Half-million-year-old wooden structure unearthed in Zambia

[Biskit]

Half-million-year-old wooden structure unearthed in Zambia

Ancient timber preserved in a riverbed suggests humans were building wooden structures 500,000 years ago.

www.bbc.co.uk

Wow.

 

[Lacedaemonian]

I might have to have a read of this article.

 

[msstice]

Would be a bummer if it were built by a smarter and more peace loving precursor to humans, and Sapiens came along and knocked it down shouting the stone age equivalent of "What a Nerd!"

 

[paranoid marvin]

A 500,000 year old man shed. Who knew?

 

[msstice]

A 500,000 year old man shed. Who knew?

When you get that old you are entitled to a shed of your own.

 

[Berlyn]

A 500,000 year old man shed. Who knew?

I bet it has a dartboard in it!

 

[msstice]

Their reconstruction looks very spiffy, but the photos are underwhelming. I am neither an anthropologist nor an architect but I would like to understand why they think this is more advanced than the typical pile of branches and sticks that even animals make for shelter.

 

[paranoid marvin]

The first thought that occurred to me with a wooden structure at the side of a river was some kind of raft rather than a settlement.

But by this stage, humans had already been around for more than 4 million years by that point. Presumably they had during this period done something other than wander the globe. Its exciting to see such discoveries being made, but unsurprising to think that our ancestors would have been capable of providing shelter for themselves from the elements.

 

[Robert Zwilling]

But then they pop this in, "They used their intelligence, imagination and skills to create something they'd never seen before, something that had never previously existed." I would think it was a rendition of a cave, a concept that they had seen before. Loosely bound rocks that used to form something are probably one of the hardest things to keep aligned after a couple of hundred thousand years. Many times in the past, after the demise of some great power, the stones that had been assembled into meaningful structures were cannibalized by the local population and carted away ending up in everyone's dwellings for a free upgrade.

 

[Adeptus]

I know that I will sound as thin-foil maniac, but big part of our knowledge about so called "prehistory" is nearly pure speculation. E.g. we cannot be sure when first human civilizations were created - because fact that we have not find artifacts older than given age means only exactly that - that we have not find them. We cannot know if it because there were no civilization before this date or if just there are no any surviving artifacts of it.

 

[BAYLOR]

Monte Verde in Chile 16,500 BCE and Jericho has been continuously inhabited for about 10,000 years .


Could human civilization has existed half a million years earlier ? It's possible .

 

[Brian G Turner]

This is seriously interesting. Especially as the article points out this worked wood predates our oldest records of moden humans even existing!

 

[Danny McG]

the article points out this worked wood predates our oldest records of moden humans even existing!

I always hated woodwork at school

 

[Venusian Broon]

Their reconstruction looks very spiffy, but the photos are underwhelming. I am neither an anthropologist nor an architect but I would like to understand why they think this is more advanced than the typical pile of branches and sticks that even animals make for shelter.

As the article states:

" "One is lying over the other and both pieces of wood have notches cut into them," said Geoff Duller, professor of geography at the University of Aberystwyth and a member of the team.
"You can clearly see those notches have been cut by stone tools.
"It makes the two logs fit together to become structural objects." "

Gorillas, orangutans and chimpanzees & bonobos all make nests in and around trees. Some, such as orangutans making relatively complex nests with a degree of technical knowledge of how to build comfortable and sturdy nests using the structural properties of the various branches.

I think it isn't a stretch to suggest that our distant ancestors probably had "wood-knowledge" at the very least at this level to begin with and probably grew much higher very early - given that we've found stone tools at the earliest perhaps 3.3 million years ago. If hominids are purposely crafting stone tech that early, surely they are also looking at wood and experimenting with the material - sturdy digging sticks for finding nutritious tubers underground are a likely tech they made very early on, I would imagine (Chimpanzees look like that are at the start of this journey today, as they employ 'poking sticks')

Wood technology and know-how is also vital for the taming of fire, so the fact that we've got quite a sophisticated use of wood so early gives a hint that perhaps our ancestors regular use of fire was very early as well (for example there's an argument that our ancestors 1 million years ago may have found and made use of the secret of fire!)

Unfortunately, again as the articles say, preservation of any ancient wood tool, structure or fire pit is going to be virtually impossible (hence giving this find a big wow!)

