To note, the supposed builders of the structure also left behind other tools that the researchers identify, not just the two logs. All that evidence after nearly half a million years is a miracle of a find.
Also, Homo heidelbergensis was the supposed builder. The wiki page has a lot of good info on these folks. One interesting point is that Homo heidelbergensis was more closely related to neanderthals than to us. We know tool use occurs in a lot of apes, so finding such evidence isn't to be all that unexpected. Still, amazing stuff and amazing work by the research team.
Apes don’t carve logs and notch them to build structures.
While not “modern humans” it’s important not to fall into the trap of thinking those who came prior to us had some degree of lesser intelligence. Truth is they probably just knew different things that were important to their lives then. Instead of knowing how to drive a car or use credit card they knew what plants to eat, how to make tools, hunt, and apparently build houses with logs.
Homo heidelbergensis is the common ancestor between modern humans and Neanderthals. They are pretty darn close to modern humans. And if you took a modern human from, say, 10,000 years ago and raised them in the modern world you’d just have a modern human. While this seems like a long way back, this subspecies probably isn’t that far from that scenario.
And recent research into Neanderthal DNA shows that there was intermingling and an ebb and flow of genetic mixing over long periods of time. I only say that to suggest that things are less linear than we were taught.
The whole concept of different human species may be a taxonomic error of historic proportions despite the morphological differences we see in the fossil record. Information on the genome of archaic humans is a very recent development in a centuries old field so it is still catching up, especially at the level of educational material.
Based on my reading of the paper about the sequenced neanderthal bone [1] and a global genetic variation study [2], the difference between neanderthals and modern humans isn't that much bigger than the natural variation within the modern human genome. That difference is much smaller (on the order of 10-40x) than the difference between modern humans and chimpanzees and given the multiple genetic bottleneck events in our evolution, I think it's much more accurate to look at all the different species of archaic humans as breeds of modern humans that happen to show a larger difference with older samples because of the limited founding population and the diversity of our ancestors (of which we have very few biased samples).
Where to draw the line in speciation is always controversial but my theory is that once tool use really got going by the second stone industry, early humans started artificially self-selecting for intelligence just like we later did with dogs and eventually the modern human "breed" was born. By the million year ago mark, roughly the time evidence of fire started showing up in the archaeological record, I think the species that is modern humans was already long spreading and out competing other apes. I think shortly after this point is when we started developing clothing and moving into the colder climates, leaving evidence at places like Atapuerca.
We're not used to seeing diversity in humans, as the extant population is remarkably same-ish apart from very extremely minor traits like skin colour or eyelid variations. There's quite a bit of genetic diversity within the African continent, but even there it's remarkable how well we all cluster together, genetically.
So given a fossil record where we find people without chins and broader shoulders, etc. we go crazy with the species boundaries.
But given how rare fossilization conditions are, we're only seeing a tiny fraction of what was out there anyways, so it seems remarkably bold to classify with such confidence.
The reality is that nature doesn't "care" about species. There were likely bagloads of individuals who sat on a continuum of a diversity of traits that have since disappeared because of population bottlenecks at, disease, famine, homogenization, etc.
> Apes don’t carve logs and notch them to build structures.
The builders were much closer to us than to apes. We separated from great apes (chimpanzee ancestors) 7 million years ago (mya). This structure is from 0.5 mya and Homo sapiens first walked the Earth ~0.2-0.3 mya.
> While not “modern humans” it’s important not to fall into the trap of thinking those who came prior to us had some degree of lesser intelligence. Truth is they probably just knew different things that were important to their lives then.
What makes that 'truth'? Evidence: It depends on how far back you go, of course, but between ~7 million and ~2.6 mya (with some uncertain evidence from 3.3 mya), none of our ancestors figured out how to make or use tools. Around 1.8 mya we figured out Acheulean tools, which were made by finding an appropriate hand-sized rock, knocking flakes off one edge to sharpen it, and voila - a 'handaxe'. Acheulean tools, arugably the most relatively successful technology in history, dominated world-wide Homo tool market for a long time: We didn't improve on them for about 1.3 million years, when we figured out how to use make tools from the sharp flakes, and to attach the tools to hafts.
That's just one example, and it all speaks cleary to ability. More importantly, there is no evidence of ability approaching ours, afaik.
Well the exciting part to me is that it suggests settlement or at least deeper investment in a location.
