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)
Related Stories
Can We Be Sure We're the First Industrial Civilization on Earth?
In a new paper, Gavin Schmidt of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Adam Frank from the University of Rochester ask a provocative question [open, DOI: 10.1017/S1473550418000095] [DX]: Could there have been an industrial civilization on Earth millions of years ago? And if so, what evidence of it would we be able to find today?
The authors first considered what signs of industrial civilization would be expected to survive in the geological record. In our own time, these include plastics, synthetic pollutants, increased metal concentrations, and evidence of large-scale energy use, such as carbon-based fossil fuels. Taken together, they mark what some scientists call the Anthropocene era, in which humans are having a significant and measurable impact on our planet.
The authors conclude, however, that it would be very difficult after tens of millions of years to distinguish these industrial byproducts from the natural background. Even plastic, which was previously thought to be quite resistant, can be degraded by enzymes relatively quickly. Only radiation from nuclear power plants—or from a nuclear war—would be discernible in the geological rock record after such a long time.
Anonymous Coward says "I told you so!" and starts babbling about megaliths.
Related: Homo Sapiens Began Advanced Toolmaking, Pigment Use, and Trade Earlier Than Previously Thought
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @03:03PM (36 children)
For so many years, people have spoken of the possibility of mankind having a much richer history than taught by the mainstream educators; those people have been utterly lambasted, and dragged through the mud in the most public and humiliating ways.
And, yet, over the last 20 years, there has been an exponentially growing body of facts indicating that they were correct.
Listen, people. Still today, we in our modern, technologically advanced "Civilization" live among hunter-gatherer tribes, some of whom don't even know we exist. Were a global cataclysm to strike, it would be those meek hunter-gatherers who survive, and it would be their descendants who inherit the earth, wondering how their own advanced civilization came to be, passing down stories that would one day be confused as ancient myth.
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Friday March 16 2018, @04:24PM (35 children)
And yet that evidence doesn't exist. Here, we're speaking of an adjustment of just over 6% in the timing of an ancient technology advance. That would be like adjusting an event 10,000 years ago by 600 years. More precise, but it doesn't challenge the present day understanding.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @05:01PM (10 children)
Not only is there a indisputable site like the Göbekli Tepe, which has totally and indisputably thrown a wrench into the modern narrative, but there are also other kinds of populations such as the Denisovans, who seem to have had a much more advanced culture than was ever expected. There are also unexplained symbolic parallels between geographically disparate peoples.
More importantly, though, is the fact that many examples of megalithic across the planet have probably been attributed incorrectly to populations that found them long after they were constructed; those later populations simply built atop them.
I invite people to look into the matter themselves; look past the "Ancient Alien" stuff, and just marvel at the oddities and incongruity.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 16 2018, @05:29PM (9 children)
No, you are wrong here. Göbekli Tepe merely indicates that stone working knowledge was more advanced in a single region than expected. While there might have been an implicit assumption in the recent past to assume that everyone developed in the same way, it's not instrumental to our current models that things evolve that way. To give an example of this reasoning, are we less advanced than the Incas because we haven't bothered to learn how they made tight stone work like Machu Picchu? Or is it rather, that we could master that just fine, we just haven't bothered to, because our current technology is much more suited to our societies?
No, there isn't. For example, a common claim is that geographically disparate peoples have flood mythologies. However, floods are also geographically disparate (and universal - even in deserts and on islands in the ocean!) and it is routine for storytellers to exaggerate their narration of disasters their cultures experience to the point of being worldwide, particularly when explaining how the world was made in the first place. Thus, we have plenty of stories of global flood, fire, nightfall, earthquakes, etc.
Similarly, stones are geographically disparate, so it is no surprise that use of those stones is also geographically disparate. It doesn't demonstrate common origin.
Key damning evidence against these claims is that we don't have a global technology distribution that couldn't be explained by people taking and improving what they had with them in the traditional models of human progress. We don't have global DNA spread. Any global culture that exchanges ideas and trades will also exchange DNA. We don't have global language evolution that can't be explained by the usual. And we don't actually have the "unexplained" symbolic parallels.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @05:48PM (1 child)
As has already been pointed out to you before, "indigenous" people of the Amazon have been linked by DNA [smithsonianmag.com] to the indigenous people of Australia.
Also, elongated skulls of Peru have been associated by DNA to Europe.
And, the ancient Egyptians have been associated by DNA with the people of the Levant and to some degree of Europe.
