Technology from half a million years ago

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Technology from half a million years ago

Post by Lord Zentei »

Found this on Dienekes' Anthropology blog. It's pretty impressive stuff. This means that we used technology since before we were Homo Sapiens Sapiens, and since before modern humans diverged from the Neanderthals.

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Archaeologists identify spear tips used in hunting a half-million years ago
Findings suggest hunting with stone-tipped spears began much earlier than previously believed

TORONTO, ON – A University of Toronto-led team of anthropologists has found evidence that human ancestors used stone-tipped weapons for hunting 500,000 years ago – 200,000 years earlier than previously thought.

"This changes the way we think about early human adaptations and capacities before the origin of our own species," says Jayne Wilkins, a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto and lead author of a new study in Science. "Although both Neandertals and humans used stone-tipped spears, this is the first evidence that the technology originated prior to or near the divergence of these two species," says Wilkins.

Attaching stone points to spears – known as 'hafting' – was an important advance in hunting weaponry for early humans. Hafted tools require more effort and foreplanning to manufacture, but a sharp stone point on the end of a spear can increase its killing power.

Hafted spear tips are common in Stone Age archaeological sites after 300,000 years ago. This new study shows that they were also used in the early Middle Pleistocene, a period associated with Homo heidelbergensis and the last common ancestor of Neandertals and modern humans.

"It now looks like some of the traits that we associate with modern humans and our nearest relatives can be traced further back in our lineage", Wilkins says.

Wilkins and colleagues from Arizona State University and the University of Cape Town examined 500,000-year-old stone points from the South African archaeological site of Kathu Pan 1 and determined that they had functioned as spear tips.

Point function was determined by comparing wear on the ancient points to damage inflicted on modern experimental points used to spear a springbok carcass target with a calibrated crossbow. This method has been used effectively to study weaponry from more recent contexts in the Middle East and southern Africa. The stone points exhibit certain types of breaks that occur more commonly when they are used to tip spears compared to other uses.

"The archaeological points have damage that is very similar to replica spear points used in our spearing experiment," says Wilkins. "This type of damage is not easily created through other processes."

The findings are reported in the paper "Evidence for Early Hafted Hunting Technology" published in the November 16, 2012 issue of Science. Other authors contributing to the study are Benjamin Schoville from Arizona State University, Kyle Brown of the University of Cape Town, and University of Toronto archaeologist Michael Chazan. Funding for the research was provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the National Science Foundation, and the Hyde Family Foundation. Logistical support came from the South African Heritage Resources Agency and the McGregor Museum, Kimberley, South Africa.

The points were recovered during 1979-1982 excavations by Peter Beaumont of the McGregor Museum. In 2010, a team directed by Chazan reported that the point-bearing deposits at Kathu Pan 1 dated to ~500,000 years ago using optically stimulated luminescence and U-series/electron spin resonance methods. The dating analyses were carried out by Naomi Porat, Geological Survey of Israel, and Rainer Grün, Australian National University.
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Jayne Wilkins
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Abstract
Hafting stone points to spears was an important advance in weaponry for early humans. Multiple lines of evidence indicate that ~500,000-year-old stone points from the archaeological site of Kathu Pan 1 (KP1), South Africa, functioned as spear tips. KP1 points exhibit fracture types diagnostic of impact. Modification near the base of some points is consistent with hafting. Experimental and metric data indicate that the points could function well as spear tips. Shape analysis demonstrates that the smaller retouched points are as symmetrical as larger retouched points, which fits expectations for spear tips. The distribution of edge damage is similar to that in an experimental sample of spear tips and is inconsistent with expectations for cutting or scraping tools. Thus, early humans were manufacturing hafted multicomponent tools ~200,000 years earlier than previously thought.
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Re: Technology from half a million years ago

Post by Sea Skimmer »

I think we already have some evidence for stone tool use from several million years ago before the Homo genus was even clearly established. But like the article mentions, spear point and the requirement to make a spear in ordered to use it would be a much more advanced tool and level of thinking then simply recognizing that a sharp edge can cut. If people were smart enough to do that, this would strongly suggest humans would have been doing other advanced stuff at a much earlier point. That seems to be a trend in discoveries, everything about human civilization is older then we think, and older civilizations were generally more widespread and advanced then we knew.
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Re: Technology from half a million years ago

Post by Stark »

Is this related to the way we now think of a wider range of animals as tool-using or otherwise 'intelligent'? After all, if birds can work out pulley systems, and pre-human man can join the dots on stabbing weapons, then the hard conceptual break between 'intelligent' and 'not intelligent' seems even dumber than before.
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Re: Technology from half a million years ago

