8 ms·
430,000 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
by drakythe 9mo ago
430,000 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 9mo agoIt wasn’t Homo sapiens most likely. We have found stone tools made by Erectus.
- doctoboggan 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo agoWhen is the first evidence for cooking?
- throwup238 9mo agoThat’s a complicated question. The Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa where we found the first evidence of controlled fire also contained burned plant remains and bones, which could be interpreted as evidence of cooking. There were also burned fish remains found at the Gesher Benot Ya’aqov site in Israel, dated to about 780 kYA, which could also be interpreted as evidence of cooking. By far the strongest evidence is the Qesem Cave in Israel, which had a central hearth and so many burned animal remains that it couldn’t have been accidental. Unfortunately the dating on that is controversial and the error bar is huge at 300 +- 100 kYA (200,000-400,000 years ago).
- dbcurtis 9mo agoThanks! That is much farther back than I thought, even 200 kYA.
- sandworm101 9mo agoAnd cooking kills like 99+% of pathogens, which freed us from much of the parasite/disease stress other animals must live with.
- awesome_dude 9mo agoI had thought (perhaps wrongly) that our brains got a massive "boost" in capacity when our ancestors moved to coastal areas and the diet was dominated by (Omega 3 heavy) shellfish and crustaceans. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9505798/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9505798/
- riffraff 9mo agoah, there's a very good movie about this exact topic (not scientifically accurate, one presumes, but still very good) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_for_Fire_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_for_Fire_(film)
- doxeddaily 9mo agoNot to mention the Iron Maiden song! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SF7cWpBTZ6s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SF7cWpBTZ6s
- sethammons 9mo agoFirehawks spread fire to scare out game; that count? https://wildlife.org/australian-firehawks-use-fire-to-catch-prey/ https://wildlife.org/australian-firehawks-use-fire-to-catch-...
- adgjlsfhk1 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo agoWell, today I learned something! Thanks for the information, I guess I know which rabbit hole I'm going down today.
- throwup238 9mo 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 9mo agoThanks! I'll add them to my reading list for today. Its going to be interesting, I can already tell.
- niwtsol 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo ago[flagged]
- dh2022 9mo agoThis process also display coordination within a group and memory. Quite impressive.
- xandrius 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo ago[dead]
- thechao 9mo 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 9mo agoThe big secret: certain pools of ancient humans have been smart for alot longer than modern evolutionary theory wants to admit
- adgjlsfhk1 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo agoWhat if the meaning / definition of ETA when used like this?
- pas 9mo agolikely "edited to add"
- nephihaha 9mo 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.