The stone ball tools in question are from the Qesem cave in Israel and dated to 400 to 200 thousand years before present. The 2 million in the headline must refer to other similar tools dated to earlier times but whose use couldn’t be determined. The cave was discovered in 2010 during roadwork.
The article describes how the researchers made replicas and used those to crush bones, which they did better than unshaped stones of similar size. The replicas also had marks after use similar to the original artifacts. I really like when scientists do this kind of validation.
This article taught me about ancient humans; I did not know we had such archaeological evidence from them. I had heard that anatomically modern humans have been around for 100 thousand years, so art in Lascaux caves from 17,000 years was made by people like us (just pre agriculture and civilization), but I had no idea about humans 200,000 years ago using tools.
For perspective, this cave was used (likely intermittently) by humans for 200,000 years, so 100 times the Christian Era or 40 times the span recorded history (oldest writing dating back to Egypt around 3rd millenium BC). But then it was unused, probably covered up and undiscovered for the same length of time until present.
It still blows my mind that a human that lived 100,000 years ago was anatomically modern. I take that to mean that we could've taken one at birth and raised it in a modern home and it could've grown up to receive a physics PhD. In other words, a human 100,000+ years ago was 100% capable of understanding general relativity, or how to design and construct the Saturn V rocket, or any other modern STEM topic. What were we doing for all those years banging bones with round rocks? There must've been a lot of intellectually frustrated people.
> There must've been a lot of intellectually frustrated people.
This is funny. As if they were just hanging around with the luxury to want to be challenged.
They didn't live very long, their lives were harsh, they were probably banging out kids at an unbelievable rate.
There's something just fantastically out of touch about your statement here. Very silver platter.
Even now, there are much more intelligent people than you or I with no time or resources for intellectual pursuits, and following that, no particular drive either.
If you're hungry and your living conditions are risky, you probably don't care about lacanian this or knot topography that. Much too busy.
I recall a study of 'primitive' people of the Amazon, vs the 'modern' Japanese farmer. The primitives spend 3-4 hours a day foraging, and the rest at leisure. The farmer spent 10-hour days with 4 or 5 holidays per year. And lived in simple wooden huts as well.
Depending on the environment, ancient people's lives didn't have to be nasty, brutish and short. Leave that to the modern overcrowded slum.
The interesting question is how much physical effort was required to forage and hunt, and did that necessitate rest due to the lack of nutritional value offered by said food. Reading Guns, Germs, and Steel right now. The value of agriculture would have been that it allowed food to scale so that other members of society could specialize in something, develop knowledge, and use it, including metalwork, soldiering, scholarship, etc. That type of specialization was not possible when everyone was focused on being a hunter gatherer to survive, especially given that nutrition options were poor in most parts of the world compared to where agriculture did take off.
I see what you're saying, but if the logic held all the way through, and you believe the previous commentor's claims about intellectually frustrated people, then the obvious result would be that those people were doing things like taking on ethics, math, religion, and science in concrete ways. I'm not an archeologist or anthropologist, but I don't recall any particular advancements in anything really, from that era. Better huts. Minor improvements in tools. Where were the windmills? Why didn't they come up with gearing for mechanical leverage? Long term structures and joinery?
I get that we have a lot of intellectual force multipliers now, so the achievement of a few propagates and impacts more than similar intellectual leaps in the, past, but given the kind of advancements we know one person is capable of making, there was remarkably little progress during all of this supposed leisure time.
'Soft' civilizations that didn't work in stone are nearly completely lost. Nobody going to find a knotted rope representing algebra or combinatorics lessons, or going to understand what it was without written instructions?
More on point, if all of these intellectuals were hanging out in the amazon, bored, why didn't they come up with long term data storage like clay tablets and writing? Why didn't they write their combinatorics proofs in stone? I know you're not really saying they had combinatorics, but a few millennia of frustrated brain boxes should leave some kind of legacy, especially in the totally physical space they lived and worked in.
There was once a businessman who was sitting by the beach in a small Brazilian village.
As he sat, he saw a Brazilian fisherman rowing a small boat towards the shore having caught quite few big fish.
The businessman was impressed and asked the fisherman, “How long does it take you to catch so many fish?”
The fisherman replied, “Oh, just a short while.”
“Then why don’t you stay longer at sea and catch even more?” The businessman was astonished.