Of course, there is also still Neanderthal DNA in a lot Eurasians, and there is still Denisovan DNA in a lot of Asians.
Also, one must consider the effects of genetic drift.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 16 2018, @08:24PM
(Score: 4, Informative) by HiThere on Friday March 16 2018, @06:37PM
Actually, we *do* have global DNA spread, and it's quite old. This, however, is more a tribute to the spreading capabilities of DNA within a species than anything else. Very little DNA is specific to a particular area, though the proportion of the population presenting it is highly variable.
That said, neutral drift and population reduction in catastrophes can cause extreme variability in proportions even without environmental advantage. And if the population is reduced sufficiently it can easily remove the less common alleles.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday March 16 2018, @07:04PM (5 children)
That's not at all how I read it.
Humans had already been working with stone for hundreds of thousands of years and made a wide variety of very effective everyday tools with it. Nothing to do with their level of stoneworking is at all surprising.
What could have been surprising is the social structure implied. Tribes are typically limited to ~180 people. Federations of tribes may cover large areas and coöperate in some general ways but you don't normally see multiple tribes gathering to party on a regular basis, unless they're too small and in the process of merging.
Partying in some form or another is a crucial part of tribal life. Typically in areas with strong seasons there is at least one seasonal gathering when the entire tribe comes together in a special place and parties. This is very important to maintain cohesion and to keep bands healthy. During the festival bands may lose or gain members or even dissolve or form new. These parties develop traditions quickly and what we might see as 'religious' aspects easily, and they define the tribe.
And Göbekli Tepe sure looks like a special place for seasonal parties. Not a surprise that. What's surprising is it's huge. Larger than seems reasonable for a single tribe. And the investment of time and energy into all that stone - not that they *could* do it but that they *did* go to the trouble.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 16 2018, @08:31PM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday March 16 2018, @09:00PM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday March 17 2018, @04:54AM (2 children)
Did you see what they found when they did ground radar? There's a whole buried village adjacent, built in stone. Show me any migratory culture that does this. Everything about the structure, the art, the amount of work required to achieve it, the labor cost to bring in food for the builders, speaks of a settled civilization with agriculture sufficient to feed a permanent population. (And those decorated monoliths appear to be roof supports.)
I think we just haven't dug deep enough to uncover our earliest civilizations. No big mystery there, just a lot of time and debris and the fact that sites get built over again and again.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1) by Arik on Saturday March 17 2018, @05:05AM (1 child)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday March 17 2018, @05:21AM
Thought I'd saved it, but bloody hell if I can find it offhand. If I come across it again I'll (try to remember to) post it. They had some pretty good radar images showing probably a hundred such buildings.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Friday March 16 2018, @05:05PM (23 children)
Göbleki Tepe did push the date for monolithic structures back considerably, but yeah, there's no good evidence for more advanced civilizations than that existing longer than previously thought.
Here's a question I grapple with: what is the most advanced technology that could have existed before the end of the last ice age without us having good evidence for it today? On the far-out end, if we left modern vehicles in an area below the new water line would there be any evidence of them 11,000 years later? Answering this question negatively would not mean that such a civilization existed, but answering it positively would practically rule it out. If we left monolithic structures on pre-Younger Dryas coastlines, would they last? I find it more reasonable that a civilization of this tech level could go missing without leaving some sort of inland remnants for us to discover by 2018. Of course, there is a whole continuum of potentials between these extremes (and even outside of them).
Given the general die-off during the Younger Dryas, it would be amazing if we didn't lose some amount of culture and technology. The question is how much. Are we talking about arrowhead designs, or basic metalwork? Arrowheads seem obvious, even without direct evidence. We know that hunter-gathers lose technology when they hit population bottlenecks. Metalwork would be entirely speculative, but I don't think it's outside the realm of reasonable possibility.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 16 2018, @05:35PM (4 children)
It would have to be small and in isolation. At that point, it then becomes a simple matter of some natural disaster covering up the evidence, combined with researchers not looking in the right spots.
Some vehicles have platinum and gold in them. Those would still be around. Same goes for gold jewelry. That stuff is pretty durable and would last thousands of years easily - the main way it goes away is by someone finding and reusing it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @05:42PM (1 child)
Many massive, important, influential ancient civilizations existed without gold-and-platinum-containing vehicles.
