[HN Gopher] Earliest Carpenters: 476k-year-old log structure dis...
___________________________________________________________________
Earliest Carpenters: 476k-year-old log structure discovered in
Zambia
Author : walterbell
Score : 175 points
Date : 2023-12-11 08:40 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.archaeology.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.archaeology.org)
| pvaldes wrote:
| 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)._
|
| Previous discussion here:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37587791
| misja111 wrote:
| 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.
| gcanyon wrote:
| 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.
| defrost wrote:
| Do you have any examples of these lost technologies and
| references to the papers that discuss this?
|
| Or is this some _Quadrant_ sourced opinioning?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Greek fire and Damascus steel are fairly good examples.
| Maybe chuck in the Antikythera device.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Roman concrete
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete
| tzs wrote:
| 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".
| bumby wrote:
| 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.
| alemanek wrote:
| 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.
|
| We lose stuff all the time.
| antisthenes wrote:
| 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.
| ReleaseCandidat wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://engineering.purdue.edu/MSE/aboutus/gotmaterials/H
| ist...
|
| The actual paper about the impurities: https://www.tms.or
| g/pubs/journals/JOM/9809/Verhoeven-9809.ht...
| antisthenes wrote:
| 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.
| ReleaseCandidat wrote:
| > we would have found plenty of other wooden structures in
| the period
|
| Well, wood is not exactly known to survive for hundreds, much
| less thousands or hundreds of thousand of years.
| misja111 wrote:
| 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.
| mysterydip wrote:
| If it was a burned structure, maybe the burning affected
| the measurement of the dating.
| Kye wrote:
| 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.
| Bouncingsoul1 wrote:
| they got 'infinite' for all carbon dating. They derived
| the age from the sand layer the wood was found. I got
| this from reading the paper.
| pulse7 wrote:
| Earth's crust is moving. Maybe the sand layers moved
| after the wood was placed there... and maybe the derived
| age is all wrong...
| pvaldes wrote:
| "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
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| 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.
| ReleaseCandidat wrote:
| 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.
| neilk wrote:
| 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!
| zikduruqe wrote:
| Exactly. If wood was better preserved, we would probably
| have called it the Wood Age versus the Stone Age.
| atwrk wrote:
| 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.
| caleb-allen wrote:
| Yes, but I'm a programmer.
| EliRivers wrote:
| 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.
| Kye wrote:
| Making a linked list is a lot like processing a lidar
| scan of a jungle canopy for signs of ruins, if you think
| about it.
|
| Am I being serious? I have no idea.
| datameta wrote:
| 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.
| poulpy123 wrote:
| to be fair, programmers are experts in logs
| zaat wrote:
| The number of programmer problems I by reading logs make
| me skeptical of that
| 0xdeadbeefbabe wrote:
| Especially endeavours like wrestling. Try it sometime.
| mannyv wrote:
| 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.
| philipswood wrote:
| He didn't say programming is about numbers.
|
| 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/
| alex_lav wrote:
| The arrogance of this statement is wild.
| zaat wrote:
| Surely you refer to this: https://xkcd.com/1831/
| pmontra wrote:
| Programmer's hubris?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| 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)
| liquidpele wrote:
| > challenging should always be an option.
|
| By someone else in the field, not by some jackass online.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| Oh, the irony.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| But did the professionals consider that it might be aliens?
| saalweachter wrote:
| 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.
| oldpersonintx wrote:
| ok, by what consensus was the "bonfire" conclusion reached?
|
| if the original claim is assumed bogus, why is the HN
| dismissal assumed true?
| saalweachter wrote:
| 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.
| pvaldes wrote:
| 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".
| zaat wrote:
| 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
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| > It usually is prudent to assume that professionals in
| foreign fields aren't idiots
|
| No ones presuming idiocy, more dishonesty.
|
| What makes a better paper? Bonfire or "Earliest carpenters"
| squidbeak wrote:
| Cynicism's as bad a tool for judging research as arrogance.
| OJFord wrote:
| 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'.
| poulpy123 wrote:
| 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.
| riscy wrote:
| 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.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| 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.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| Bonfires don't flatten a log leaving tool marks. They do leave
| burn marks.
|
| I agree with the other comment that it's rather absurd to
| rebuff a reviewed paper with such an armchair view.
| TSiege wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06557-9
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| 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.
| freejazz wrote:
| Is this supposed to be an example of thinking freely, or
| reactionary thought because of "reddit"?
| arolihas wrote:
| You should be a little skeptical of all claims, regardless of
| who they come from.
| Clubber wrote:
| You burn wood slightly to make it stronger. This was also
| common when making wooden spear tips.
|
| https://www.customshingles.com/blog/wood-burning-for-wood-
| ro....
| ReleaseCandidat wrote:
| The actual paper:
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/374057808_Evidence_...
