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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 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.