https://apnews.com/article/oldest-wooden-tools-marathousa-1-...
https://archaeologymag.com/2026/01/430000-year-old-wooden-to...
ETA: Today I learned I had a much much larger gap in knowledge than I thought I did. Thanks to everyone for the information and links!
Even this evidence of woodworking is largely unremarkable. We’ve got phytolith [1] and microwear [2] studies showing unambiguous evidence of woodworking going back at least 1.5 million years. Wood tools just don’t survive very long, so this find is most notable for its preservation.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...
This somewhat contradicts the subheading, no?
> The finding, along with the discovery of a 500,000-year-old hammer made of bone, indicates that our human ancestors were making tools even earlier than archaeologists thought.
The original paper's abstract is much more specific (ignore the Significance section, which is more editorializing):
> Here, we present the earliest handheld wooden tools, identified from secure contexts at the site of Marathousa 1, Greece, dated to ca. 430 ka (MIS12). [1]
Which is true. Before this the oldest handheld wooden tool was a thrusting spear from Germany dated ~400kYA [2]. The oldest evidence of woodworking is at least 1.5 million years old but we just don't have any surviving wooden tools from that period.
[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2515479123
[2] https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/behavior/getting-food/o...
I mostly just read the papers as they are published but I’ve heard good things about those two books (they’re on my reading list but I haven’t read enough to form an opinion)
"We" (Homo sapiens) did not invent fire. Our predecessor species were already using it.
Firestarting is harder to pin down and may be within the scope of homo evolution.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_fire_by_early_human...>
Try this: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/26/science/archaeology-neand...
And she told us that would likely happen again, there would be a gap where our technology proved to be insufficiently durable to last throughout history. Unsurprisingly not everyone in the class thought this was likely, but I figured it was possible.
Anyway, I could go on about the archeology of tech all night, but I've got to figure out how to get the photos off this Kodak DC25 camera card. Something about a DLL from the original installer that you wrap in a Linux library? Can't remember.
I heard that fear being muttered mostly about everything going digital and that's much harder for archaeologists to dig up than paper or stone tablets.
However, that's all nonsense, of course: the stuff that people bother to write down is seldom all that interesting. Who cares about who was king or whatever? The real juicy bits are all in our garbage dumps, and we are producing garbage that'll last much longer than anything the ancients could muster. What with all our metal, glass, plastic etc.
I’m going to use a charged word because Jane Goodall used it.
Goodall asserted that humans and chimpanzees (and wolves) are unique among animals in that we have a genocidal tendency [1]. When a group attacks us (or has “land and resources” we want) we don’t just chase them off. We exterminate them. We expend great resources to track them down to ensure they cannot threaten us.
One reading of pre-history is that we had a number of hominids that were fine sharing the world, and humans, who were not. (I’ve seen the uncanny valley hypothesised as a human response to non-human hominids, as well as other humans carrying transmissible disfiguring diseases.)
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/06/does-...
That's an unsupported generalization.
The article describes "behaviors" that include "perhaps even genocide", and notes that wiping out populations exists in chimps and wolves too.
So not unique, there's a "perhaps", and it's not a tendency. There's no evidence we have a "gene" for it or anything.
In the vast, vast, vast majority of conflicts between two groups, we don't exterminate the "enemy". Otherwise, the human race would have gone extinct a long time ago. Wiping out entire populations is by far the exception, not the rule, of human societies. It happens, but the situations are notable precisely for their extremity, precisely because they're not the norm.
As vapid as the movie (intentionally) is, "Mean Girls" does a really good break-down of things, and perhaps the main issue is that unlike some other animal groups, people don't always stop.
Entirely wiping out an enemy population can be incredibly risky as they'll try to also wipe you out in response. It consumes enormous resources as people on your own side get killed, your resources get used up, etc. It weakens your group making you more vulnerable to attack from third parties.
Most of the time, it's just bad strategy.
You don't need to invent instincts or tendencies or claim something is more subtle or targeted when the vastly simpler explanation is just that it's all just cost-benefit.
I honestly have no clue what word you used was 'charged'. Considering any of those words charged makes me worry how far political correctness has gone! (I'm assuming, I suppose, politically charged?)
We were a large family [1].
> Real "are we the baddies?" moment
We were animals. We acted in accordance with our natures. Wolves and chimpanzees aren’t baddies any more than bees or hyenas. Nature is brutal.
Today, however, we are more than our natures. We have the capacity to criticize it when it arises in ways we disapprove of. In a certain sense, humans have a unique capacity to reduce suffering in a way without precedent in Earth’s natural history.
Your argument, written here and As far as I understand it at the moment, goes along with the other argument that everything is a simulation, or that everything that we do is preordained based upon physics. All mindbenders.
I want to believe that I have the ability to make an educated decision when faced e.g. with impulses to suppress or oppress others, I do know that I can consider ramifications and benefits outside of those which directly impact me.
