430,000 years? Am I reading this headline correctly? (since the site seems to have fallen victim to the HN-hug-of-death). That seems wildly further back than I understood humans to have tools, or even homo sapiens to have existed.
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!
Tools predate homo sapiens (which emerged about 300 kYA) by millions of years. The first stone industry - Oldowan - is at least two million years old and might be as old as three million. They predate what we call “archaic humans” by a long time.
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.
Just edited to add two paper citations for the phytoliths and microwear studies. Have fun! It’s a deep rabbit hole largely ignored by popsci publications so there’s lots to explore.
I don’t read popsci but if you’re interested in a rigorous treatment I’d recommend The Human Career by Klein which has the broad overview and The Human Past edited by Scarre which is more of a textbook.
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)
> Tools predate homo sapiens (which emerged about 300 kYA)
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.)
The worst part of reading this thread is I know I won't be able to google image anything interesting related to "non-human hominids" :( Your comment was oddly depressing lol. Real "are we the baddies?" moment this morning.
> won't be able to google image anything interesting related to "non-human hominids"
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.
That's kinda ridiculous to think we're not animals anymore, our nature is to use intellect for survival (and though we know we can reduce suffering further we choose not to).
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?
As equal to their ability to cause it. It’s this dichotomy that makes us, human. We have the power of destruction, the power of criticism, the power of nurturing, and the power to advance. We are amazing animals.
humans have a unique capacity to reduce suffering in a way
With low cost to our wellbeing as well. Which I think is the main point. Our advances in logistical transportation and food production allow us to be kinder and more plentiful than ever before. Unfortunately we see "instinctual" echoes of past strife seemingly arise from minor inconveniences (those ppl do something that annoys me).
Another way of looking at it is that humans (and apparently our close brethren) are tribal, don't give up fighting easily, and can generationally hold grudges.
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.
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.
Given enough time of human survival, the only species left on this planet will be ones that are aesthetically pleasing to us
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
That's wild! Thanks for sharing. I didn't realize these things went so far back. So are you saying these were straight up non-human primates using tools? Or is this all traceable to our lineage?
The first identified tools were 3.3 million years ago, which is before the homo genus emerges. Thus, those were either by Australopithecus afarensis or by a yet unidentified hominid species -- they were still very likely our ancestors (but technically TBD).
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!
I believe the evidence is animal bones that show marks from butchery, as well as actual sharpened stone flakes and other things found primarily in what is now Kenya: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lomekwi
Last I knew, the 3.3 mya evidence from the site Lomekwi 3 in Kenya was debatable, though a serious possibility, and the 2.58 mya evidence from the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania was considered the sure thing.
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.
That's a difficult distinction to make - at which point does tool selection differ from modification for use as a tool - any animal that strips the leaves off a twig in order to use it as a tool has manufactured the tool.
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.
Our last common ancestor with our closest non-human primates (Pan genus) diverged about 6-8 million years ago, so what constitutes “human” is murky and I don’t think archaeologists give the matter much thought. “Human” means homo sapiens, “archaic human” means a few subspecies like neanderthals up to about 600 kYA, and the rest are just “hominins”.
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.
As others mentioned, tool use wasn't restricted to homo sapiens. I think this makes sense, no? We didn't spontaneously use tools, it must have evolved incrementally in some way.
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].
Yes it's definitely further back than homo sapiens have existed (200k - 300k years), but our ancestor species were known to have used tools and control fire. I believe we have evidence of tool use going back 1 million years. So this article is referencing the oldest known _wooden_ tools, which are obviously much less likely to be preserved across the ages.
We have 3.3 million year old stone tools https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14464. They're very simple (even more so than the Oldowan stone tools https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldowan) and basically just look like rocks, but there is clear evidence of intentional shaping by hominins (somewhere in the fuzzy late Australopthis/early homo transition).
Thanks for these sources. Archeology definitely is a big known unknown for me, so even getting started reading basic info about this is rough. I appreciate the links and terms.
This youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/stefanmilo has a lot of good stuff. I don't know enough to know where he's right or wrong, but provides entry points for to looking more into it.
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.
Awesome. I've watched plenty of Miniminuteman (Milo Rossi) videos, but his tend to be more pop-sci/debunking outrageous claims and less foundationally educational. I'll check this channel out too.