As far as jewelry is concerned, though, what about the intricately curved Denisovan bracelet [wikipedia.org], wrought from the very difficult material jade? That has been dated, pretty much indisputably, to 40,000 years before present.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 16 2018, @08:33PM
I answered a legitimate question about how a common artifact of our era would have survived 11,000 years. I imagine that more of the car would survive than just that (such as plastics, glass, and rubber tires), particularly, if buried.
How much of the world does that bracelet appear in? Jewelry in one place is not a demonstration of global presence.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Friday March 16 2018, @06:08PM (1 child)
If it spread along the coasts, not necessarily. I do think that this requirement all but rules out civs past a certain tech and population threshold -- if they covered all the coastal land they would eventually move inwards.
We're talking about a small gold trinket left unprotected on a shoreline for over ten thousand years. You think it would necessarily still be recoverable in the modern day? I can imagine the hypothetical artifact getting swept into the ocean and banged against rocks until it became unrecognisable.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 16 2018, @08:38PM
I disagree. You would have widespread common artifacts, genetic heritage, language, etc which we would see today. Let us keep in mind that the traditional model already takes into account a lot of prehistoric migration, so it's not like the establishment completely discounts the idea.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @05:37PM (4 children)
We don't know how certain works were achieved even in ancient society that is recognized. They don't teach that in schools.
More than a continent's worth of coastal land (you know, where most people tend to live) has been swallowed up in rising sea levels in the last few 10s of the thousands of years, and humans of modern form (physically, and as far as we can tell, mentally) go back as much as 200 thousand years. That's a lot of time, and a lot of archaeologically unexplored territory.
There are megalithic structures in Peru which are attributed to Indians of the last millennium, but even they attribute those structures to the "gods" who came before them, and Lake Titicaca would have last been striking their vicinity some 12 thousand years ago, as also evidenced by astronomical alignments of the stones, which only work at that time, too.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday March 16 2018, @06:51PM (3 children)
While the statement "We don't know how certain works were achieved even in ancient society that is recognized." is true, it's misleading. Usually we can think of several ways it it could have been achieved and can't validly choose between them. Usually when people say "There's no way they could do that" they're either revealing their ignorance of technical approaches, or they're unwilling to accept that massive an amount of labor.
E.g.: Did you know that Roman legions stationed in Carthage ate ice sherbets? The approach was simple, you dig a deep pit and line it with straw. You make a wooden cover for it, and cover that with straw. Every night you leave the lid off to the desert sky. Every day before dawn you put the lid on again. I believe it only took a few days to freeze the pot of mix. Nothing magic, no high tech, just a simple technical approach, and the legions could have a treat that in Rome only the Emperor could afford.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday March 16 2018, @07:08PM (2 children)
This is without a doubt the 'secret' behind many ancient wonders. The willingness to invest incredible amounts of labor over long periods of time.
Many of these things were built over multiple generations. In a world where most projects last a few month, and are obsolete before they release, many people simply cannot conceive of it, but it's true. The man who finished a project might be the grandson of the man who started it. Three generations, working diligently, if not on a daily basis at least a seasonal one, year after year, decade after decade, that was the true genius of the ancients that we have lost.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 16 2018, @08:45PM
We don't need that for most things. It doesn't take three generations to build even our largest buildings. For example, NASA built the Vehicle Assembly Building in about four years and that is one of the largest buildings in the world by internal volume.
Another problem is that a three generation project has the potential to become obsolete before it is finished. For example, a large project on the coastline might be flooded by climate change (if the warnings come true). A computation project would be forever updating on more advanced hardware. It'd be quite the challenging, moving target to plan something so many years in advance.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 17 2018, @03:36AM
Science, mathematics and technology are like that. The knowledge that started to be formalized thousands of years ago has reached incredible heights.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday March 16 2018, @05:57PM (9 children)
Evidence in some form that some more advanced race might be able to find? Sure. Evidence we'd be likely to notice today with our technology? I'm thinking no. But it does depend on exactly what sort of 'modern vehicles' we're talking about. And also just how it's deposited. It's probably *possible* for something to be sealed in under the ocean without coming into contact with seawater for 11k years but it seems highly improbable.