Not surprising given what we found in Wonderwerk Cave in the Kalahari Desert, but it is totally challenging to some people’s long held beliefs in archeology.
A good scientist is a skeptical/cynical scientist.
And never forget the two main rules of understanding scientific findings:
1) pay no attention to what media reports say about a scientific finding. Read the paper instead. The media almost never gets things right and very often completely misrepresents them.
2) One paper is the same as no paper. Don't even think about entertaining the notion that what a single paper says is actually true. Wait until there are other papers from researchers trying to reproduce results.
The cynical skepticism isn't a bad thing, especially as you've pointed out, so much stuff has been published that would make it necessary. Wholehearted acceptance, blindly, on anything new is just not a sound practice. Even if reviewing and confirming the material only takes minutes, it was at least reviewed and confirmed.
The simulation only started at unix 0 so really it "happened" a 0 but was coded to appear in the past to help seed the universe and reduce agent confusion, a classic issue in the previous versions.
The log structure is 476k years old and the tools are 390k-326k years old. Does this mean that people might have been living at this site for up to 86k-150k years? That is mind-boggling.
It's surprising that the quick conclusion is "proto-humans". Couldn't any other animal do this? Half a million years is a lot of time. Couldn't proto-elephants be a bit more resourceful back then?
We can speculate on any possibility. The basis of science, and the reason for its outstanding success, is the requirement for evidence. Do we have any evidence of any other organisms ever doing anything of the sort? The answer is no.
Almost all known non-human tool use is for obtaining food, afaik.
Other primates use tools, but it's on the level of a stick stripped of leaves to poke into a termite nest (termites crawl on stick, remove stick, eat).
Avians are the other main category; some only have been observed using tools in captivty. Corvids (crows, ravens, rooks) are particularly interesting. New Caledonian Crows will actually bend the end of a tool to make a hook, good for prying out grubs from under bark. Rooks have handled some particularly complex problems in captivity.
There is no evidence of any non-human doing anything like making axes, chopping wood, and constructing something. If I understand the paper correctly, the 'axes' were 'handaxes' - archaeologist-speak for an unhafted axes, i.e., axes sans handles, i.e., effectively just the axe head which you hold in the palm of your hand. Our ancestors took > 2 million years to figure out how to attach tools to hafts, succeeding by ~200,000 years ago (but only in one place - 'the future is here, it's just not widely distributed yet'.)
This was my initial thinking as well. Ive seen plenty of notched logs created by modern beavers when they give up on a project.
Perhaps not even an animal. I could imagine several scenarios where a perpendicular placed log could rub back and forth across another log creating a notch over time.
I guess it comes down to tool marks on the logs notched area but the whole thing is so weathered I can't imagine that evidence is crystal clear either. Its worth noting that the other tools, which the article mentions were found at the same site, are ~100k years younger.
Haven’t there been a tonne of these things that supposedly push back the clock of human history? Why is this one in particular getting a lot of attention??
I'd assume it's due to the discovery not being some human remains but rather processed wood, making it the oldest evidence for wood working we have by a massive margin. Quote from the article:
> Prior to this discovery, the oldest known surviving wooden structures were built by people living in northern England around 11,000 years ago.
I get that. I just thought there were a tonne of even more exotic finds of more advanced technology than woodworking — but it’s not always clear which are ‘fringe’ and which have been invested with the epistemic authority of institutional science. That is the confusing thing.
It is honestly shocking that there were some form of human building houses with stone axes half a million years ago. It's difficult to reason about what kind of humans they were.. but it sounds quite a bit like modern humans. How old are we exactly? And when I say "we" I don't mean Homo Sapien as we would likely identify in a sort of "uncanny valley" way with other species of human.
It wasn't about building houses or anything like that. From the article:
"[..] the logs may have formed part of a walkway or the foundation of a platform built over wetlands."
So humanoids were already building things half a million years ago. Can you imagine what they'll be building in half a million years in the future? (if we're still around)
Paired with the other article on the front page about transparent wood, I’m assuming it will be log structures from genetically modified trees that provide passive heating and cooling, air filtration, adaptive transparency and artificial light, self repairing, anti-fungal, neuronal smarthone brain with a range of stylish finishes that can be regrown based on input from your brain-treecomputer interface.