Wait hang on, would they "control" file by finding natural sources (volcano, lightning strike wildfire, etc.) and then make use of that source for controlled sources of light/heat/etc? I guess I've always thought of "control" of fire including the intentional starting thereof.
> Wait hang on, would they "control" file by finding natural sources (volcano, lightning strike wildfire, etc.) and then make use of that source for controlled sources of light/heat/etc?
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).
There's pretty strong evidence that the use of fire to cook food is what enabled modern humans, with their short (and relatively fragile) digestive systems and giant energy hungry brains to evolve. Cooking food makes more calories bio-available in food and also reduced the amount of energy the body needs to expend on that food to harvest calories... so there's more energy available for thinking (etc).
That’s a complicated question. The Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa where we found the first evidence of controlled fire also contained burned plant remains and bones, which could be interpreted as evidence of cooking. There were also burned fish remains found at the Gesher Benot Ya’aqov site in Israel, dated to about 780 kYA, which could also be interpreted as evidence of cooking.
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).
I had thought (perhaps wrongly) that our brains got a massive "boost" in capacity when our ancestors moved to coastal areas and the diet was dominated by (Omega 3 heavy) shellfish and crustaceans.
We have evidence that non Homo sapiens bipeds (e.g., Neanderthals, Homo habilis) used tools far before we came onto the scene. A long lineage of hominin species came before humans!
And even today, our species' cousins (Chimps) are rudimentary tool users. Recently saw a documentary where they evolved their 'tools' to get honey from a 1-stick approach to a 3-stick approach.
You might be old enough to have been taught that Humans are tool-using apes. That's tragically incomplete: lots of apes use tools. Birds use tools. And now, cows use tools!
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 was homeschooled in a particular conservative area. Much of what I have been taught was... woefully inadequate, we'll say. Lots of my learning has come in university and afterwards, so what I've picked up is pretty obviously incomplete and leaves me with many unknown unknowns in this area. Today has begun filling in many of those gaps so they get to be known unknowns now!
There's bound to be a lot of vital archeological evidence of the development of humans and our cousins below the water. Past peoples probably lived near the coasts and the rising water would have obscured or destroyed a lot of the evidence of their existence. I think a lot about what must be or have been just out of reach of our current studies.
That’s rapidly changing. Underwater archaeology has been going through a mini-Renaissance in the last thirty years thanks to multibeam and side scan sonar. Now with the proliferation of underwater drones capable of high-resolution 3D photogrammetry, that is rapidly accelerating into a full blown revolution. As usual the problem is lack of funding to do excavations. There are far more known sites than there are funds to study them.
I have always believed that the human evolution consensus which is usually based upon finds of advanced toolmaking in absence of culture cues, to be questionable by orders of magnitude. So it seemed natural to simply double generational concepts of the village along a trade route, from ~500kya (like the Nile) to 1 million YA as a hyperstable span of evolution of the 'trade route village'. I even wrote a book about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtxgpaXp9vA that might seem like whole fiction. But science seems not to ask, how many times might we have started over?
That's ridiculous. Scientists absolutely ask these questions. We just don't have the answers so we don't make assumptions. It is implicitly assumed there is an enormous amount of proto- and pre-human culture and technology that is undiscovered or undiscoverable. We have very long known that hominins made tools, art and structures out of organic material that has decayed beyond our ability to detect.
I actually saw the website, pictures of the tools and text and everything before it gave me the database error message. It would have been totally fine.
Yeah, that was me. I threw the link into archive.is to check if it had a snapshot, but it just created a shanpshot of the 503 before I could figure out how to cancel it.
It gets wilder, all of the finds mentioned so far are stuff I have heard of, then there are the intentional burials from millions of years agoby a tiny hominum in SA, deap in a
cave complex that requires extream cave crawling to get into, and also from SA, there is strong evidence for the manufacture of red pigment @400kyr ago.
