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Signs of symbolic behavior emerged at the dawn of our species in Africa
More than 320,000 years ago in the Rift Valley of Africa, some early innovators adopted a new technology: They eschewed the clunky, palm-size stone hand axes that their ancestors had used for more than a million years in favor of a sleek new toolkit. Like new generations of cellphones today, their Middle Stone Age (MSA) blades and points were smaller and more precise than the old so-called Acheulean hand axes and scrapers.
These toolmakers in the Olorgesailie Basin in Kenya chose as raw materials shiny black obsidian and white and green chert, rocks they had to get from distant sources or through trade networks. In another first, they chiseled red and black rocks, probably to use as crayons to color their bodies or spears—an early sign of symbolic behavior. "This is indicative of a gear change in behavior, toolmaking, and material culture," says evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, who studies social networks.
A trio of papers released online in Science today documents this remarkable technological transition. Although other sites have yielded MSA tools, the new, securely dated chronology nudges the transition back by at least 20,000 years, matching when our species, Homo sapiens, is now thought to have emerged. By analyzing artifacts over time at one site, the papers also show that these behaviors developed as climate swings intensified, supporting the idea that environmental variability drove innovation.
Related:
Environmental dynamics during the onset of the Middle Stone Age in eastern Africa (DOI: 10.1126/science.aao2200) (DX)
Chronology of the Acheulean to Middle Stone Age transition in eastern Africa (DOI: 10.1126/science.aao2216) (DX)
Long-distance stone transport and pigment use in the earliest Middle Stone Age (DOI: 10.1126/science.aao2646) (DX)
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday March 17 2018, @03:19PM
Amateurs or professionals? Its pretty easy to fool the amateurs especially the ones with only one anecdote as data.
Two things rarely considered:
1) Statistics. One gold earring found in the wilderness is a meaningless anomaly. 5000 lost gold earrings, even if smashed and battered into unrecognizable nuggets, can be chemically analyzed and the statistical results will be utterly unnatural. The geologists will pitch an absolute fit at the geologically unexplainable distribution of nuggets by location and size and impurity. A motivated archeologist could run the chemical compositions thru a statistical grouping algorithm and with minimal help from a chemist or engineer could completely reverse engineer our entire karat based gold alloy system down to the decimal points of our specific alloys and could determine the relative value of gold vs copper vs silver and other alloys. Then comes deeper analysis of the chemistry such that the copper that was alloyed with gold could only have been cleaned up by electrorefining (or some more advanced space alien thing, certainly not mere smelting anyway). That implies all kinds of things about the electrical technology when the gold alloy was made for those former earrings, or at least when the copper was refined that eventually alloyed with the gold to make the earrings. Then consider spatial analysis, even after power lines completely corrode away into the soil, a suitably motivated geologist or agronomist or archeologist could manufacture some interesting theories about our long distance electrical power distribution infrastructure based solely on weird distribution of the corrosion products of the alloys ideal for power transformer laminations (if not PCB concentrations in the soil LOL) or long linear deposits of copper from copper power lines. Imagine long after every piece of silicon based electronics is back to sand crystals, someone doing an analysis and reverse engineering our type-N and type-P semiconductor ionic doping process to reverse engineer the stage of electronics technology and world trade we currently have, all from precise and weird contaminants in some sand grains. Actually you could merely look at soil contaminants over large areas and a graph would display something like our transportation networks that could be hand waved away as mere river-beds until the geologists notice good old Highway 66 flows uphill unlike a river flow, not to mention those surveyors making arrow straight roads and railroads. Why, world wide, do weird concentrations of industrial era isotopes show up in sedimentary sea rocks starting at a certain time in concentrations that could only come from the high concentration ore bodies that all are missing according to the geologists?
2) Lack of something is proof something removed it. It would seem natural for all intelligent beings to remove the easy resources first, this is universal among humans anyway. A survey of industrially useful materials would show all the easy resources that the geologists insist should have formed there, are gone, and plenty of hard to extract resources remain untouched where the geologists predicted they would appear. Huh, every geologist prediction of 7% iron ore is missing, every 2% iron ore body is present, WTF? Essentially no oil drained out of puddles more than 15000 feet below the surface, essentially all shallow large continental deposits are already gone today already. Where's all the anthracite that geologists insist MUST be under new england and old england? How come all the anthracite is gone but lots of bituminous remains, especially far away from where the anthracite is missing? Millions of years after the last uranium mine collapses and cannot be identified, we have continents where all the "good stuff" that should be there, is none the less gone. And given that everthing runs into the seas eventually, you're really going to piss off the geologists trying to explain why our seas have a ridiculously high U235 and Pu concentration compared to other isotopes like you'd expect from uranium ore isotopes...
The short summary is mother nature washes random junk away into the sea, but humans dig up the best ores first and this will really freak out prospecting geologists when they see the data.