So assuming we're going to have some contact with seawater - most modern vehicles until recently were primarily composed of steel. Steel reliably dissolves in salt water. End of story on the bulk of the mass. Rubber and plastic can last longer, and of course we see *more* modern vehicles using more plastic, but the engine, drive train, wheels, etc. on automobiles are all still steel and that would simply have dissolved into the ocean long ago. I rather think plastic has replaced steel on ships significantly less than with cars but I'm not necessarily up to date on that. Most of the big ships I've seen were steel. A lot of smaller craft are wood, and that's probably more likely to be preserved than steel. It still requires special burial events. Several really ancient seawrecks have been discovered. This is an interesting one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dokos_shipwreck
Pottery survives better than steel or wood. I expect plastics and other modern materials, fiberglasses etc. would probably fare better as well. But finding ANYTHING 11k years old usually depends on more than a little good luck.
"Answering this question negatively would not mean that such a civilization existed, but answering it positively would practically rule it out."
Unfortunately the best answer is a big fat maybe :(
"If we left monolithic structures on pre-Younger Dryas coastlines, would they last?"
A monolith can be a type of megalithic structure, or a geological formation. Which is actually directly relevant here.
Stone, *depending on which stone* can stand a very good chance of lasting, yes. But would we notice it, would we know it was worth looking at and not mistake it for just another rock?
Well, probably not. A geologist might take an interest in it, and might notice that it was not of natural origin. Maybe.
"Given the general die-off during the Younger Dryas, it would be amazing if we didn't lose some amount of culture and technology. The question is how much. Are we talking about arrowhead designs, or basic metalwork? Arrowheads seem obvious, even without direct evidence. We know that hunter-gathers lose technology when they hit population bottlenecks."
[citation needed]
"Metalwork would be entirely speculative, but I don't think it's outside the realm of reasonable possibility."
With no evidence whatsoever? That's in the parlor-game 'anything is possible' realm of speculation.
Now as long as we acknowledge that, then sure, yes. Not at all impossible that there was very basic metalworking knowledge that far back. Iron is rare but not entirely unavailable without smelting or refining - from meteorites. Meteoric iron can be worked with stone tools. So cold-worked iron is possible - but the earliest evidence for it is bronze age. Gold is quite rare but does occur in fairly pure form in small quantities here and there, and can also be easily worked with stone tools. Copper and silver would be easily workable as well, but I'm not sure if there are any naturally occurring deposits pure enough to use. The vast bulk of metalworking relies on having at least some capacity to refine metals, and I think that's more often than not what we're really talking about when we say metalwork.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Friday March 16 2018, @06:23PM (5 children)
Yeah, that's a hurpadurpa moment on my part. I meant megalithic, not monolithic.
On what exactly? The mass die off? The fact that hunter-gatherers lose tech at population bottlenecks? I won't be back on tonight but I can cite either, if asked. The arrowheads and metalwork were noted as speculation.
But all possible things are not equally likely. We would be less shocked to find 12,000 year-old metal tools than 12,000 year-old airplanes. I find the question of how shocked we should be quite interesting.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday March 16 2018, @06:49PM (4 children)
The loss of technology thing.
Why would a population bottleneck necessarily result in loss of technology? Of course it's *possible* something is lost but typically the entire population would be expected to have nearly the entire existing skillset; it's not like there was this one hunter that made all the arrowheads and everyone bought from him. Every hunter knew how to make scrapers and points and how to repair them in the field. Specialization would have been a disadvantage, and impractical. So there's no necessary loss of technology in population bottlenecks that far back. The most recent population bottleneck may have had the opposite effect - there was an article to that effect I read recently but I can't seem to find it again easily.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @10:25PM
Actually, that's pretty much exactly how it worked (specialization). Pretty much everyone learned the basics, but mastery was generally left to the most skilled. When a bad arrow can make the difference between food or starvation, you let the best fletcher fletch and let the best hunters hunt. Everything took a lot of time and effort and considerable skill and knowledge, though it doesn't seem like much from a modern perspective.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Monday March 19 2018, @04:47PM (2 children)
One well documented example is Tasmania. I think I read this whole paper (direct PDF) [harvard.edu] a few years ago, but it might have been a similar one. Here's the abstract (emphasis added):
Consider that without writing, a culture's technology is limited by human memory. Insisting on replication of all data in all humans limits the growth of technology considerably. The less replication we insist on, the more technology we can have. We just also risk losing it if the population declines. One human can not remember all useful skills to the same degree of precision that a hundred humans can.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday March 19 2018, @07:16PM (1 child)
"Consider that without writing, a culture's technology is limited by human memory."
