7 ms·

Tools 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

• drakythe 9mo ago
  Well, today I learned something! Thanks for the information, I guess I know which rabbit hole I'm going down today.
  • throwup238 9mo ago
    Just 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 ago
      Thanks! I'll add them to my reading list for today. Its going to be interesting, I can already tell.
    • niwtsol 9mo ago
      As 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 ago
        I 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)
  • wil421 9mo ago
    To put it into perspective, we did not invent fire.
    • Sharlin 9mo ago
      Well, nobody did, because fire was likely used for tens or hundreds of thousands of years before anyone figured out how to make fire on demand.
      • taejavu 9mo ago
        Which is what the comment you’re replying to means by “invent”.
      • dredmorbius 9mo ago
        Use of fire considerably pre-dates H. sapiens, with anthropological evidence dating to 1.7 -- 2 million years ago. Sapiens diverged from common ancestors about 600,000 years ago. "We" (Homo sapiens) did not invent fire. Our predecessor species were already using it. Firestarting is harder to pin down and may be within the scope of homo evolution. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_fire_by_early_humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_fire_by_early_human...> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human#Evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human#Evolution>
      • wil421 9mo ago
        You and everyone else know exactly what I meant but whatever. Not sure why I train AI on this site anymore.
        • nandomrumber 9mo ago
          How can I be certain I know what you mean. Ever since Earth’s atmosphere had sufficient oxygen to sustain fire given a fuel source and heat, fire has exists. If we can lay the blame on anyone for having started fire it’s going to be whoever fine tuned the constants such that there is anything here at all.
          • 9mo ago
• thinkingtoilet 9mo ago
  That's wild! Thanks for sharing. I didn't realize these things went so far back. So are you saying these were straight up non-human primates using tools? Or is this all traceable to our lineage?
  • adgjlsfhk1 9mo ago
    Even today there's plenty of non humans (and non-primate) tool use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_use_by_non-humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_use_by_non-humans. In terms of tools by homonins, there is a roughly ~3million year history of stone tool use by various species, and the main thing preventing that date from being pushed further back is the difficulty in discerning between stones that have been shaped intentionally and those shaped by natural forces.
  • ryan_j_naughton 9mo ago
    The first identified tools were 3.3 million years ago, which is before the homo genus emerges. Thus, those were either by Australopithecus afarensis or by a yet unidentified hominid species -- they were still very likely our ancestors (but technically TBD). Then around 2-2.5 million years ago you get the first homo species in the genus homo such as Homo habilis and they created the Oldowan tool culture. Both Australopithecus afarensis and Homo habilis are our ancestors -- however they are also the ancestors of other homo lines that diverged from us that we are not descendents of (which are now extinct). People often forget how widespread and varied the Homo genus was before all our cousin species went extinct (likely in part due to us).[1] Homo erectus colonized the entire old world very effectively 1.5 million years ago! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo#/media/File:The_hominin_fossil_record,_known_in_2024.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo#/media/File:The_hominin_f...
    • thinkingtoilet 9mo ago
      So cool! Thanks for the info.
    • mmooss 9mo ago
      Last I knew, the 3.3 mya evidence from the site Lomekwi 3 in Kenya was debatable, though a serious possibility, and the 2.58 mya evidence from the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania was considered the sure thing. Also, more than primates use tools: Many corvids (crows, ravens, etc.) do, as do other animals. Look up New Caledonian Crows in particular. But don't take all this from HN commenters debating each other; find some authoritative sources. A recent review article in a scientific journal would be a great start. Google Scholar lets you search for review articles.
• JumpCrisscross 9mo ago
  > Tools predate homo sapiens (which emerged about 300 kYA) I’m going to use a charged word because Jane Goodall used it. Goodall asserted that humans and chimpanzees (and wolves) are unique among animals in that we have a genocidal tendency [1]. When a group attacks us (or has “land and resources” we want) we don’t just chase them off. We exterminate them. We expend great resources to track them down to ensure they cannot threaten us. One reading of pre-history is that we had a number of hominids that were fine sharing the world, and humans, who were not. (I’ve seen the uncanny valley hypothesised as a human response to non-human hominids, as well as other humans carrying transmissible disfiguring diseases.) [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/06/does-chimp-warfare-explain-our-sense-of-good-and-evil/58643/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/06/does-...
  • MarcelOlsz 9mo ago
    The worst part of reading this thread is I know I won't be able to google image anything interesting related to "non-human hominids" :( Your comment was oddly depressing lol. Real "are we the baddies?" moment this morning.
