobe 10mo agoTrue but every science headline is misleading, loaded or exaggerated. My pet peeve "X found where it should not exist". What they mean is "scientists are pleased because there's some new evidence that is not explained by their current models and that means they get to improve their models which is the goal of science anyway, so pretty much just another day for science but glad to keep you updated"
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- GolDDranks 10mo agoI'm not so sure if that's too wrong. Science works by scientist having a model of reality and then testing that model against reality, gathering evidence that fits or doesn't fit the model, evaluating how well the model corresponds to reality. If there is a widely accepted model in the archaeological community, and the new data contradicts it, the wording "than archaeologists thought" seems plausible enough. Of course, depending on the model, the model itself might admit regimes of "non-applicability", or have some measure of confidence... If archeologists have large uncertainty whether human ancestors made tools 500,000 years back or not, then they shouldn't be surprised upon finding evidence that the ancestors did. I don't know any specifics about this case, just arguing that that kind of wording by itself is not always wrong by default.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- guywithahat 10mo agoWhat's incredible about this too is they found it in England, which means they had to first build a boat to get there and leave the tools on the island
- brightbeige 10mo agoEngland wasn’t always an island https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland
- maximgeorge 10mo ago[dead]
- emeril 10mo agomaybe the trump administration can learn something from these tools to offset the 10k STEM PhDs that have resigned and moved onto to greener pastures...
- aubanel 10mo ago"well preserved tools" said the ad -> I bought some, surprisingly expensive for a hammer -> it's a mishap and inform piece of wood -> straight to dump
- drsalt 10mo agohow do they know it was tools and not some wood some guy was munching on?
- vee-kay 10mo agoArticle title is click bait. Hominin tools that are millions of years old have already been found by archeologists. e.g., recent news: Scientists uncover 3-million-year-old tools but they weren’t made by our ancestors: https://www.futura-sciences.com/en/scientists-uncover-3-million-year-old-tools-but-they-werent-made-by-our-ancestors_23401/ https://www.futura-sciences.com/en/scientists-uncover-3-mill... A list of findings of earliest known hominin tools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earliest_tools https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earliest_tools
- pilaf 10mo agoPerhaps the key word is "wooden"? Which is not to say much older wooden tools didn't exist, but it's likely extremely rare that they would be preserved this long.
- sam_goody 10mo agoDo we know if these were formed intentionally or just happened to be in such a form and were used by those that found them? Do we know if these were used more than once, or if they were in a convenient shape that was grabbed by a local for one time use? How do we know that these were actually used as tools and not just pieces of wood that coincidentally in the site? Do we have any reason to think these were used by (precursor to) humans more than ravens, beavers or any other number of animals that use tools? Because of the paywall I could not read the whole article, but the pictures and intro leave a lot unanswered.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- keepamovin 10mo agoWithout assuming correctness, assuming instead "risk probability" - if previous advanced civilizations have risen and fallen on Earth, after evolving here naturally - what should we do as a species to not share their fate? edit: I am not sure backupping to 'Mars', with its lack of magnetic field, inhospitality, and necessity to live underground is a positive idea
- bbcc90 10mo agoSure, but did they have MCP?
- brockers 10mo agoIt might be just my perception, but it seems like every single time anthropologist make statements to the effect that complex human development didn't start until XX they are proven wrong. It wouldn't bother me so much if it wasn't for the fact that those "estimates" are generally used as proof to dismiss alternative timelines for human progression. I'm certainly not trying to say the planet had Atlantis with flying cars 300,000 years ago; but it certainly seems plausible that there were large/complex societies beginning long before the advent of our current written history... an idea that is regularly dismissed as foolish.
- scotthenshaw3 10mo ago[dead]
- blobbers 10mo agoPretty sure my neighbor is using these as ground cover in her garden.