So, perhaps it's better to say, we can be unanimal like rather than simply not animal, at all? What do you think?
I see what you mean by being able to consider the worth of harming something for your own gain. But doesn't this apply to all animals? If a bear was hungry I'm sure they would happily eat you, but they would probably think twice if they weren't. Same for early humans, it's just we have our technologies (which our intellectual nature has enabled) now to prop us up and not have to really think about survival.
The main thing I'm curious to hear your thoughts on is what are we if not animals? Gods? That's surely completely relative, like an anteater to an ant.
The "simulation" is indistinguishable from god.
What?
This isn't a mindbender. You're just drawing lines.
Edit: I slightly misread your comment as advocating that we're not animals. However, whether one describes us as not animals or able to be "unanimal like" is still a matter of drawing lines.
humans have a unique capacity to reduce suffering in a way
This really depends on how you define nature. Attempts to delineate what is and is not nature tend to be motivated.
Humans have a well-earned nickname: "murder apes"
Invaders of days gone by knew that even the young kids would grow up to "avenge their people", so to avoid problems (violence/killing against their tribe) in 10-15 years, it's better to just totally erase the population.
Related, I think this is also the mechanism for how religion tends to stabilize societies/give them cohesion. Rather than having an eventual positive feedback loop of division, the division is placed between some type of "good" and "evil" rather than your neighbor. The "us vs them" division that switch craves is put on something more metaphysical (and sometimes a net benefit, like defining evil as behavior destructive to societies).
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ants-and-the-art-...
And lions. And banded mongooses. And meerkats. And ants. Lots and lots of ant species - they’re actually by far the worst, following colony pheromones to the end of the earth just to get a single ant. Ants that aren’t genocidal to their own species tend to be some of the worst invasive species (like Argentinian ant supercolonies).
I love me some Jane Goodall as much as the next guy but that hypothesis is not taken seriously by primatologists and using the word “genocidal” in this context would get you laughed out of the room. Lethal intergroup aggression, coalitionary killing, and raiding are all different aspects of violent behavior in animals and hominins are far from unique in demonstrating them.
What part of the study strikes you as unsubstantiated?
That's 250,000 years of coexistence. We know that we sheboinked with at least two other species, probably more, because we still carry their genes to this day. So much so that it couldn't have been just a sheboink or two; we sheboinked over extended periods of time, i.e. we formed families with Neanderthals and Denisovens.
We have no evidence of warfare between the species. I.E. We have found no Neanderthal skull with an arrowhead in it, for example. Besides the fact that we are the only ones left, I don't see any substantiation at all.
It is a mystery why they are not still here. But the last 50,000 years, since the end of the last Ice Age, has been very hard on human species, for some reason. We are the only humans left, what every got them might get us too if we let it.
Thats not correct.
We have a neanderthal slain by spear, at a time and place where it was only carried by modern humans. [0]
This isn't a singular event. We have a history on injuries consistent with war, on both sides.
Yes, we "sheboinked". We also took women as prizes of war and raped them. As humanity has continued to do for most of their history.
Sure, the story is probably more complex. Some tribes at war, others at trade. Some who intermingle, and others who raged. That's... Just history of a people. That's normal.
But we absolutely have a history of war between the species.
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...
All of their history.
Everything selectively bred due to environmental or artificial pressures to have big eyes, big heads, high vocal sounds, attributes of human babies
It is very strange and an aberration amongst species, one being tolerating other beings because of their entertainment value and the joy they give from looking at them, but seems to be consistent and validate what's happened over eons of homo sapien propagation
Not only are we the only species to reach this kind of technology but among humans the first group to reach space was the Nazis. Today the innovation in that area seems driven by militaristic states and by people who seem ideologically adjacent. In other words it’s driven by very aggressive territorial members of one of the most aggressive territorial species.
We can’t generalize from one example of evolution, but if this is indicative of a common pattern then there might be some scary MFs out there. Our radio signals have been spreading for a while, so for all we know something is on its way to cleanse the universe of all forms of life that offend its god (or whatever its genocidal rationalizations is).
If this is true then we die. There is zero chance of resisting something with the technology to travel the stars and perhaps a million years or more head start on us. It’d be like an Apache attack helicopter versus a termite mound.
I had this thought when I saw the ideological turn (or mask removal) of certain people in the space industry. I found it metaphysically disturbing. Again… if there is other advanced life and if this is the pattern of how you evolve to become spacefaring, then we are doomed.
Today it's Musk driving space technology forward, and I don't see him acting militaristic.
Then around 2-2.5 million years ago you get the first homo species in the genus homo such as Homo habilis and they created the Oldowan tool culture.
Both Australopithecus afarensis and Homo habilis are our ancestors -- however they are also the ancestors of other homo lines that diverged from us that we are not descendents of (which are now extinct).