Claims to be smelling like the material from spontaneously occurring biological structures of ancient times that, some say, gave this material its name !
BOC sells a couple of Xmas smells, or did at least, from 1995, 'BOC's first big customer is Woolworths, where a whiff of cinnamon and a subtle hint of cloves will be in the air this Christmas' by 1997 it had become 'a heady mix of pumpkin and thyme'!
I doubt humans ever stopped building log structures. Not all humans or groups of humans of course, plenty live in places without many trees. I'd be less surprised to find out that there have been humans have been using log structures more for the entire ~.5M years than to find out it was lost for some number of years/generations.
So more Burroughs and less Asimov? Shall we start digging now or shall we start the bunker after lunch?
Roddenbury’s vision is quickly coming to life. Ship’s computer AI, pocket communicators, advanced medicine… surely some of this matters (barring the ongoing threat nuclear apocalypse, granted).
A problem I see is that we've long since depleted all the easy-to-extract fossil fuel reserves, if there's ever a catastrophe of any sorts there will not be any way to reboot our civilization. Or there possibly could be, but then the path would be so slow and cumbersome that on that kind of timescale we'd likely get obliterated by asteroid impacts long before getting the technology up to par with what we currently have.
So we'd better get it right this time because it's our only chance.
> A problem I see is that we've long since depleted all the easy-to-extract fossil fuel reserves
A sentence I'd never thought I'd ever write, but we can actually look at the Nazis for an answer. They too had the problem that there was barely any oil available, so they turned to a recent-ish French invention - wood gas - instead [1] and scaled the technology up to hundreds of thousands of deployed units, including locomotives.
Wood is perfectly fine to kickstart a re-industrialization, it was how the original industrialization went on as well with giant steam power plants in the first place. The largest benefit of oil was that it was waaay cheaper to extract and handle than to deal with wood, and you can make plastics out of it.
A future civilization may actually have an easier path, by using either power-to-gas technology to create energy-dense fuel, or by letting plants do the job instead (biofuel). The only thing that will be really short in supply is plastics - for now, we make cheap plastics out of the byproducts of oil refineries, but in a society that doesn't have oil, they will be limited to plastics that do not require oil (e.g. PVC) as part of the supply chain.
I'm a bit embarrassed to not have considered wood gas as a civilization jump starter - my wood/metalworking teacher in high school actually built a wood gas car as a side project but for some reason I hadn't really incorporated that technology into my thinking.
So let me ask you something. Which one of the following three options is the correct one?
During the past 40 years the amount of oil and natural gas remaining in known reserves:
- Was cut in half
- Stayed about the same
- More than doubled
If you answered more than doubled you’d be right.
More and more oil and natural gas reserves have been discovered and much of it in just the last 10 years (including off the coast of Gaza, go look it up).
This means they are not running out like most people think.
We need to switch to cleaner energy now, we can’t just wait for the dirty stuff to run out. But because we are constantly discovering new accessible supplies the threshold for running out keeps getting pushed further back, and we haven’t even really started to tap several suspected massive reserves in the arctic and elsewhere and Russia is rumored to be sitting on discoveries that they haven’t even announced to the world.
People wrongly think that as we use more oil and gas, the reserves will run lower. They hadn’t realized that as technology improves, it becomes more possible to find and extract fossil fuels.
To prevent the absolute worst effects of climate change, oil and gas reserves must stay in the ground. But they will never run out, just become more expensive to extract.
We just need to create alternatives that are cheap enough that extracting oil for burning and not manufacturing isn’t cost effective to do anymore.
The technology to replace fossil fuels is coming, and it’s been dropping in cost profoundly in recent years. There’s every reason to believe that we will make this transition, it’s just a question of getting better energy density with existing technologies and getting them widely deployed with less exotic materials.
When electric cars have a 2000 kilometer range and cost 1/2 of the price to refill, gas vehicles won’t stand a chance.
Have faith. Things are dire but they are far from lost. We do need to shift society, and quickly, but that only happens when the system that got us in trouble gets used to cause the transition to sustainability.
I am not a doomer so perhaps we don’t see eye to eye on things. But the idea that we are going to run out of oil anytime soon is a falsehood that’s widely perpetuated, and it means that a lot of our thinking needs to change from “before the end of oil” to “proactively change towards a defined and sustainable solution” as we won’t be forced to stop using it as it won’t run out…
> More and more oil and natural gas reserves have been discovered and much of it in just the last 10 years (including off the coast of Gaza, go look it up).