“This is enough to feed my whole family,” the fisherman said.
The businessman then asked, “So, what do you do for the rest of the day?”
The fisherman replied, “Well, I usually wake up early in the morning, go out to sea and catch a few fish, then go back and play with my kids. In the afternoon, I take a nap with my wife, and evening comes, I join my buddies in the village for a drink — we play guitar, sing and dance throughout the night.”
The businessman offered a suggestion to the fisherman.
“I am a PhD in business management. I could help you to become a more successful person. From now on, you should spend more time at sea and try to catch as many fish as possible. When you have saved enough money, you could buy a bigger boat and catch even more fish. Soon you will be able to afford to buy more boats, set up your own company, your own production plant for canned food and distribution network. By then, you will have moved out of this village and to Sao Paulo, where you can set up HQ to manage your other branches.”
The fisherman continues, “And after that?”
The businessman laughs heartily, “After that, you can live like a king in your own house, and when the time is right, you can go public and float your shares in the Stock Exchange, and you will be rich.”
The fisherman asks, “And after that?”
The businessman says, “After that, you can finally retire, you can move to a house by the fishing village, wake up early in the morning, catch a few fish, then return home to play with kids, have a nice afternoon nap with your wife, and when evening comes, you can join your buddies for a drink, play the guitar, sing and dance throughout the night!”
The fisherman was puzzled, “Isn’t that what I am doing now?”
And then the fisherman dies from blood infection at 42, leaving his kids working at the age of 10. The kids like reading about sciences but can’t find time to do so. This story repeats for centuries.
You make a good point that too many current humans have the same problem, or lack motivation, but the silver platter/out of touch barb wasn't necessary.
> banging out kids at an unbelievable rate
That's not actually helpful. Some stats would be good. I did a quick search for number of offspring for the yanomami but found nothing.
I remember this little theory where in some ancient cultures children would be weaned around age six and the mothers would only become fertile again after that. I'm not sure how established the mechanicas are, but the theory says that hormonal pathways where breastfeeding causes infertility are activated by scant nutrition. It sounds like an effective way to adjust births to the available resources.
Breastfeeding does reduce odds of conception but it doesn't really last more than a year. Plenty of people get pregnant while breastfeeding.
I dunno, original poster mentioned scant nutrition being a condition for an extended effect so mayyyybe, seems like it would not be very hard to study today.
They were trying to figure out how to survive in a harsh world filled with deadly predators -- without the benefit of sharp claws, poisonous fangs, heavy muscles, thick fur, or any other advantage normally afforded to their competitors. That meant learning, for example, how wind and gravity affect the trajectory of a spear through the air. It's not rocket science but it's close enough :p
Our genus has been using tools, or at least one particular kind of tool, for at least 2.6 million years. Check these out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand_axe
Yes, when I thought about it, early humans must’ve been using tools for much longer. I think what impressed me here were the details they were able to deduce: storing tools in a common place, how they probably used them, perhaps the pre-historic equivalent of a butcher shop.
Also, it’s not as if exactly 100,000 years ago, humans turned modern. It was a long drawn-out transition, and perhaps some qualities came much earlier. Which makes me wonder what archaeologists consider as modern and how they arrived at that date. I’ll have to look for the Sapiens book recommended in the other comments.
And thanks for that link, it’s really interesting. I particularly like the linked pages for John Frere and thunderstones, about how stone axes were found and considered in modern times. I find such historiography fascinating: the stone axes were thought to be from gods or fairies at first, then some early scientists started to make more rational guesses about their origin—another approach to deep time.
What boggles my mind is that this particular stone tool, it's so attached to our genus that you could argue that it's a central part of our heritage. For almost two million years this particular tool was made, in similar ways. In some ways it defines us as a species.
And yet we lost the knowledge only 10-20,000 years ago. I find that kind of sad. I wouldn't mind learning how to make one.
When I went to the Maker Faire 5+ years ago, there was one small group of exhibits about making flint tools and other Stone Age implements (fiber cord, then you can make a bow drill and make beads, etc.). They were really trying to revive the ideas and methods hat you are talking about. I don’t have any contact info, but it should be on google somewhere.
Somewhat related for the Bronze Age is the Clickspeing YouTube channel where the guy create bronze-working tools by hand and then uses them to re-create the Antikythera Mechanism. It is surprisingly complex, but he is meticulous and perfectionist with incredible results. Unfortunatel, he stopped posting halfway through, so I’m not sure what happened.