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| More free version:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06557-9 (yes
| really!)
| Aardwolf wrote:
| 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)
| Isamu wrote:
| Some will say: it'll be log structures again
| myth_drannon wrote:
| "I do not know with what weapons World War III will be
| fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and
| stones." - Albert Einstein.
| stareatgoats wrote:
| 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."
|
| https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/einstein-world-war-iv-
| stic...
| saalweachter wrote:
| 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.
| gumby wrote:
| I know Mike Godwin and can tell you he at least doesn't
| have to.
| neuromanser wrote:
| Every popular quip ends up being attributed to Mark
| Twain.
|
| -- Voltaire
| baud147258 wrote:
| > sticks and stones.
|
| well, the clashes on the India-Chinese border in the
| Himalayas comes to mind...
| ppsreejith wrote:
| I like how this can be read both as a future where we regress
| technologically, or as a future where all work is in the
| domain of math.
| visarga wrote:
| from logs to logits
| dougmwne wrote:
| 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.
| tudorw wrote:
| Smells good too!
| liotier wrote:
| Claims to be smelling like the material from
| spontaneously occurring biological structures of ancient
| times that, some say, gave this material its name !
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| It's beginning to smell a lot like Christmas!
|
| With the look of real wood!
| gumby wrote:
| Indeed, but also other advanced mathematical structures too.
| gumby wrote:
| The big question is if that's enough time for _snakes_ to
| evolve to using log structures, so that they can slither
| beyond simple adders.
| chanandler_bong wrote:
| You're assuming there will be any trees left...
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| This is my bet also
| happytiger wrote:
| 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).
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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
| spurgu wrote:
| 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.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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).
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas
| sophacles wrote:
| 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.
| jansan wrote:
| A lot of construction is still banging a bunch of planks
| together. Maybe in half a million years they will still bang
| planks together?
| jacquesm wrote:
| Or rocks... trying to make fire.
| Aardwolf wrote:
| > Maybe in half a million years they will still bang planks
| together?
|
| But maybe they'll be doing so... in outer space
| garyrob wrote:
| It seems like it will be robots and AIs doing that building. I
| just wonder whether humans will exist at all in a form we can
| recognize.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Pyramids? Piling rocks in pyramid shape is pretty sturdy... And
| rocks are somewhat renewable resource.
| visarga wrote:
| <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.</>
| Balgair wrote:
| Very short article, well worth the time.
|
| 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
| passwordoops wrote:
| Very exciting! I love that the time line for humanity keeps
| getting pushed back. HOWEVER,
|
| >All that evidence after nearly half a million years is a
| miracle of a find.
|
| I really hope this doesn't turn out to be one of those too good
| to be true finds. I hate that the nature of academic research
| is making me so cynical
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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.
| JohnFen wrote:
| 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.
| happytiger wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/genetics/ancient-dna-
| an....
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| >Apes don't carve logs and notch them to build structures.
|
| But we know what people do.
|
| >While not "modern humans"
|
| This wasn't carpentry, this was a sawmill.
| happytiger wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://phys.org/news/2021-04-unveil-oldest-evidence-
| human-a...
| civilitty wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://sci-
| hub.se/https://www.nature.com/articles/nature128...
|
| [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature15393
| dr_kretyn wrote:
| 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?
| gehwartzen wrote:
| 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.
| sunday_serif wrote:
| Happened at around unix time -15 trillion
| pphysch wrote:
| Engineering was >15 trillion seconds old when engineers decided
| a 32-bit timestamp ought to be enough for anyone
| contingencies wrote:
| _News at 82800_
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