>
> This means they are not running out like most people think.
You seem to be missing the point - I never said anything was running out. You seem to be arguing about our current civilization. If you imagine a future upcoming civilization (post-apocalypse, whatever), having progressed to an iron age stage, how on earth would they even discover those deposits hidden deep beneath the sea? They would have no reason to drill there in the first place.
The easy-to-extract close-to-land-surface deposits are long gone. Humanity would have to somehow progress to industrial stages without the help of fossil fuels that we've enjoyed, which seriously restricts growth. And thus we're talking about much wider timescales than what we've so far experienced.
The other reply had a very interesting idea regarding wood gas and that could be an option for a cool future cyberpunk civilization that would allow for somewhat constrained population growth (assuming balance is found and it doesn't lead to another Easter Island).
> But they will never run out, just become more expensive to extract.
You are very much correct here. It's more expensive (= complex & energy-intensive) both to extract and to discover in the first place. A future civilization wouldn't make these discoveries by chance, like we happened to discover oil. Unless we'd store a Rosetta Stone type thing for future civilizations instructing them how to do so. And even then they'd require tools that would likely not be viable without first having fossil fuels.
I always liked the saying "the meek shall inherit the earth, the rest of us are going to space." While those in space will probably be closer to Total Recall style bases vs Star Trek clean and shiny, I feel like those on earth will be closer to Mad Max. Humans are why we can't have nice things
I totally agree with the sentiment, but the citation marks might not be wholly appropriate. This is what Snopes said when they dug into it:
> "We found several other instances of people making similar statements at around the same time, indicating that this was a popular opinion at that time that was evidently shared by Albert Einstein. However, we have been unable to find a direct quote from the physicist that matches this particular meme."
If I were famous enough for people to attribute quotes to me while I was still alive, I would totally take the good, pithy ones and go, "I've said it before and I'll say it again..." at my next interview.
I still think the same: This is, most probably, just a bonfire.
I will shamelessly self-quote:
"wood looks cut in a tip and partially burnt in the other. Fire makes this notches easily when two logs overlap. Also explains the preservation of the wood, sterilized by fire (maybe minutes before a rain fell or a flood hit).
It usually is prudent to assume that professionals in foreign fields aren't idiots; that includes archeology and their knowledge of the existance of bonfires. Just skimming the paper for a few seconds makes the reasoning of the researchers pretty clear.
As an outsider, you're best off waiting to hear the consensus of a field, rather than grabbing an arbitrary study and trying to evaluate its quality.
It's hard to spot the difference between a good paper and a charlatan who carefully paints a picture that supports his claim or even outright fabricates data, unless you've read dozens or hundreds of papers in the field and know the lay of the land on who tends to be reliable and who are the well known cranks who have been publishing academic fan fiction for decades.
I'm not assuming either claim is bogus or legit. I'm saying trying to divine the legitimacy of a study without much context beyond a handful of "Alice says X but Bob says Y" is a fool's errand. On any "X/not X" topic one side is probably going to be correct, but not necessarily for any good reason.
we have an overcomplicated, never seen before, explanation involving a short structure of two short logs joined together for an unknown purpose that nobody could explain. Too short to be a building, too big to be a tool (Is this a 1mx1m house, a prehistoric walmart? a doll house? the earliest proof of a christian cross in the planet?) The structure somehow managed to survive for an awful lot of time, and was dated by a strange indirect method. If the sand is old, the wood is old (and the people sunbathing in the beach is also old).
This is explanation 1.
I proposed a much more simple explanation, that explains the notches, and also the position of the pieces, and also why the logs didn't root; and also a reasonable purpose for this structure that does not depend on extraordinary claims. This particular structure can be also easily replicated today
This is explanation 2
One of this explanations can be published on Nature. One is more probable than the other. One, or none, of this explanations are correct
I keep seeing people claiming that explanation 1 is correct "because experts are right, because they are experts (and know better)". A circular reasoning known in logic as fallacy of appeal to authority. Check the definition if you think that is used here incorrectly.
Nope, this is not an acceptable proof of anything
"You can't be right because, who do you think that you are, jackass?" is also an equally ludicrous response. Sorry If I broke your little Indiana Jones heart. Who do you assume that I am is not relevant. (LOL, you don't even know me).