My wife is an anthropology grad, in one of her classes they spent some time learning flint tool making. But it's really a skill that takes years. And of course we don't know for sure how a hand axe would have been made.
Subject to the caveats that (1) we can't necessarily identify something as "writing" or "not writing"; and (2) it's hard to establish accurate dates for things that happened 5-6000 years ago, they're roughly contemporaneous.
From South India here. Round stone ball (like the one in the pic) is still a very common tool in the kitchens here. We use it to quickly grind spices like pepper or make paste of ginger or garlic.
Interesting: whoever edited that article miscorrected "cobble" to the likely more familiar but incorrect "cobblestone".
I've seen a huge increase in such errors over the past decade, both in terms and tense. I don't know how to explain it but it is discouraging. Sometimes the errors are quite confusing until you realize what happened; this one is quite minor.
Hmm. What do you see as being incorrect here, and what's your justification?
My 1982 paper dictionary agrees with Wiki sources that you can use the word "cobble" either as a short form of cobblestone, or as a verb for paving streets with such stones.
You can also use a different word, written the same, "cobble" for a now largely obsolete trade and some related things but this document clearly has nothing to do with those so that can't be what you mean.
In Minecraft "cobble" is certainly understood to be short for cobblestone. A "cobblegen" is either an arrangement of materials (lava, water, something heat resistant) so as to cause the game to make and replace cobblestone blocks when you mine them out, so as to obtain unlimited amounts of this building material, or in modded Minecraft it's a more compact machine which makes this material, perhaps in very large quantities indeed, and maybe related materials like sand.
Cobble (the noun) is a term for a small stone, and in particular a geological term these days such as would be picked up and used for the purpose described. It is retroglossed in an abbreviation for the cobblestone paving in an urban setting, but this article references the more basic term. An abbreviated dictionary like you’d have in your house might drop the more basic use but a full dictionary like the OED would not.
Note that in the US “cobblestone streets” is often used to describe what are not even cobbles but setts (square trimmed blocks) which are still found in some older US cities like Boston or Manhattan and European cities like London or Paris.
I think the traditional difference between cobbles and a cobblestone something is the same distinction as pebbles vs a pebbledash something.
A pebble is of course a small rock. Pebbledash describes the decorative finish — which is made of pebbles and other material like cement or concrete — on some physical thing. You would say “my new house has pebbledash walls” or just by itself as a shorthand where it implies an unsaid word: “the pebbledash [finish] on this property gives it a delightfully vintage feel!”
So historically speaking, cobblestone describes a type of surface finish made of cobbles, and the two words have been quite separate.
Aerial is a fun one too. An antenna has components such as bolts and fixtures and junction boxes, but most prominently it will have a wire or other metal object that is thrust into the air: that is to to say a component that is aerial, or the aerial component.
Once I learned that distinction, saying “aerial” instead of the more precise “antenna” seems very quaint, like saying “wireless” for radio or “pianoforte” for piano. It’s not exactly the same as cobbles being used in cobblestone finishes, but they are interesting examples of nouns and adjectives merging into each other.
In this case I think cobblestone is correct? They tested natural stones (Merriam Webster: cobblestone - "a naturally rounded stone larger than a pebble and smaller than a boulder") vs the hand made stones for this particular task.
"cobble" is more frequently a verb in my experience, to "cobble something together". The dictionary does say cobblestone as a noun = cobble as a noun though. So although they seem to be equivalent I think the original objection is that in some dialects / regions it probably just flows better in a sentence? Probably another subtle british vs american english thing. (I'm american) -- edit My brit friend says it's a stone until it's in a road, then it's a cobblestone.
Cobble is what a geologist would call a medium-sized water-rounded piece of rock if it was free or embedded naturally in a matrix (like glacial till or sediment). They’d only call it a cobblestone in the context of like, paving a street or driveway or something.
However, I don’t think that makes it wrong for people / other disciplines to call it a cobblestone.
I wonder if anybody of those experts ever tried to model a stone. With tools available 2 million years ago which means: another stone. Crafting stone balls to reach the marrow? Any other stone would do.
