It is an incredibly long time, but places like Ounjougo in Mali have been inhabited for hundred of thousand years by several species of humans:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ounjougou
An explanation lies in the fact that in those ancient times there was little numbers of humans, sometimes less than 20,000 (on the whole earth) so it is not surprizing they inhabited the same places over and over. They had no manpower to even build a village. That would come much later with neolithics when population will explode in numbers, but perhaps not in quality of life.
It must be jarring for a new cohort of humans to come across artifacts invented and developed by predecessor that they can't understand.
Our archival-based approach to history is a complete opposite, but I wonder if the relics of the past helped influence the future generations of ancient human.
> It must be jarring for a new cohort of humans to come across artifacts invented and developed by predecessor that they can't understand.
As others have pointed out your position is a modern one; the "wonders of the ancients" is a several thousand year old perspective. And in fact for a good chunk of recent European history (last couple of millennia) the prevailing view was one of declinism when compared to the Romans of the late Republic and early empire.
But we don't know if the users of this cave had that jarring experience. 4500 years is a long time but it's quite possible -- likely even -- that there was continuous use, so it was "just part of the landscape" with knowledge accreting and being passed on.
The reason I say "likely" is that presumably the color technology evolved over some period of time, and if the users died off and the cave was later rediscovered after a gap, the new discoverers would have to re-invent a bunch of the tech somewhat from scratch (although results and possibly raw materials would be right there to provide hints).
It's interesting to speculate what kind of speech and culture they might have had.
Technology development was unbelievably slow back then, so re-inventing tech, which seems like a routine thing to do to us, was next to unimaginable back then. We see exactly the same artifices made exactly the same way over stretches of eover a million years (the Acheulian had axe). In that era lost technology was simply gone for all intents and purposes at a community level. This site lies in the Middle Palaeolithic era which lasted about 300 thousand years.
Even with good communication that remained true until very recently: read the debates on the constitutional roots of the US patent system and it was an explicit "bribe" that you received a government-guaranteed monopoly in exchange for explaining how to make your invention. Otherwise the information could easily be lost. Obviously that's not how the system works today
I've got Lichtheim's 3-volume Literature of Ancient Egypt. The time between the earliest and latest entries in that collection? Something like 2400-2500 years (IIRC). And (again IIRC) it stops a few hundred years shy of crossing the BC/AD boundary. It spans 4-5 related, but distinct, major civilizations living on roughly the same land, only the last couple of which are recent enough to squeeze onto the leading edge of where we usually start the narrative of recorded history.
A little off topic. Gobekli Tepe is a really fascinating find. The size of the pillars, the inscriptions, the intricate designs of the pottery and jewelry (with cleanly drilled holes in them) give a glimpse of a sophisticated civilization with architecture and farming at a time when humans are supposed to be hunter-gatherers. Graham Hancock has a few very interesting books on this. He seems to believe that humans basically go through periods of amnesia or better put get periodically wiped out, lose their bearings and start over again. We become just like that ancient human circa 5000 BC looking at the ruins of Gobekli Tepe. Or the modern human looking at the Pyramids all over the ancient world and trying to piece history together.
Gobekli Tepe is awesome, but Mr. Hancock is a hack. He may begin with facts, but takes them to unfounded conclusions which "challenge mainstream science" (read: contain no discernible falsifiable thesis, recede ever into knowledge gaps, and are defined primarily by being anti-establishment).
The 20 thousand is based on a rather fuzzy boundary for what is human. Neanderthal for example could still breed with Homosapiens and produce viable offspring at least some of the time. So, they are arguably the same species, though arguably not.
Well there's still some debate as to whether Neanderthals were a separate species or a subspecies, but it's worth noting that the ability to produce fertile offspring is necessary for species inclusion, but it's not sufficient.
Your statement nailed it. I think that 100 years from now we won't be teaching biology and it's existing classification system of Kingdom/Phylum/Class, but something much more accurate based on genetics (i.e. DNA).
It might still fit the hierarchy, but the delineation will be much better aligned with nature.
Humans need classifications to easily understand and describe complex things. If you defined species in a continuous way, we'd have a hard time getting our heads around how similar these prehistoric "animals" were to ourselves. We'd have to describe their differences which would be quite complicated. Instead, we can coarsely group them into species as a quick mental shortcut for high level understanding.
Our discrete classifications actually match DNA-based clustering results pretty accurately. If you do multi-dimensional clustering on allele frequency at multiple loci, the clusters pretty much exactly match the species/subspecies classifications that humans use intuitively. Our discrete classifications don't cover all cases, but they're surprisingly good in the vast majority of cases.
There are other sites that served similar functions for ancient peoples over long periods of time. I recently learned about one of them in the Blue Hills just south of Boston; it was a quarry used by native people for thousands of years to make stone tools such as spears and axes:
Wampatuk hill, one of the many that make up the ridges of the Blue Hills, is made entirely out of a material called rhyolite. Essentially this hill represents a portion of the lava column located within the volcano that solidified so quickly that it’s silica (or glass)- rich magma turned into a crystalline fine grained blue rock with tiny flecks of quartz. It is the natural blue color of the stones of the Blue Hills that gave the area its name, and it is this one particular type of blue stone that brought Native people from the surrounding area to Wampatuk to mine and work its natural stone. The entire area surrounding the hill consists of massive boulders and outcrops of blue hills rhyolite, each one slightly different, and each one a type of stone that I have found turned into tools that we excavate on archaeological sites throughout the area. These range from the deep blue-black stones east and south of Wampatuk to the oddly speckled material you find on Wampatuk itself. This hill was a Mecca of stone tool production.
As you walk the Sawcut Notch path along the northern boundary of the park, you will pass great dome and little dome. These two small hills are made out of Braintree slate and Massachusett hornfels. Keep an eye open for scoop-like marks in the stone where thousands of years before a Massachusett Native person was standing exactly where you are striking the slate to remove portions of it to turn into tools. Turn around and behind you will be small mounds of stone fragments.
These mounds are not natural deposits, but heaps of stone waste, each the result of stone striking stone working raw slate down to a spear preform or perhaps a stone adz. These are all viewable from the path and artifacts lie within the path itself. ...
... The natural hillside was not in fact natural, it was, and IS, a quarry of truly monumental proportions. The terraces I had walked were not simply erosional, but were in fact carved into the raw rock by Massachusett Native people quarrying stone from the hillside for thousands of years, and the mounds and pathways I had been climbing over were mountains of stone debris consisting of Millions upon millions of stone flakes each individually struck by human hands.
Exact same thing at Morrow Mountain in North Carolina. It was a quarry used by natives for thousands of years to obtain Rhyolite for tools and weapons. Apparently Rhyolite was a big deal everywhere. Who knew? It feels as if I'm missing out on some sort of universal human experience of making sharp stuff out of Rhyolite.
People overlooking Native American sites because they were on too large of a scale and assuming they're natural formations is kind of a cliche at this point - the mounds left behind by the uncreatively named mound builders are another example.
It amazes me how few know about the mounds. I look through a lot of the books from 1840's that detail them all in Oh/Mi/IL/etc.
Link with cool descriptions and maps etc of those in Ohio. I located some on modern maps that you can still see and that havent been disturbed in a long long time.
How many things we don't know from that age! I heard Indus Valley Civilization used to domesticate animals and had a network of sewage system in place. Pretty cool for 3000 BC.
An explanation lies in the fact that in those ancient times there was little numbers of humans, sometimes less than 20,000 (on the whole earth) so it is not surprizing they inhabited the same places over and over. They had no manpower to even build a village. That would come much later with neolithics when population will explode in numbers, but perhaps not in quality of life.