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Scientists think they have discovered a 500,000 year old wooden structure

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  • Scientists think they have discovered a 500,000 year old wooden structure
• Scientists think they have discovered a 500,000 year old wooden structure

• Scientists think they have discovered a 500,000 year old wooden structure

  Michael > September 20th, 2023, 02:27 PM

  From ScienceAlert:
  Evidence of a Wooden Structure That Predates Our Species Uncovered
  
  

  Quote:A pair of interlocking logs that haven't seen sunlight in half a million years could challenge some fundamental assumptions about the technology and culture of our Stone Age ancestors.
  
  Uncovered in 2019 at the Kalambo Falls in Zambia, the objects provide archaeologists with an exceptionally rare look at wooden technology from mid-Paleolithic Africa, a time better known for an acceleration in the innovations of stone tools. The logs also predate the evolution of our own species, Homo sapiens.
  
  An analysis conducted by an international team of researchers has now come to the astonishing conclusion that the wooden artifacts were once part of a permanent structure of some kind, such as a platform or building.
  
  If so, the discovery complicates the conventional image of hominins as nomads hunting migrating herds or gathering seasonal flora with relatively basic tools.
  
  "This find has changed how I think about our early ancestors," says University of Liverpool archaeologist Larry Barham, leader of a project researching Stone Age technology called Deep Roots of Humanity.
  
  "Forget the label 'Stone Age,' look at what these people were doing: they made something new, and large, from wood. They used their intelligence, imagination, and skills to create something they'd never seen before, something that had never previously existed."

  
  That's a pretty significant find, if it holds up to testing and evaluation.
  
  Most estimates put the rise of Homo sapiens at 250,000 to 400,000 years ago, and the 400,000 range is stretching it. So, who made this structure, and how?

• RE: Scientists think they have discovered a 500,000 year old wooden structure

  Alvin Eriol > September 23rd, 2023, 10:18 AM

  Let's face it: there's been a longstanding popular assumption that very ancient peoples preferentially made and used stone artifacts, because until lately artifacts from that period that were found were almost exclusively stone (plus some teeth, tusks, bone, antlers, suchlike).
  Wood is pretty easy to obtain and form, it's nature's plastic, if you will! Except in exceptional circumstances like protected deposits in long-term arid climates, wood doesn't last tens of millenia to be found by modern archaeologists.
  
  It's sort of like the "cave people" stereotype, when actually suitable caves or sites for making bunker/cave-like shelters weren't nearly common enough to house the human population generally. Boughs and bushes (like animals often use) were probably the earliest hominid shelters, but they were highly impermanent, and the vast majority are unlikely to have left traces to be found now.

• RE: Scientists think they have discovered a 500,000 year old wooden structure

  Michael > September 23rd, 2023, 04:11 PM

  I've read a few attempts over the years to extrapolate what could have been done with those old stone tools, but they always wound down to "this is all we have left so we generally assume they just used these tools on animals and skins".
  
  But to be effective hunters they probably had to make wooden weapons and may have found other uses for wood. The real question is whether there are other places on Earth where ancient wooden artifacts might have been preserved. There are some old wooden structures at the bottom of the Black Sea, for example. They're thought to be only a few thousand years old (dating from the the time when the Mediterranean Sea broke through what is now Turkey to join up with the freshwater lake that became the Black Sea).
  
  There might be some ancient structures buried under the sands in the Persian Gulf (although I don't know if the conditions there could have preserved wood for thousands of years). There was once a great sand barrier protecting what was a large valley plain from the Indian Ocean. It eroded away about 6,000 years ago (around the same time as the Black Sea was formed if I recall correctly). These flood events are believed to be the source for the Sumerian Ziusudra and Biblical Noah stories.
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