And if you like, you can wander around certain sea sides and pick, little tiny dino trackways that have fallen out of the cliff,
:)
> then there are the intentional burials from millions of years agoby a tiny hominum in SA, deap in a cave complex that requires extream cave crawling to get into
There is archaeological evidence of tools going back even further, potentially over a million years, but it's ignored for the usual reasons of dogma and not conveniently fitting into the paradigm of the current priestly class. I'd highly recommend this talk Michael Cremo (author of "Forbidden Archaeology") gave for this "Authors at Google" program in 2014:
It instantly destroys all credibility. Any serious theory would present itself on its own merits rather than going for the victimhood angle. When you title your book in such a way as to push the perceived victimhood to the forefront, it indicates that there is no convincing evidence and therefore the only option left to you is to play at the conspiracy angle, cursing the shadowy figures who are suppressing the "forbidden truth".
Why not just watch the talk and hear his argument from himself?
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.
Because life is short and we have to prioritize the talks we watch. And if you've seen enough bullshit, you can smell it coming. So if someone gives strong signals that they're full of it, we don't bother.
Because charismatic people can make us believe just about anything, and if we think we're immune to that we just haven't met the right charismatic person. I like to do some searching when something jumps out at me, like his book name, to get some background before I invest more time into the topic.
The self professed skeptic community is pretty extreme. Their arguments so often go beyond occams razor that is essentially absurdism to get around anything non-material or unexplained by current science / thinking.
I'm not the person you asked this of, but I've worked in museums and research settings and can lob a response your way.
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.
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:
I think it just doesn't fit into the accepted timeline so it's mostly ignored. This is a common pattern with scientific discovery where evidence that contradicts the prevailing paradigm is ignored and builds up until it can no longer be ignored and causes a paradigm shift. This idea comes from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn.
> There is archaeological evidence of tools going back even further, potentially over a million years, but it's ignored for the usual reasons of dogma and not conveniently fitting into the paradigm of the current priestly class.
? 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).
430,000 years? Am I reading this headline correctly? (since the site seems to have fallen victim to the HN-hug-of-death). That seems wildly further back than I understood humans to have tools, or even homo sapiens to have existed.
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!
Tools predate homo sapiens (which emerged about 300 kYA) by millions of years. The first stone industry - Oldowan - is at least two million years old and might be as old as three million. They predate what we call “archaic humans” by a long time.
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...
Well, today I learned something! Thanks for the information, I guess I know which rabbit hole I'm going down today.
Just edited to add two paper citations for the phytoliths and microwear studies. Have fun! It’s a deep rabbit hole largely ignored by popsci publications so there’s lots to explore.
As you seem knowledgeable of this topic and it is super interesting, any books you would recommend that gives a good broad overview of all of this?
I don’t read popsci but if you’re interested in a rigorous treatment I’d recommend The Human Career by Klein which has the broad overview and The Human Past edited by Scarre which is more of a textbook.
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)
Thanks! I'll add them to my reading list for today. Its going to be interesting, I can already tell.
> Tools predate homo sapiens (which emerged about 300 kYA)
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-...
The worst part of reading this thread is I know I won't be able to google image anything interesting related to "non-human hominids" :( Your comment was oddly depressing lol. Real "are we the baddies?" moment this morning.
> won't be able to google image anything interesting related to "non-human hominids"
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo
That's kinda ridiculous to think we're not animals anymore, our nature is to use intellect for survival (and though we know we can reduce suffering further we choose not to).
It is a mind bender, yes.
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?
As equal to their ability to cause it. It’s this dichotomy that makes us, human. We have the power of destruction, the power of criticism, the power of nurturing, and the power to advance. We are amazing animals.
Another way of looking at it is that humans (and apparently our close brethren) are tribal, don't give up fighting easily, and can generationally hold grudges.
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.
It’s an interesting interpretation, but it’s sounds all very unsubstantiated. Speculation it seems to me.
> sounds all very unsubstantiated. Speculation it seems to me
What part of the study strikes you as unsubstantiated?
Lack of a control or any experimental evidence?
> (and wolves)
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.
Army ants do something similar as well.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ants-and-the-art-...
Given enough time of human survival, the only species left on this planet will be ones that are aesthetically pleasing to us
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
That's wild! Thanks for sharing. I didn't realize these things went so far back. So are you saying these were straight up non-human primates using tools? Or is this all traceable to our lineage?
The first identified tools were 3.3 million years ago, which is before the homo genus emerges. Thus, those were either by Australopithecus afarensis or by a yet unidentified hominid species -- they were still very likely our ancestors (but technically TBD).