I see the experts proposing that as there is a notch, it must be an imaginary rope, glue or whatever to join the logs, to support their narrative. My explanation does not rely on hypothetical proofs like an imaginary rope (that lets admit it, nobody has found)
Chop marks on firewood are expected, but don't imply necessarily "Tell Nature that they were trying to build a boudoir".
The fallacy of appeal to authority (or argument from authority) is referring to cases where the authority status is unrelated to the field of the argument. It is not a fallacy to assign higher credence to a statement of an expert in the relevant field relative to outsider with no relevant expertise.
I once read an article relating to farming practices which evoked from me reaction similar to yours, those smartypants archeologists are surely imagining entire worlds on the basis of small piece of insignificant broken metal. I read the entire paper just to prove myself I was right, and reading the forensic methods used for corroborating the thesis was very effective humbling lesson
Indeed; the simple thinking you apply to sort some numbers, or to understand a brutally simple logic such as a programming language spec, gives you incredible insight into all fields of human endeavour, past and present.
On a somewhat related note - I highly recommend visiting the Mayan ruins at the Coba archaelogical site. It has the tallest Mayan pyramid on the Yucatan peninsula, with half of it (the inaccessible rear) still inundated by dense jungle. A few tips: if you don't want to opt for a guided tour, prepare to turn down several pointed offers at the entrance. Also, there are small rickshaws for transportation - they will inflate the distances involved to get you to hire one - if you can take a few hours total of walking including breaks you don't need their services. Quite a place! Less squeaky clean than Chichen Itza.
The fact you think programming is about numbers shows you have no idea what programming is.
The fact is, programming at a high level means analyzing thousands of dimensions of information and flattening them out into something executable by a dumb machine.
We are literally expert at becoming experts.
For any given data set there are a number of possible interpretations. Is that notch natural? They say yes, but I'm sure others in the field disagree as well.
His claim was that programming is a simple kind of thinking. He gives two representative examples:
* The consideration of sorting algorithms (which in all fairness _is_ a staple in teaching algorithms), and
* The use of simple logic - such is representative of programming language specs.
I'd say that this is a fair summary - real life tends to be a lot more complicated that the problems faced by most programmers.
Even more brutally: he is aiming quite high, a lot of programming is the minor stitching together of APIs without making too big of a mess.
Few programmers ever seriously actually need to analyse thousands of dimensions of information - and I'd say that it is a safe bet that the ones who do are probably using numbers.
To "We are literally expert at becoming experts.", I'd reply with https://xkcd.com/1112/
Prudent yes, but also, since it's science, challenging should always be an option. A lot research on e.g. female burials were done by male researchers who had male point-of-views, so they interpreted someone buried with a load of weaponry as male, while the actual science showed - later on - it was a woman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birka_grave_Bj_581)
Bonfires aren't renowned for leaving tooling marks, they're not just saying it was done kind of side claim and moving on, they're presenting the case for them appearing to be evidence of 'earliest carpenters'.
Off topic but I've been thinking about the difference in how logic works for programmers, engineers, and lawyers. A programmer can build a complicated logical thing and it'll work reliably. An engine can do that too but it takes a lot of effort to make it reliable. If a lawyer tries that it won't work. Because legal facts are to uncertain and the law conflicts with itself.
to be fair, having such a giant jump between this discovery and the previous earliest log structure discovered incite to be cautious. There was a similar case with superconductivity few weeks ago, where the cautious were right against the researchers.
There is a lot more money to be made if you claim to have the secret formula for superconductivity, than discovering some evidence of ancient wooden tools/structure.
This is a discussion forum. It’s not “obvious” to everyone, including people who correctly identify their non-expertise.
(This comment continues the trend of abusing the “appeal to authority.” Humanity collects and specializes knowledge because we recognize the general impossibility of knowing everything ourselves.)
Jesus christ the number of people that learned a list of fallacies but never understood them or their applications and now mindlessly accuse people online of them in ways that aren't at all applicable while thinking they're so much smarter than everyone else cause they memorized this list of gotchas that aren't actually gotchas regularly astounds me.
Please learn what the fallacies actually mean and maybe read actual organized debate rules. I promise you, in one of those "the researcher has years of experience in the field and you're a programmer, they are more likely to be correct" is valid support for an argument and not some how negated by "I cast 'appeal to authority' fallacy" without an actual argument that indicates why the authority does not have weight.