Which is why we developed poetry and all the other memory-enhancing technologies that moderns too often forget about.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Friday April 06 2018, @12:21AM
How many examples does it take to show that something *must* happen? It's not a possible task, obviously. No number of measurements can prove that an apple must drop downwards. What would you need to probabilistically convince you that this is a real effect?
On poetry and other mnemonics, you're totally correct that they increase the amount of information an individual can store, but that doesn't change the fact that a group of people using those techniques to store overlapping-yet-different sets of information can record more than a group of people using the same techniques to store the exact same set of information in every individual. Increasing bytes-per-capita doesn't change this dynamic.
(Score: 2) by t-3 on Friday March 16 2018, @10:13PM (2 children)
For copper, there used to be quite a bit of it in the upper peninsula of Michigan, in the area known as "Copper Country" (the Keewenaw Peninsula). The natives used it extensively, but IIRC they didn't forge anything. I also recall being taught about Tenochtitlan being near a mountain of silver that was used by the Aztecs and plundered by the Spanish.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday March 16 2018, @10:25PM (1 child)
That sounds right. The mississipians used cold-worked copper in burial goods, and they were still technically 'stone age' in toolkit though of course that's very much later nonetheless. I think there was some silver too, impure, copper-silver alloys maybe? But the lack of ability to purify and refine the ores limited the scope severely.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @10:38PM
From what I recall of "Michigan History" in school, the Keewenaw was notable for exceptional purity, basically as pure as copper gets out of the ground.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday March 16 2018, @07:08PM
For "advanced technologies" the problem isn't the existence of artifacts, but the traces of mining for the materials with which to make the artifacts.
They could have had coal fires, but there's little advantage (and many disadvantages) for a stationary site when there's sufficient wood available. Basically they'd need to develop coke before there'd be advantages for a stationary source unless you imagine cast iron stoves and good chimneys. Minor iron working would be harder to detect than bronze, but that's if it depended on meteoric iron. Iron ore is more problematic, as refining it requires large clay ovens that become extremely well fired, and they durable. Those may be a bit difficult to date, however, and we know that they existed in West Africa around the time of the old Egyptian dynasty. They could be a lot older, but the iron mines give limits on the total amount of iron extracted...and that makes a really ancient origin unlikely.
Basically, ceramics are hard to date, but they're so durable (if only as shards) that there's a good idea as to whether they were present at any particular site or not.
OTOH, wood, fabric, and rope don't leave much in the way of evidence. Fire hardened wood is more durable because of the outer layer of pure carbon. Baskets, however, wouldn't be expected to leave any trace. Neither would cloth. Certainly not in any area where termites were common. And wood was an extremely common construction material in almost all past civilizations. Stone working leaves permanent evidence, but is often extremely difficult to date, and isn't very portable.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday March 17 2018, @04:58AM
Consider: most of today's cities are built on top of older cities, in turn atop villages, atop someone's camp, because the same spot remains attractive to humans across time. How many layers are permanently buried beneath modern city centers?
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(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.
(Score: 4, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Friday March 16 2018, @03:14PM (6 children)
In the 1950s, Homo Sapiens were the _only_ toolmakers, this was taught widely in schools. And Homo Sapiens tool making capability was max 50,000 years old.
Somewhere in the 1970s, a few liberal school children started to question: what about beavers and birds and even termites, don't nest structures count as buildings - making something to improve living conditions? Hippies like Goodall went and lived with monkeys and discovered that they, too, made tools. Then all sorts of people got in on the act and discovered birds and other lower animals doing some very tool-looking things in the wild.
Anthropologists continue to improve their dating techniques (some are even married now), and they find older and older sites with pre-humans that: surprise! made tools too.
Like the 2nd law of Thermodynamics, sharp line division absolute definitions dissolve into continuum states as understanding of the system increases.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by unauthorized on Friday March 16 2018, @06:55PM (5 children)
Incorrect. They were the only KNOWN toolmakers. Science does not work with certainties, it works with likelyhoods, if anyone ever says they are absolutely certain in any knowledge or fact, then you know they aren't a scientist, or at best they are a socially savvy scientists (yes those exist) who is speaking to non-scientists in order to work around that pesky lizard brain "feature" where we find those who act cocksure more reliable.