People often forget how widespread and varied the Homo genus was before all our cousin species went extinct (likely in part due to us).[1] Homo erectus colonized the entire old world very effectively 1.5 million years ago!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo#/media/File:The_hominin_f...
I assume these are made of stone? What kind of tools?
Also, more than primates use tools: Many corvids (crows, ravens, etc.) do, as do other animals. Look up New Caledonian Crows in particular.
But don't take all this from HN commenters debating each other; find some authoritative sources. A recent review article in a scientific journal would be a great start. Google Scholar lets you search for review articles.
>Flexible use of a multi-purpose tool by a cow
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(25)...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_tools#/media/File:Cow_Tool...
Chimps and New Caledonian Crows (and maybe some other animals) also manufacture their tools, at least sometimes, BTW. IIRC the crows strip sticks and bend them into hooks to grab at objects.
Why would someone imply otherwise if they don't know? What are people trying to prove in this discussion?
[0] There's strong evidence of 3.3 mya; see other comments.
Agreed, though the dividing line is tricky.
(Your prior comment didn't say 95% of that; for example, it doesn't mention animals. Because the parent comments were focused on human ancestors, that's what I thought you were addressing.)
In terms of tools by homonins, there is a roughly ~3million year history of stone tool use by various species, and the main thing preventing that date from being pushed further back is the difficulty in discerning between stones that have been shaped intentionally and those shaped by natural forces.
We have both observational and archaeological evidence of tool use in chimpanzees, macaques, and capuchins so it’s a pretty widespread behavior. I think the archaeological evidence for monkeys only goes back about four thousand years but thats because we havent studied the issue as much in archaeology.
I think we see shades of this today. Bearded Capuchin monkeys chain a complex series of tasks and use tools to break nuts. From a brief documentary clip I saw [0], they first take the nut and strip away the outer layer of skin, leave it dry out in the sun for a week, then find a large soft-ish rock as the anvil with a heavier smaller rock to break open the nut. So they had to not only figure out that nuts need to be pre-shelled and dried, but that they needed a softer rock for the anvil and harder rock for the hammer. They also need at least some type of bipedal ability to carry the rock in the first place and use it as a hammer.
Apparently some white-faced Capuchins have figured out that they can soak nuts in water to soften it before hammering it open [1].
I have gone down a couple rabbit holes based on his videos and while it seems like he's occasionally gotten some facts wrong or misunderstood an argument, I'm pretty confident he's doing a decent job accurately representing the archaeology.
Pretty much. Being able to transfer/build a fire is a lot easier than starting one. Fire starting requires bow/flint&steel and a lot of patience. Control basically means using simple torches to transfer fire from one place to another (where the initial source is either lightning/wildfire or embers of a previous fire).
[1] https://www.nhm.ac.uk/press-office/press-releases/groundbrea...
https://wildlife.org/australian-firehawks-use-fire-to-catch-...
By far the strongest evidence is the Qesem Cave in Israel, which had a central hearth and so many burned animal remains that it couldn’t have been accidental. Unfortunately the dating on that is controversial and the error bar is huge at 300 +- 100 kYA (200,000-400,000 years ago).
Fascinating stuff!
Dumbed down understanding of mine: evolutionary theory predicts that graph goes from (0.1; 0) to (very high; in a million years). X axis: years, Y axis: progress or evolution. The only difference such discoveries make is to further refine the slope of the graph. Was the development linear or exponential? How fast did it progress? Obviously, in the past 500 years we didn't change as humans but our technological progress accelerated beyond belief.
That's true for pretty much everybody. Homeschooled or not. You think everyone shocked by this news was all homeschooled?
Just for fun, ask some high schoolers who were the major combatants in WW2.
Honestly I would have expected a pig or horse to be discovered to use tools, rather than a cow. Cattle are generally... not thought of as particularly intelligent.
I am tired of this. No. Archeologist only claim what they have discovered. They don't speculate because they work based on evidences. Journalists should better. This wording sounds like archeologists were wrong. That only fuel the narrative that layman's opinion is more informed than professionals.
Science works by scientist having a model of reality and then testing that model against reality, gathering evidence that fits or doesn't fit the model, evaluating how well the model corresponds to reality.
If there is a widely accepted model in the archaeological community, and the new data contradicts it, the wording "than archaeologists thought" seems plausible enough.
Of course, depending on the model, the model itself might admit regimes of "non-applicability", or have some measure of confidence... If archeologists have large uncertainty whether human ancestors made tools 500,000 years back or not, then they shouldn't be surprised upon finding evidence that the ancestors did.
I don't know any specifics about this case, just arguing that that kind of wording by itself is not always wrong by default.
That would shake our knowledge from the foundations.