Post by PeZook »

Well, people like to think we're a superior form of life, and that our ancestors were hopelessly ignorant and stupid, because it implies less impact of environment and circumstance on rise and fall of civilizations. The thought that thriving societies can fall in decades because the climate changed one way or another is kind of scary, after all.
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Re: Technology from half a million years ago

Post by Ziggy Stardust »

Related article in a recent issue of the Economist.
THE shards of stone pictured, which have an average length of about 30mm, or 1.2 inches, may provide an insight into the evolution of the human psyche. They were discovered at Pinnacle Point, on South Africa’s southern coast, by Kyle Brown of the University of Cape Town and Curtis Marean of Arizona State University, and they are estimated to be 71,000 years old.

Such shards are known as microliths. They are made by heating a suitable lump of rock in a fire, and then bashing it, in order to flake pieces off its surface. They are believed to have been employed mainly as arrow heads—and were so used in Scandinavia as recently as 9,000 years ago.

From about 40,000 years ago microliths are common. Before that date, only one set of examples, from about 60,000 years ago, had been found. This fact has been used for support by those who think the human psyche evolved separately from, and more recently than, the physique of Homo sapiens.

Both fossil evidence and DNA analysis using molecular clocks (estimates of historical mutation rates) agree that Homo sapiens is 150,000-200,000 years old. It is only in the past 50,000-60,000 years, however, that it has really taken off. Some ascribe that late take-off to chance. Others think the human mind crossed a threshold at that time, and the flourishing of humanity is the consequence. The battleground for this debate is the handful of artefacts that predate 60,000 years ago—which is also the moment when Homo sapiens left Africa and started the rise that has now established the species on every continent.

The discovery of these particular microliths, which Dr Brown and Dr Marean report in this week’s Nature, shows that people 71,000 years ago were able to conceive of making them, to act on that conception and to use the result. That suggests they had bows and arrows, a sophisticated form of weapon. This finding thus adds weight to the argument of those who believe that members of Homo sapiens alive at that time were not, psychologically, very different from those alive today. That their culture was simpler was because there were fewer of them, and inventions needed time to accumulate, not because they were less clever.

The existence of these ancient microliths may also have a bearing on a related argument, over why human psychology is different from that of other species. One manifestation of that difference, in the view of some, is extreme altruism—extreme in the sense that people will occasionally lay down their own lives for the sake of others.

Such self-sacrifice is most often seen in war, and a controversial hypothesis proposed by a few evolutionary biologists is that it did indeed evolve in the context of warfare, at the time when the invention of weapons such as bows and arrows first made it possible for one group of humans to annihilate another. In those circumstances, heroic self-sacrifice to preserve a band of relatives might make evolutionary sense, since an individual’s genes could still be passed on collaterally, through surviving members of the band. That impulse, the theory goes, is still felt today, even though comrades-in-arms are not always blood relations.

Such thoughts are a heavy burden for a handful of stones to bear, but that is often the fate of fossil signs of human activity. Each discovery, though, does bring the truth a little closer.
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Re: Technology from half a million years ago

Post by Darth Wong »

This relates to an important revelation about human development which most people refuse to make peace with: that much of our ability is not born into us, but rather, given to us as a gift of society. Few want to accept that the cumulative learning effect of human society far supersedes any individual effort, and without it, we would be little better than any other animal.
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Re: Technology from half a million years ago

Post by Stark »

That's the thing with the behaviours we observe in animals - if they had a language or a broader society that could efficiently share and preserve their learnings, they'd display even more advanced behaviours. It really puts human society in perspective.
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Re: Technology from half a million years ago

Post by Darth Wong »

In other words, it took half a million years for us to get sufficiently full of shit that we could declare ourselves capable of coming up with higher concepts "a priori" due to independent reasoning alone ;)
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Re: Technology from half a million years ago

Post by Flagg »

I'm probably going to get soundly mocked for this (and maybe rightfully so) but I've always had a suspicion that human civilization has been around alot longer than we like to think it has. Especially when you consider how easy it is for small isolated civilizations to be wiped out by natural disasters leaving little or no trace of them. Now I'm not talking about huge technologically advanced civilizations or anything like that, but I can easily see things like writing being around long before Sumeria.
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Re: Technology from half a million years ago

Post by ryacko »

Surely the vedas themselves indicate a highly advanced Indian civilization.
But we may never know. I wonder how long it would take for my laptop to be totally unrecognizable by future archaeologists. Just look at the Antikythera device.
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Re: Technology from half a million years ago