(Score: 4, Informative) by HiThere on Friday March 16 2018, @07:18PM
The statement that "humans were the only toolmaker" was correct as a statement about what was taught in schools. It's also what was preached in popular science texts and on TV. That professional scientists might have reserved a bit of judgment is possible, but from what I've read if some of them did so, they didn't talk or write about it. They left that to the science fiction writers (some of whom, of course, were scientists when wearing their other hat). Robert Ardrey was one of the folks who first put a chink into that stone wall, and he wasn't a scientist. He didn't directly attack it the way Jane Goodall did later, but he set the stage. And, of course, he was building on the work of various ethologists...so there was a silent movement happening behind the scenes, but it didn't show up in public view until Ardrey...probably "The Naked Ape" was the moment of inflection, but that might just be the way I saw it.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday March 16 2018, @07:45PM (3 children)
You givin' me lip, boy? Scientists don't teach in schools, teachers teach in schools, and most grade school teachers of the 1950s, 60s and 70s (even up through today, I'm sure) taught certainties and absolutes.
Only humans make tools.
Nerve cells never regenerate in adults.
Humans only use 10% of their brains.
Try any of that "thinking man" crap on the test and see what kind of grade you get.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday March 17 2018, @01:06AM (1 child)
We are seeing some flip-flopping on that one:
Adult Neurogenesis in Doubt [soylentnews.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday March 17 2018, @02:26AM
Yep, and not just on neurogenesis... Back when I was in school, they were teaching that when a nerve is cut, that's it, it's cut - never heals. I cut the sensory nerve that serves the outside of my right pinky finger in 1983, by 1993 near normal sensation was returning to it - and the neurosurgeon who was going to attempt a repair for me in 1983 knew that this was likely - but in 1984 my high school biology teachers were still teaching the "never recover" dogma. Now, that might not be neurogenesis, but actually just dendritic growth from the surviving neurons, but either way, it's basically back to 100% normal sensation now.
I notice the most flip-flops in commercial "science" like the health ramifications of cholesterol in eggs, or fat from whatever, or artificial sweeteners. Then there's material safety like mercury in fillings, or arsenic in treated wood, or asbestos in insulation, or lead in gasoline and paint - those seem to stay mostly in one direction, and I'm sure some are overreactions, but with 7B people and growing, some percentage of the population probably has a problem with all those things and more.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday March 17 2018, @03:22PM
The purpose of public schooling is political/religious indoctrination.
There do exist specialty classes sometimes teaching actual scientific method science, but that's definitely not for the general public.
(Score: 4, Funny) by cocaine overdose on Friday March 16 2018, @03:56PM (6 children)
In other news, this gives further evidence of the "out of Africa" theory. Albeit, the implications have shifted, from Africa being the "cradle of civilization," to something more sinister. A closed box of genetic lineages that couldn't innovate, culturing in the dampness of the Rift Valley for over 3 eons. What's left is a genetic pool completely devoid of innovative ability and absolutely alien to the modern cultures of today.
In an almost hilarious irony, the "Valley," has existed for over 320,00 years. By this, I mean the archetype or abstract idea. Before it was the "Rift Valley," today the "Silicon Valley."
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by Runaway1956 on Friday March 16 2018, @04:27PM
Mmmm. Funny, yet somewhat distasteful, and none of it untrue. We need to bludgeon the staff until they give us more mods to work with. What fits here, anyway? Damifino!
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Arik on Friday March 16 2018, @05:24PM (4 children)
People spread out because of overcrowding. This is an extremely rich environment, warm, wet, fertile soil, and life everywhere you look. The food chain is densely filled, all the way from the grubs and insects to the lion. Humans fit in there as food for crocodiles.
So, crocodiles are dangerous and scary as hell but they pretty much have to catch us unawares to eat us, very few of us are stupid enough not to stay the hell away from a croc, and people that live in croc areas are watchful when near the water. And push come to shove, not one but several warriors, representing a small unit of hunter gatherers, a band, can actually kill the croc. So they tend to snag a very old one here, a very young one there, a particularly stupid one on another day, but they don't really pose a threat to the population as a whole. This wouldn't really be a compelling reason to move by itself, particularly since no matter where you go there are similar dangers. It might make sense to us now as a reason to move, but it wouldn't likely occur to someone born and raised in that environment. It's just a fact of life. Careful near the water. Crocs'll getcha.
It's a very rich environment but hunter gatherers still tolerate a relatively low level of population pressure before spreading out. If it's not competition for scarce natural resources it's political rivalry, divergent values, etc.