 

[Bowler1]

Man, as in all of us has been fully evolved for a long time or we wouldn't be here. The only reason we have houses with TVs is shared knowledge and knowledge handed down to us. To get to where we are today we needed to develop more resources, learn to farm, have spare time for education and a larger population for specialist skills such as a blacksmith. So civilization is a step process, with a lot of steps to get where we are today.

I read the original articles and I found it condescending, as in, dumb man could put two sticks together. Of course we did, because we're not dumb. It's very likely man of 10k years ago was the same as man 100k years ago and very likely the same as us for a very long time. The difference being a more seasonal lifestyle, with winter stressing early man more so just surviving was a more pressing need. But if you're wet and cold, building a simple shelter, even if it's only a simple lean to is what you'd do, so why not? Making two logs stand together is not hard, I'm sure I could manage it with stone tools - bearing in mind, just having stone tools would indicate having an imagination good enough to stick sticks together. I have no doubt early man had excellent outdoor skills, or we wouldn't be here today, and quite possibly knew a lot more again that's been lost to the mist of time.

Clearly early man didn't have the advantage of a university education, so what did they know?

 

[BAYLOR]

Man, as in all of us has been fully evolved for a long time or we wouldn't be here. The only reason we have houses with TVs is shared knowledge and knowledge handed down to us. To get to where we are today we needed to develop more resources, learn to farm, have spare time for education and a larger population for specialist skills such as a blacksmith. So civilization is a step process, with a lot of steps to get where we are today.

I read the original articles and I found it condescending, as in, dumb man could put two sticks together. Of course we did, because we're not dumb. It's very likely man of 10k years ago was the same as man 100k years ago and very likely the same as us for a very long time. The difference being a more seasonal lifestyle, with winter stressing early man more so just surviving was a more pressing need. But if you're wet and cold, building a simple shelter, even if it's only a simple lean to is what you'd do, so why not? Making two logs stand together is not hard, I'm sure I could manage it with stone tools - bearing in mind, just having stone tools would indicate having an imagination good enough to stick sticks together. I have no doubt early man had excellent outdoor skills, or we wouldn't be here today, and quite possibly knew a lot more again that's been lost to the mist of time.

Clearly early man didn't have the advantage of a university education, so what did they know?

According article from and unnamed source of dubious scientific and historical credibility, early man of 100,000 have engaged in bungie jumping from very hight cliffs .

 

[Swank]

It really makes you think, especially when you consider the new evidence that dates the sandwich back to 800,000 B.C.

 

[BAYLOR]

It really makes you think, especially when you consider the new evidence that dates the sandwich back to 800,000 B.C.

I had no idea that Lord Montagu's family was that old .

 

[Venusian Broon]

I read the original articles and I found it condescending, as in, dumb man could put two sticks together. Of course we did, because we're not dumb. It's very likely man of 10k years ago was the same as man 100k years ago and very likely the same as us for a very long time. The difference being a more seasonal lifestyle, with winter stressing early man more so just surviving was a more pressing need. But if you're wet and cold, building a simple shelter, even if it's only a simple lean to is what you'd do, so why not? Making two logs stand together is not hard, I'm sure I could manage it with stone tools - bearing in mind, just having stone tools would indicate having an imagination good enough to stick sticks together. I have no doubt early man had excellent outdoor skills, or we wouldn't be here today, and quite possibly knew a lot more again that's been lost to the mist of time.

Clearly early man didn't have the advantage of a university education, so what did they know?

The time period we are discussing here is about half a million years ago. As far as we aware Homo Sapiens had not evolved at this period of time. It may have made by an ancestor of ours or one of a branch of great apes that went extinct that had smaller brains than us and very probably cognitively very different. (If it was homo naledi, for example, they probably had brains half the size of modern humans.)

So although yes, there is probably very little difference between a human now and one 100,000 years ago in terms of their ability to think, there may be a vast difference in terms of what the great apes of half a million BC could think through and us now.

 

[Robert Zwilling]

It's just plain old discrimination based on the illusion of imagined superiority. The farther back in time the easier it gets to fill in the missing gaps with personal preferences. Speech is supposed to be one of the great accomplishments, yet the parrot brain came into existence 50 million years ago.