Post by Esquire »

Could you unpack that? How do the Vedas indicate a highly advanced Indian civilization, and what do you mean about the Antikythera mechanism?
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Re: Technology from half a million years ago

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ryacko wrote:Surely the vedas themselves indicate a highly advanced Indian civilization.
But we may never know. I wonder how long it would take for my laptop to be totally unrecognizable by future archaeologists. Just look at the Antikythera device.
The Antikythera mechanism just computes the position of the stars. It is quite interesting but not really all that advanced in terms of raw knowledge, as at the time of its construction (estimated 1 BC) the mathematics that computed the position of the stars had existed for some time, though it is still an amazing work of mechanics for the time.
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Re: Technology from half a million years ago

Post by Darth Wong »

ryacko wrote:Surely the vedas themselves indicate a highly advanced Indian civilization.
But we may never know. I wonder how long it would take for my laptop to be totally unrecognizable by future archaeologists. Just look at the Antikythera device.
Even if its function is unidentifiable, its structure would definitely be recognizable as an artifact of a technological society. Even if the ravages of time render its structure unrecognizable, the refined materials alone would definitely be recognizable as artifacts of a technological society.
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Re: Technology from half a million years ago

Post by Ziggy Stardust »

Darth Wong wrote:This relates to an important revelation about human development which most people refuse to make peace with: that much of our ability is not born into us, but rather, given to us as a gift of society. Few want to accept that the cumulative learning effect of human society far supersedes any individual effort, and without it, we would be little better than any other animal.
Indeed. There is a growing school of thought in evolutionary psychology/anthropology circles that modern humans really are not significantly more intelligent than Homo sapiens from 200,000-300,000 years ago. Certainly, there would have been some post-agricultural revolution "bump" as a result of better nutritional standards, but in general it is becoming increasingly obvious that our ancestors were amazingly intelligent. Cumulative social learning in and of itself is a fascinating and understudied phenomenon.
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Re: Technology from half a million years ago

Post by Esquire »

Is the general feeling that "our ancestors were amazingly intelligent," or that we aren't any moreso? I'm just curious about whether the anthropological community feels the glass is half-empty or half-full.
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Re: Technology from half a million years ago

Post by ryacko »

Imperial528 wrote:
ryacko wrote:Surely the vedas themselves indicate a highly advanced Indian civilization.
But we may never know. I wonder how long it would take for my laptop to be totally unrecognizable by future archaeologists. Just look at the Antikythera device.
The Antikythera mechanism just computes the position of the stars. It is quite interesting but not really all that advanced in terms of raw knowledge, as at the time of its construction (estimated 1 BC) the mathematics that computed the position of the stars had existed for some time, though it is still an amazing work of mechanics for the time.
The mechanism, from what I've read, was so corroded that it took about fifty years for it's purpose to be correctly guessed.

To my knowledge, it is the only mechanism of it's kind and time period found. It's discovery at the sea floor was by sheer luck.
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Re: Technology from half a million years ago

Post by Grandmaster Jogurt »

Would there have been a bump at all from agriculture? I was under the impression that while the adoption of agriculture allowed for larger populations, sedentary living, stratification, and other things that would make a society stronger, it actually made things noticeably worse for the individuals involved.
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Re: Technology from half a million years ago

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The per capita health of human populations in general decreases with the adoption of agriculture, it is just that it allows for people to sustain higher populations and classes of specialist labourers. From an individual standpoint, unless you were one of the big men of the tribe who could accumulate surplus, it was a bit miserable. Of course, their numbers let them out compete hunter-gatherers, hence why there are almost no hunter-gatherer societies left.

Also, brain size has decreased over the past few tens of thousands of years. There was a whole big thread on it a few months back, but some of the likely causes are increase in efficiency requiring less brain for the same amount of processing power, and agricultural lifestyles being less mentally taxing than hunter-gatherer since there are fewer things trying to kill you all the time (most notably your neighbours).
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Re: Technology from half a million years ago

Post by Sea Skimmer »

Stark wrote:That's the thing with the behaviours we observe in animals - if they had a language or a broader society that could efficiently share and preserve their learnings, they'd display even more advanced behaviours. It really puts human society in perspective.
New Caledonian crows actually do demonstrate tool making to the young, without it having any immediate purpose. I don't think any other animal tool maker has been observed doing this though, at least not yet, and we've observed Chimps making tools for much longer then the crows have been studied.
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Re: Technology from half a million years ago

Post by Stark »