I saw a paper years back, which I now fuzzily recall as having people select which size stones felt good, felt right in their hand, and then comparing that with their biophysics parameters like arm length, with a hypothesis that people like the feel of stones which are optimally sized for them to throw. So among thoughts of "innovation", perhaps include "thinking with your hands", and even beaver-style slapping mud on trickling noises "just because". Mens et manus (MIT's "mind and hand" motto).
Confused: How long did it take scientists to figure out, stone balls were used to hit things? Why didn't they simply ask Australian Aborigines? Oh they did, in 1912:
> For nearly 2 million years, ancient humans crafted stones into hand-size balls, but archaeologists were unsure why.
Wait, for nearly 2 million years ... humans? Starting and ending when? Do we have human remains from more than 2 million years ago? Turkana Boy is 1.5 million years old and close to modern physiology, once you get back to 2 million isn't it australopithicus and such?
> That changed when Assaf and her team came across a cache of 30 stone balls in Qesem Cave in Israel, where humans lived from about 400,000 to 200,000 years ago
I wonder if 2 million is a typo for 200 thousand?
> these stones "might have helped enhance human caloric intake and adaptation in the lower Paleolithic period," (2.7 million to 200,000 years ago), at Qesem Cave and possibly beyond, the researchers wrote in the study.
Whew, OK, so 2.7 million years ago is their starting point on this. That's interesting. Who was shaping stones that far back?
An interesting other site is the Cerutti Mastodon site in San Diego with 130kYBP mastodon bones possibly crushed with similar stones which were found at the site.
You can see in the sidebar that you can traverse the industries in time (Preceded by and Followed by links). Amazingly, these span _species_, since stone tools were in use before Homo sapiens were on the scene.
It's really incredible that at that point humans(or whatever homo species) could 1) invent novel techniques for tool making and 2) train others, who could train others, etc etc until the technique traveled flawless across the accessible world.
The weirdest part for me though is how flawless transmission of the techniques happened over a relatively short period of time, but (1) was so infrequent that each technique lasted for tens or hundreds of thousands of years. Yet not so infrequent that it never happened, or it only happened once.
There's an argument that some technologies only make sense in a particular context and so if you invent that technology without the context it dies out.
IIRC Writing died out several times, some specialists would see the value in recording language "permanently" and embrace the invention but nobody else did, then circumstances result in this group dying out or at least being dispersed and the ability is lost again.
There are some edge cases too. The invention of radio almost doesn't make sense, because they didn't yet understand enough about electromagnetism to make anything resembling a modern radio transmitter. The "spark gap" radio transmitter invented was totally crazy (in modern terms it's basically a broadband jammer and thus illegal), but if nobody else has a radio transmitter then it's all you've got. If that technology was slightly worse (say the maximum range is a hundred times worse or getting the transmitter working is not merely tricky to learn but such an art that few can do it reliably even with practice) it wouldn't be useful and would have gone nowhere until the electromagnetic theory gets better and valves are invented.
The Alexanderson alternator was an intermediate technology between the spark gap transmitters and tubes. Unlike the spark gaps transmitters, it produced a more spectrally clean waveform, but only at modest frequencies (up to 600 kHz, according to the Wikipedia page).
The other thing this article made me think of: the stone tools get stored in a cave and forgotten (the small band of users get wiped out for some other reason), then another band finds the cave (because of a rainstorm) and the tools and the broken bones nearby. They figure it out and “own” the cave and the tools for a few years/generations until history repeats. Over the 200,000 year use of the cave, maybe it sat dormant for 1-5,000 years at a time. Imagine finding a cave in a mostly empty land, and finding useful artifacts inside.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qesem_cave
The article describes how the researchers made replicas and used those to crush bones, which they did better than unshaped stones of similar size. The replicas also had marks after use similar to the original artifacts. I really like when scientists do this kind of validation.
This article taught me about ancient humans; I did not know we had such archaeological evidence from them. I had heard that anatomically modern humans have been around for 100 thousand years, so art in Lascaux caves from 17,000 years was made by people like us (just pre agriculture and civilization), but I had no idea about humans 200,000 years ago using tools.
For perspective, this cave was used (likely intermittently) by humans for 200,000 years, so 100 times the Christian Era or 40 times the span recorded history (oldest writing dating back to Egypt around 3rd millenium BC). But then it was unused, probably covered up and undiscovered for the same length of time until present.