Tribes only get so big. IIRC the current best guess from psychologists is ~180 people. If we figure average band size is 10, that's roughly 18 bands. As you get significantly larger than that, it works less effectively, internal friction develops, and people leave, either in a trickle or a flood, until it works properly again. In gaming terms, it's a soft-cap, where once you go over a certain value other mechanics kick in to frustrate further increase.
So once you combine those two facts, the natural soft-cap on tribal size, and the resource rich environment, the place is tailor made to 'spin-off' tribes. It wouldn't be about resources, because they aren't scarce. The resources relevant at the time were food, wood and plant fibers, leather and stone. All available in abundance just go get them and shape them. You'd never get close to carrying capacity with hunter-gatherers. Everyone would have lots of babies, many of them would live, the population would increase, and in short order there would be 200, 250, maybe 350 folks showing up to party.
It's just too many, it gets out of control, there are fights and feuds and we've killed all the grass for miles around the spot and everyone complains about it but no one knows what to do, and pretty soon we are polarising into two factions and confronting each other and a few people are injured, quite possibly dead, and it's awful.
Then, because we're hunter gatherers in a hunter gatherer world, rather than moderns in a modern world, one faction just packs their stuff and takes off. They travel several days away and find a good spot to party, and now both tribes are now working properly, <180 people everyone basically friends and parties are fun again.
At least for a generation.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday March 16 2018, @07:27PM (3 children)
Except that stone isn't a simple thing. Different varieties of stone are useful for different things, and a lot of it isn't very useful for much of anything if you're a stone age technologist. So trade is important, and the tribes don't stay incommunicado, they're merely separate. The early Hebrews were pastoralist rather than hunter-gatherer, but read the early books of the Bible to get an idea of the plausible social structures. It doesn't really fit, but it's a lot closer than anything you'll have direct experience with. Notice in particular how Cain and Able both found wives who are just not mentioned. Hunter gatherers wouldn't generally be so male dominated, but they also tend to just ignore those outside the tribe as much as possible.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday March 16 2018, @08:47PM (2 children)
And historically we know that hunter gatherers who lived in areas short on the good stones didn't just trade for them, but often just used replacements. We call it the stone age because that was the predominant tool-making material, but it was never the only one. Very good scrapers and points can be made from bone, from shellfish husks, or tusks from any of several sorts of animals, and in many cases were.
"The early Hebrews were pastoralist rather than hunter-gatherer, but read the early books of the Bible to get an idea of the plausible social structures. "
Eh, no, should have stopped before the but. Those are not hunter gatherer social structures.
"Notice in particular how Cain and Able both found wives who are just not mentioned."
Why?
"Hunter gatherers wouldn't generally be so male dominated, but they also tend to just ignore those outside the tribe as much as possible."
What does 'male dominated' mean to you? That seems a bit of a loaded concept.
The very term "hunter-gatherer" refers to sex roles and segregation, if that's what you mean. That's the whole basis of their lifestyle, their daily bread. The specifics vary a lot but the general pattern is pretty clear. The women group together, sing songs and beat sticks and whatever to warn the animals away from them, and collect useful plant products and other such inanimate objects. The men spread out in the bush, silently, trying to catch something tasty. The two groups meet back up later and pool their resources for a hot meal, but their daily working day is very different and rigidly segregated.
They're traditionalists, not authoritarians, so there may well be tolerance for exceptions (there's a very widespread and clearly ancient shamanic tradition that was tied to opting out of the male hunter role for example) but all evidence suggests that this been the basic pattern for hundreds of thousands of years, up until pastoralism and agriculture started to develop.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday March 17 2018, @01:06AM (1 child)
Have you ever tried to knap sandstone? It can't be done. Glass, OTOH, works well (so obsidian was prized. Flint occurs in lots of places, but not everywhere.
And, yes, if you don't have and can't get a decent stone, you use something else. But if you can trade for something better, you will. And not just for tools. We know the amber route reached from Northern Europe to the Middle East during the stone age. Possibly even during the Old Stone Age. We call it the stone age because stone was durable and left tracks, where wood, twine, cloth, etc. decayed rapidly, and left few tracks. This doesn't prove that stone was the dominant tool, I suspect that wood was, it proves that it's the most durable tool.
You are right that pastoralist isn't the same social structure as hunter-gatherer. Pastoralists, e.g., tend to be male dominated due to wealth being measured in herds. But the early pastoralists are essentially tribal, and that's a lot more similar to hunter-gatherer than anything modern.