As Feynman once remarked, "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." Archaeology is a soft science at best and highly dependent on interpretation. Given the replication crises afflicting even hard sciences like medicine, we should be skeptical about the claims of any given researcher. And while a domain expert may be more likely to be correct than a layman, their overall probability of being correct may be less than chance, as in the case of pre-industrial doctors.
I assure you that there's no replication crisis in archaeology. Why? Because almost nothing in archaeology uses replication. You can't excavate the same sections twice, you can't test the same samples twice, and you can't replicate the same historical events to test theories of formation processes.
Archaeology is a historical science like evolutionary biology and geology.
Another thread posted an example where for over a hundred years a Swedish skeleton was thought to be male because it was buried with weapons, but then just a decade ago it was found by DNA evidence to be female.
Surely bone anatomy is much more reliable to interpret than a half million year old pile of sticks yet it was still gotten wrong. Anything that needs interpreted will invite incorrect interpretations and should be taken with a grain of salt.
The evidence seems quite good that this was intentional. The paper found evidence of both using stone tools and fire to shape the notches. Using fire as an aide to woodworking is well known and still exists today in some traditional forms of woodworking. I don't see anywhere in the paper saying the entire structure was burned, just the faces of the notches. They were able to reproduce the chop marks they found with recreated stone tools of the time.
Given we know stone tools were used for more than 2.5 million years by the genus homo, I don't see why it's a stretch to say they were using stone tools on wood 2 million years into having stone tools. Lack of evidence does not mean lack of occurrence. It is very difficult to find organic matter from so long ago given that it normally decays. Furthermore, this is not a radically complex structure either. Something a child could make.
> We interpret the notch as intentional, made by scraping and adzing1 to create a join between the log and trunk, forming a construction of two connected parts. Infrared spectroscopy (Supplementary Information Section 5) provides indeterminate evidence for use of fire in shaping the notch. Clark17 described a similar find, from the Acheulean in Site B, of comparable length (165 cm long) with a “wide and deepish groove” transverse to the long axis, with tapered ends. He interpreted the groove as anthropogenic and suggested it was part of a structure. The excavation of two interlocking logs in BLB5, with shaped ends on both objects supports this interpretation. We know of no comparable construction in the early archaeological record.
Yeah I agree that the article's explanation seems unlikely. A jump from 11K to 476K years ago just seems too big, one would expect that we would have found plenty of other wooden structures in the period in between if people had been manufacturing them all the time.
Sure, but apparently the chance that it survives 476K year is > 0. That would imply that the chance of finding preserved wood anywhere in [11K .. 476K] is > 0 as well.
Given such a large period with nothing found in it, and given that in this period wood needed to survive considerable less long than 476K, makes me want to look for other explanations.
I also don't know where they got the 11ka from? From the paper:
The earliest known wood artefact is a fragment of polished plank from the Acheulean site of Gesher Benot Ya’aqov, Israel, more than 780 ka (refs. 2,3). Wooden tools for foraging and hunting appear 400 ka in Europe, China and possibly Africa. At Kalambo we also recovered four wood tools from 390 ka to 324 ka, including a wedge, digging stick, cut log and notched branch.
So not exactly much, but there are other finds. But the problem is to not only find wood that is that old and has survived and has (clear) signs of human "tools", but had also been used for "structural" purposes.
I also don't understand the general idea. So there are humans capable of generating tools out of stones (the oldest flint tools are 3 millions of years old), but the idea that they use these tools to work wood to help making something structural out of wood - like some notches to be able to easier put some sticks of wood together - is debatable?
The problem for archeologists is of course to prove that these wooden "structures" existed by, well, finding traces(Oh, what a pun!) of them.
But we're dealing with such small numbers and such perishable materials!
This isn't like modern humans - billions of individuals each generating tons of waste materials over their lifetime, stuff like concrete, plastic, glass, and metals. This is a few hundred thousand individuals who are sometimes making things out of sticks, grasses, and hide.
As far as I can tell from some quick googling, there only were ever a few hundred thousand homo heidelbergensis, and that's the high estimate.
We only have a few hundred specimens of the bones of homo heidelbergensis and some of those are from extremely bizarre circumstances, like a pit in a cavern where people seem to have been deliberately disposed of.