Right, and with a more 'advanced' or 'human like' society, they might have crows who do nothing but teach, or nothing but find new tools, or whatever. If even very primitive man displayed this kind of tool use, and contemporary animals do as well, maybe the only distinction really is the social element.
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Re: Technology from half a million years ago

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Grandmaster Jogurt wrote:Would there have been a bump at all from agriculture?
There is some evidence for continuing evolution post-agriculture. Lactose tolerance in adulthood, for example, probably did not become common in any human group until after humans started keeping herds of dairy animals, and there are still billions of humans today who don't have that particular mutation. So yes, it's possible there was some sort of "bump" from agriculture allowing better use of agricultural products or favoring certain types of behavior (more tolerance for crowding, for example) but it would be difficult at best to prove.

You could just as well argue there was a "bump" from other significant technological advances in pre-history.
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Re: Technology from half a million years ago

Post by Darth Wong »

Academia Nut wrote:Also, brain size has decreased over the past few tens of thousands of years. There was a whole big thread on it a few months back, but some of the likely causes are increase in efficiency requiring less brain for the same amount of processing power, and agricultural lifestyles being less mentally taxing than hunter-gatherer since there are fewer things trying to kill you all the time (most notably your neighbours).
According to a National Geographic article I read about dogs, our relationship with Man's Best Friend may have also eliminated the need for certain enlarged brain centres. The first evidence we find of humans cohabiting with dogs is from roughly 30,000 years ago. Prior to the beginning of man/dog symbiotic relationships, man needed a more acute sense of smell and hearing, and larger processing centres in the brain to process that information. Once we formed relationships with dogs, they became our ears and noses, and we could free up those brain development resources for other things.
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Re: Technology from half a million years ago

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That could perhaps go back even earlier. Evidence for humans cohabiting with wolves is over 100,000 years year, and its possible humans began gaining advantages from wolves long before we domesticated them. Wolves can be troublesome sure, but they are a creature humans can deal with more or less readily because they are smart enough to respect strength, and small enough to bribe with food, while they'd potentially keep away other less predictable and more food intensive predators and some of the more insane prehistoric herbivores.

An increasing body of evidence also exists that humans simply burned huge areas of the planet over the centuries, and made large areas of Africa, Australia, South America and some other spots more habitable out of hand. Mass destruction like this would have been an enormous advantage in facilitating our development and help explain how fairly small human populations seem to have driven so many species to extinction early, while other, faster animals like say tigers, only got into trouble in the last ~200 years when humans have become absurdly more populated. A spear is a nice tool, a wildfire that left 10,000 charred but editable animals corpses is even better. Might have burned up the other humans on the other side of the ridge too, but who cares, it killed all the deadly snakes too.
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Re: Technology from half a million years ago

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That's been something they've re-discovered in the past few decades (it was common knowledge early in British colonial America that the natives burned large segments of the land every year). In the Midwest, it actually did the same type of thing that the Ice Age mega-fauna did, and that elephants do in Africa today: keeping grassland and woodland from foresting over. Then there's stuff like favoring different varieties of trees and the sort, which they've found evidence for everywhere in the Americas from the northeastern states down to the Amazon rain forest. It turns out that's the kind of stuff you can do in terms of managing ecosystems if you don't have access to iron and steel tools plus draft animals.

Charles Mann's 1491 and parts of 1493 give it a good layman treatment.
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Re: Technology from half a million years ago

Post by Alferd Packer »

Guardsman Bass wrote:That's been something they've re-discovered in the past few decades (it was common knowledge early in British colonial America that the natives burned large segments of the land every year). In the Midwest, it actually did the same type of thing that the Ice Age mega-fauna did, and that elephants do in Africa today: keeping grassland and woodland from foresting over. Then there's stuff like favoring different varieties of trees and the sort, which they've found evidence for everywhere in the Americas from the northeastern states down to the Amazon rain forest. It turns out that's the kind of stuff you can do in terms of managing ecosystems if you don't have access to iron and steel tools plus draft animals.

Charles Mann's 1491 and parts of 1493 give it a good layman treatment.
I've heard similar things. Like before European colonization of North America started, there may have been up to 100 million people living on the continent. 90+ percent of them died so rapidly(and continent-wide) to European diseases that the colonists basically had to do diddly but move in. There were already fields cleared, livestock predators were at manageable levels, and there were paths inland for expansion. And, of course, the native population was a post-apocalyptic shadow of its former self. The very first explorers of North America's coast wrote that there were people everywhere they went, and early settlers remarked that what should have been virgin, untouched forest was serene and park-like.
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