    • JumpCrisscross 9mo ago
      > won't be able to google image anything interesting related to "non-human hominids" We were a large family [1]. > Real "are we the baddies?" moment We were animals. We acted in accordance with our natures. Wolves and chimpanzees aren’t baddies any more than bees or hyenas. Nature is brutal. Today, however, we are more than our natures. We have the capacity to criticize it when it arises in ways we disapprove of. In a certain sense, humans have a unique capacity to reduce suffering in a way without precedent in Earth’s natural history. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo
      • reactordev 9mo ago
        As equal to their ability to cause it. It’s this dichotomy that makes us, human. We have the power of destruction, the power of criticism, the power of nurturing, and the power to advance. We are amazing animals.
• Jzush 9mo ago
  It’s so cool and strange to think we have examples of tools that literally predate humans.
• OJFord 9mo ago
  The submission's subheading seems to imply that there was a gap where homo* emerged but weren't using tools then though? I can't read the article or copy-paste it due to pay wall, but it says something along the lines of the find suggesting our human ancestors were using tools longer ago than we thought.
  • ErroneousBosh 9mo ago
    Way back when I was in high school doing history (Money for Nothing was on heavy rotation on the radio and Bob from Stranger Things was still Mikey from the Goonies), our teacher explained that there was evidence of stone tools being used by early hominids, then nothing much except maybe fragments of rock that may have been used as hammers or axe heads, and then into an era where simple bronze tools emerged. What archeologists believed, she said, was that people went from "big chunk of rock" to "small delicate bit of rock tied with strips of animal hide to a stick" to "big chunk of metal", and the wood and animal hide had simply rotted away. There would be this whole lost chunk of technology. And she told us that would likely happen again, there would be a gap where our technology proved to be insufficiently durable to last throughout history. Unsurprisingly not everyone in the class thought this was likely, but I figured it was possible. Anyway, I could go on about the archeology of tech all night, but I've got to figure out how to get the photos off this Kodak DC25 camera card. Something about a DLL from the original installer that you wrap in a Linux library? Can't remember.
    • eru 9mo ago
      > And she told us that would likely happen again, there would be a gap where our technology proved to be insufficiently durable to last throughout history. Unsurprisingly not everyone in the class thought this was likely, but I figured it was possible. I heard that fear being muttered mostly about everything going digital and that's much harder for archaeologists to dig up than paper or stone tablets. However, that's all nonsense, of course: the stuff that people bother to write down is seldom all that interesting. Who cares about who was king or whatever? The real juicy bits are all in our garbage dumps, and we are producing garbage that'll last much longer than anything the ancients could muster. What with all our metal, glass, plastic etc.
• alecbz 9mo ago
  > Even this evidence of woodworking is largely unremarkable .... this find is most notable for its preservation. This somewhat contradicts the subheading, no? > 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.
  • throwup238 9mo ago
    That subheading is complete nonsense and I can't think of a single charitable reading of that sentence that in any way makes sense. Archaeologists have known that our ancestors have been making tools for over a million years since the Acheulean industry was conclusively dated in the 1850s. It took half a century for archaeologists to figure that out after William Smith invented stratigraphy. Scientists didn't even know what an isotope was yet. The original paper's abstract is much more specific (ignore the Significance section, which is more editorializing): > Here, we present the earliest handheld wooden tools, identified from secure contexts at the site of Marathousa 1, Greece, dated to ca. 430 ka (MIS12). [1] Which is true. Before this the oldest handheld wooden tool with a secure context [2] was a thrusting spear from Germany dated ~400kYA [3]. The oldest evidence of woodworking is at least 1.5 million years old but we just don't have any surviving wooden tools from that period. [1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2515479123 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2515479123 [2] This is a very important term of art in archaeology. It means that the artefact was excavated by a qualified team of archaeologists that painstakingly recorded every little detail of the excavation so that the dating can be validated using several different methods (carbon dating only works up to about 60k years) [3] https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/behavior/getting-food/oldest-wooden-spear https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/behavior/getting-food/o...
• s20n 9mo ago
  But the article says "our human ancestors" which implies they are not talking about other hominins." Edit: Okay I just found that Human can also refer to other hominids from: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/human https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/human - a bipedal primate mammal (Homo sapiens) : a person - broadly : hominid
• User23 9mo ago
  I've felt for a long time that the field relies rather a bit too hard on absence of evidence being evidence of absence.