If we only have a few bits and pieces of bone left, consider how much less likely it is for a structure of plant and animal materials to survive. If it was in use by people, eventually it would wear out and be replaced, and get broken down to reuse its materials in various ways. If people abandon it, they probably won't bury it like they would a human being (very convenient to future archeologists). Abandoned structures will just stay on the surface, where the elements and decomposing organisms will eventually reduce it to dust.
According to the researchers here, the wooden structures only survived due to being preserved in fine sediment in the water.
So we're only ever going to find structures like this due to wildly improbable events. It's amazing we've found any!
I like to think the people who date these things can tell the difference between the carbon from burning and carbon-14. I'm not sure it's even used for something this old since AFAIK it only works so far back.
"Is not" what carbon 14 you find. Is what is lost what counts, because this is lost at a known rate. The less carbon you find the oldest the structure. So, first question: Is fire a known way to remove carbon from an organic structure?
Uppercase YES.
Second question, carbon 14 method has intervals of confidence. Show me the intervals
And does fire somehow selectively eliminate c14 but not c12? Because that's the measurement we're making.
It's irrelevant to the OP because radiocarbon dating doesn't go back that far, but your general skepticism is very much misplaced. The people who have been using and improving radiocarbon dating for the last century do in fact know more about it than your superficial armchair doubts.
> does fire somehow selectively eliminate c14 but not c12?
Maybe, if we assume that C14 is not distributed homogeneously in the log; that is the logical assumption by default
As we know that C14 had spikes in production in some particular years, Is trivial to assume that rings formed in those years stored more C14.
The main question is if we have this years registered on our log or not. If we would have it; and they fall on the outer part of the log (AKA the partially charred part), then is perfectly doable
> Maybe, if we assume that C14 is not distributed homogeneously in the log; that is the logical assumption by default
Perhaps read about the actual technique more? A tree will be at equilibrium with atmospheric c14 throughout its lifetime.
> As we know that C14 had spikes in production in some particular years, Is trivial to assume that rings formed in those years stored more C14.
We have very solid time series data on the background C14 levels from multiple independent techniques. Spectroscopy based methods count the total number of C14 atoms in the sample throughout its entire volume as well.
> The main question is if we have this years registered on our log or not. If we would have it; and they fall on the outer part of the log (AKA the partially charred part), then is perfectly doable
As I said above, the entire radiocarbon dating discussion is irrelevant to the original article. I just wanted to reply against zero content lowbrow dismissals of the technique in general. It's disappointing to see commentators here posting the exact same FUD as young earth creationists.
Technology gets lost all the time. The people who migrated to Australia apparently lost several key technologies over the years because the population was too sparse to guarantee the maintenance of knowledge.
Are you asking specifically to the Australian examples or examples in general? History is replete with many of the latter, in part because the custom was to keep certain artisans/state technologies secret. Before openly disclosed patents were the norm, technologies like greek fire, damascus steel, or Leeuwenhoek's lens often died with those who knew how to make them.
I was curious about specifically Australian examples as the comment implied they had examples in mind such as losing the use of the bow and arrow or somesuch.
The story there is more complex and there's a faction in Austalia that would insist that Australian aboriginals were on the decline when Europeans arrived.
The entire city of Petra was lost to western society (rediscovered in early 1800s) despite it being a part of the Roman Empire at one point and major trading hub for hundreds of years.
One of the problems of reading digital books (at least for me) is near-completely forgetting where a fact came from, and just remembering the fact. The source was a book on the future actually being likely to be good/improving from where we are now.
My memory on the specifics is vague. I remember him saying they had lost fish hooks (maybe just some fishing technique in general?). And that further losses occurred in the migration to Tasmania, leaving the settlers there even further behind.
Some people that replied to this comment were saying Damascus steel was "lost", which is mostly a meme.
If we're talking about modern times, Damascus steel can be easily forged and replicated by modern hobbyist smiths.
If we're talking about being lost at some point between 0AD and, say...1900 AD, then it was probably just not economically viable to make it. Damascus steel is very labor-intensive to produce and does not offer significant structural advantages compared to regular mild or tempered steel. Certainly not in applications where most metal was used in the middle ages (hint: it was warfare).
For example, it makes no sense to make a full-plate armor or a musket out of Damascus steel. It would be mostly a status item, rather than a practical tool.