5 BILLION years ago...
Wood lasts for fucking ever under the proper conditions. Old construction in Europe often only had the beams made of wood, and I always thought that was orders of magnitude more durable than wooden houses, like thousands of years vs decades. I don’t think that’s true anymore.
And this might be one of the few environmentally friendly decisions that Americans got better than Europeans, I guess. Wood is still prevalent in construction here, and as far as I know concrete and cement production are quite bad.
BTW, I’m a total ignorant about all this so just intuition and probably wrong
Modern concrete construction uses iron rebar liberally. That means every concrete structure built today will crack and crumble in a few hundred years at most, as the iron absorbs oxygen, it swells from the rust. Which is a shame, roman concrete buildings without rebar will still be standing 1000s of years from now.
I bet we could do fairly well. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of years. We've learned a lot about how to form exceptionally long lasting cement. We just choose not to do it that way, most of the time.
Most of Europe long ago exhausted easily accessible natural forest resources, and where it's not densely populated tends to prefer using land to do other stuff (like grow food). Hence, stone and concrete and similar materials in European construction.
The part that I don't quite know how to make sense of is why Canadian producers seem to have a near monopoly on sandpaper products.
Bottom box: I want to search the archive for saved snapshots
I have defaulted to using the bottom box first, since it's usually much faster
Red blood cells, and collagen from dinosaur bones. With the idea that even current museum hosted bones might have more??? Today is a wild day for me.
This is very heavily disputed and very much not consensus opinion. (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_naledi#Possible_burials and https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...)
Wikipedia has a bias against everything outside of mainstream academia, there are activist groups like Guerrilla Skeptics that go through articles and rewrite them to undermine anything remotely fringe. It's not as objective as people like to think it is.
Ultimately, it's that scientists are humans, too. Despite some of them really making their research data-forward, things like tenure, career, funding, and even who would publish your work now and in the future all create normal human environments that reward small, incremental changes to a body of knowledge that don't upset the apple cart, not discoveries that suggest huge changes. In fact, large changes and discoveries can be resisted and denied further research in favor of the status quo.
This is not a new phenomenon by any means:
Both warm-blooded dinosaurs and the Chicxulub impact were both theories dismissed as fringe for decades before overwhelming evidence led to them being accepted as likely. In no small way thanks to Jurassic Park.
Recall that eugenics and phrenology both used to be widely accepted scientific "fact."
100 fairly prominent scientists signed a letter stating emphatically that Einstein's Theory of Relatively was categorically wrong and should be retracted.
Plate tectonics was seen as fanciful crackpot musings for decades. The author of the original theory died 30 years before plate tectonics was even considered possible.
Germ theory was dismissed for most of Louis Pasteur's lifetime, despite being able to literally show people yeast in a microscope.
Helicentrism has a storied past.
Quantum theory was also denied heavily at first. Now it saves photos to our hard drives.
And how many times has the earliest dates of hominids and tool use and human thresholds of development been pushed back by tens of thousands of years?
This is not an exhaustive list, by any means.
So we have ancient examples and modern ones - and everything in between. So the level of education or scientific progress or equipment are not the cause. Humans are. Humans do this all the time. So until overwhelming evidence surfaces, which can take decades or longer, claims like this shouldn't be dismissed out of hand until proven solidly in error. A theory is a theory, so let it be a theory.
I like how the word “overwhelming” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
You've worked in those settings, and you think archaeologists reject tool use older than 1 mya?
Also, you don't understand that science is a process, based on evidence, and revision is an essential part of that process? Archaeology especially advances regularly, because evidence can be relatively very rare. If they weren't revising it, it would mean the whole research enterprise - to expand knowledge - was failing.
> how many times has the earliest dates of hominids and tool use and human thresholds of development been pushed back by tens of thousands of years?
I don't know, how many times? Tool use is universally believed, in the field, to have begun at least 2.58 million years ago, and with strong evidence for 3.3 mya. Tens of thousands of years isn't in the debate. See this subthread:
Bill Bryson's book A Short History of Nearly Everything is where I'm taking that from. It's a great read and shows all the ways in which scientists failed to see what was under their nose for decades before finally figuring out, which makes one wonder what's currently ripe for the picking.
As long as there is low number of samples with such age you should always assume methodological mistakes in measurement
? I don't think you can find anyone in archaeology who says tool use began less than 1 million years ago (mya). Maybe you mean something else?
The univeral consensus in archaeology says tools emerged either 3.3 mya, which is still subject to debate last I knew, and certainly by 2.58 mya - the Odowan industry famously discovered by the Leakeys in the Oldovai Gorge in Tanzania, in 1969.
The same consensus continues with the development of the more advanced Acheulean industry ~1.76 mya, which dominated until ~ 400,000 years ago (arguably the most successful technology ever).
Please edit out swipes, as the site guidelines ask (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are.
Your comment would be fine without that first bit.