What I meant by less male dominated wasn't that the different sexes didn't have different roles, but rather that the appraisal of the value of the roles was less lop-sided. And this is, of course, only a general rule, I'm certain that there were exceptions. What we know of hunter-gatherers today is based on groups surviving in marginal territories, and probably doesn't reflect the original groups. The original groups would have been in more danger from animal predators and less from human predators. And would be on technological par with other groups they encountered. But the myth structures we build about what life was like at that time seem to be quite at odds with what is known of surviving groups. You could extrapolate from the baboon troops, but that wouldn't seem very likely either.
According to the anthropologists among the Kalahari bushmen women frequently beat up their husbands. (Not, of course, as frequently as the other way around. Size makes a difference.) This would seem to imply a rough level of social equality.
OTOH, traditionalist societies are, if anything, less tolerant of exceptional behavior than authoritarian societies. In authoritarian societies you need to show that it's to the benefit of the authority. In traditionalist societies you need to show that it's the way of the ancestors.
FWIW, it's important to remember that the tertiary were a secondary culture. First was the hunter-gatherers, then the agriculturalists, and only then the pastoralists. You've got to domesticate animals before you can be a pastoralist. That happened (except for dogs) during the agricultural period. (Don't think only of the large agricultural civilizations. Think of isolated villages that formed when a tribe of hunter-gatherers found a good place to settle. Which they did occasionally. The oldest ones seem to be near beds of shellfish, but those don't seem to be where agriculturalists originated.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Arik on Saturday March 17 2018, @02:52AM
You can't. Which is why you don't make points or scrapers from sandstone. I said that.
"What I meant by less male dominated wasn't that the different sexes didn't have different roles, but rather that the appraisal of the value of the roles was less lop-sided."
Which means you think they are lop-sided towards males in general, so as I suspected, very loaded wording, reflecting prejudice.
"According to the anthropologists among the Kalahari bushmen women frequently beat up their husbands. (Not, of course, as frequently as the other way around. Size makes a difference.) This would seem to imply a rough level of social equality."
That's an interesting yardstick, which leads to the opposite conclusion from where you took it. In modern western countries in recent years, women beat up their husbands *more* often than the other way around, so by your standards is this a female dominated society? Is that a problem?
"OTOH, traditionalist societies are, if anything, less tolerant of exceptional behavior than authoritarian societies. In authoritarian societies you need to show that it's to the benefit of the authority. In traditionalist societies you need to show that it's the way of the ancestors."
Nonsense. In an authoritarian society there are, as the name implies, authorities. Armed men that will come and get you for violating the rules.
In a traditional society there is no one in that role. If you offend tradition, then people may be offended, but no one has any special role or rights of enforcement to kidnap you or kill you over that. If you convince the people you need to deal with you're alright, then you're alright, and the traditions that the next generation inherit are a little different as a result.
"FWIW, it's important to remember that the tertiary were a secondary culture. First was the hunter-gatherers, then the agriculturalists, and only then the pastoralists. "
"You've got to domesticate animals before you can be a pastoralist. That happened (except for dogs) during the agricultural period. "
Domesticating animals was something that happened over a very long period of time, not in a flash. As you pre-emptively admit, dogs were certainly domesticated long before there was any farming. Since we don't know (and wouldn't expect to know, given the methods we have to use) exactly when each one was first practiced, so we can't say for certain which one was practiced first, your implication of going from one to another is clearly wrong. Pastoralists didn't go through an agriculturalist stage then progress to pastoralism, I can't think of a single example of that happening, while pastoralists do settle down and become agriculturalists frequently. Historically, in the ME and elsewhere, the agriculturalists densely occupy arable land around the rivers while the pastoralists occupy a much larger surrounding area, much less densely. Some years the herds outgrow the food available in these peripheral areas and then the herdsmen show up raiding, stealing, feeding their crops in the fields before they could be harvested and so on. Later still, the most powerful of the pastoralists will begin overthrowing settled lands and settling as rulers - for instance in Babylon. But there's nothing I'm aware of that indicates either group predates the other. They seem to have developed over the same time period, in neighboring but distinct areas.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @04:13PM (1 child)
And all they got in return for beginning earlier was the worm
(Score: 3, Funny) by fritsd on Friday March 16 2018, @04:34PM
should've listened to Robert Heinlein then :-)
"those who want something else for breakfast, have to get up later" (IIRC)