Hence when we say "lost", it likely just means people looked at it and decided it wasn't worth the time outside of niche applications. And since it was niche, there is very few historical artifacts, that make it look "lost", when in reality, there just weren't too many of these items to begin with.
I do not know where you've got your version from (especially that it was lost between 0AD and the 20th century, when it actually had been the 19th and 20th and Damascus steel didn't exist before the 6th century), but I know about this one:
Many people in Europe saw these steels and tried to recreate the effect through processing. However, they could not discover the secret, and could not make it. Though there was a demand for Damascus steel, in the 19th century it stopped being made. This steel had been produced for 11 centuries, and in just about a generation, the means of its manufacture was entirely lost. The reason it disappeared remained a mystery until just a few years ago.
As it turns out, the technique was not lost, it just stopped working. The "secret" that produced such high quality weapons was not in the technique of the swordsmiths, but rather on the composition of the material they were using. The swordsmiths got their steel ingots from India. In the 19th Century, the mining region where those ingots came from changed.
So it was never really lost. As far as we know it simply wasn't produced in 1 particular region (Europe) for a relatively short amount of time (1 century).
And, like I said before, it did not offer any significant structural advantages for its labor inefficiency. So "Damascus steel" is just 1 minor technique of producing a specific steel alloy, with many substitutes that had been used in its place.
It's not like human civilization suddenly lost the technology of steel production and forging.
Lost tech is a meme. I could say the modern humanity lost the tech of making horse armor, but it is just inaccurate semantics. We can still make metal and we can still make armor in the shape of a horse, we just don't, because there's no demand for it.
I don't think I'd count the Antikythera device. My understanding is that the mystery with it is how it was made. The astronomical and mathematical knowledge to design it was well known among the Greeks.
If Antikythera devices were common, with say every ship having one, every town and village temple having one, every school having one, and so on we'd have a big mystery because we don't think the Greeks had the technology for mass production of mechanisms with the necessary accuracy and precision.
But we've only found one, and we don't know how long it took to build.
The Antikythera device could be the work of one builder and his assistants over a lifetime, financed by someone very wealthy and able to supply as many slaves as the builder wanted. It could even have been built over more than one lifetime, if the sponsor was a government.
When you are not in a hurry and you have a lot of laborers you can make very precise mechanisms with little more technology than blocks of metal and hand files.
As Teller of Penn & Teller once observed, "Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect". Penn has said "The only secret of magic is that I’m willing to work harder on it than you think it’s worth".
In case anyone here hasn't seen it, I want to share this very cool youtube series of an Australian clock maker creating a replica of the Antikythera device using only tools believed to be available to the ancient Greeks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML4tw_UzqZE&list=PLZioPDnFPN...
I dunno. What seems unlikely to me is that hominids and their predecessors had stone tools for >3 million years before they realized they could use them to build a bridge or tent. I would expect simple carpentry to be occurring much, much earlier, and the evidence lost to time.
This really shouldn't be downvoted. This isn't reddit where we lap up everything an authority or so-called expert serves in front of us, especially when those experts are slaves who need to sensationalize things to make their careers more relevant, "I discovered the oldest structure".
True intellectuals are skeptic. Try being a little skeptical, like the parent comment above. I'd sooner trust a freeman like the parent commenter than a chained academic and their redditor fanbase.
<offtopic>Just shows the raw capabilities of the human brain without the support of advanced ideas discovered by previous generations. In other words if we forgot the knowledge and skills that GPT's have mastered, we'd be right back there. It took half a million years to get from there to here, and a single human brain can't do it during a lifespan. Our intelligence is amplified by 500K years of experience collected and transmitted through language.
On the other hand AlphaZero played millions of self play games under an evolutionary tournament style, imitating human cultural evolution, and reaching superhuman level. AI can do it too, if given the exploratory budget.</>
To note, the supposed builders of the structure also left behind other tools that the researchers identify, not just the two logs. All that evidence after nearly half a million years is a miracle of a find.
Also, Homo heidelbergensis was the supposed builder. The wiki page has a lot of good info on these folks. One interesting point is that Homo heidelbergensis was more closely related to neanderthals than to us. We know tool use occurs in a lot of apes, so finding such evidence isn't to be all that unexpected. Still, amazing stuff and amazing work by the research team.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_heidelbergensis