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...
> The first identified tools were 3.3 million years ago
I assume these are made of stone? What kind of tools?
I believe the evidence is animal bones that show marks from butchery, as well as actual sharpened stone flakes and other things found primarily in what is now Kenya: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lomekwi
Last I knew, the 3.3 mya evidence from the site Lomekwi 3 in Kenya was debatable, though a serious possibility, and the 2.58 mya evidence from the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania was considered the sure thing.
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.
Most recently (January 19, 2026): cows
>Flexible use of a multi-purpose tool by a cow
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(25)...
We are talking about tool manufacture here, however, not just about tool use.
That's a difficult distinction to make - at which point does tool selection differ from modification for use as a tool - any animal that strips the leaves off a twig in order to use it as a tool has manufactured the tool.
So cool! Thanks for the info.
Even today there's plenty of non humans (and non-primate) tool use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_use_by_non-humans.
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.
Our last common ancestor with our closest non-human primates (Pan genus) diverged about 6-8 million years ago, so what constitutes “human” is murky and I don’t think archaeologists give the matter much thought. “Human” means homo sapiens, “archaic human” means a few subspecies like neanderthals up to about 600 kYA, and the rest are just “hominins”.
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.
As others mentioned, tool use wasn't restricted to homo sapiens. I think this makes sense, no? We didn't spontaneously use tools, it must have evolved incrementally in some way.
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].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFWTXU2jE14
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7sJq2XUiy8
> have figured out that they can soak nuts in water to soften
Be QUIET twelve year old me!
Yes it's definitely further back than homo sapiens have existed (200k - 300k years), but our ancestor species were known to have used tools and control fire. I believe we have evidence of tool use going back 1 million years. So this article is referencing the oldest known _wooden_ tools, which are obviously much less likely to be preserved across the ages.
We have 3.3 million year old stone tools https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14464. They're very simple (even more so than the Oldowan stone tools https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldowan) and basically just look like rocks, but there is clear evidence of intentional shaping by hominins (somewhere in the fuzzy late Australopthis/early homo transition).
Thanks for these sources. Archeology definitely is a big known unknown for me, so even getting started reading basic info about this is rough. I appreciate the links and terms.
This youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/stefanmilo has a lot of good stuff. I don't know enough to know where he's right or wrong, but provides entry points for to looking more into it.
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.
Awesome. I've watched plenty of Miniminuteman (Milo Rossi) videos, but his tend to be more pop-sci/debunking outrageous claims and less foundationally educational. I'll check this channel out too.
We have evidence of control over fire (but not fire starting) at about 1 million years. Stone tools go even further back, at least 2 million years.
Wait hang on, would they "control" file by finding natural sources (volcano, lightning strike wildfire, etc.) and then make use of that source for controlled sources of light/heat/etc? I guess I've always thought of "control" of fire including the intentional starting thereof.
> Wait hang on, would they "control" file by finding natural sources (volcano, lightning strike wildfire, etc.) and then make use of that source for controlled sources of light/heat/etc?
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).
ah, there's a very good movie about this exact topic (not scientifically accurate, one presumes, but still very good)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_for_Fire_(film)
Not to mention the Iron Maiden song! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SF7cWpBTZ6s
There's pretty strong evidence that the use of fire to cook food is what enabled modern humans, with their short (and relatively fragile) digestive systems and giant energy hungry brains to evolve. Cooking food makes more calories bio-available in food and also reduced the amount of energy the body needs to expend on that food to harvest calories... so there's more energy available for thinking (etc).
When is the first evidence for cooking?
That’s a complicated question. The Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa where we found the first evidence of controlled fire also contained burned plant remains and bones, which could be interpreted as evidence of cooking. There were also burned fish remains found at the Gesher Benot Ya’aqov site in Israel, dated to about 780 kYA, which could also be interpreted as evidence of cooking.
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).
Thanks! That is much farther back than I thought, even 200 kYA.
I had thought (perhaps wrongly) that our brains got a massive "boost" in capacity when our ancestors moved to coastal areas and the diet was dominated by (Omega 3 heavy) shellfish and crustaceans.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9505798/
And cooking kills like 99+% of pathogens, which freed us from much of the parasite/disease stress other animals must live with.
We have evidence that non Homo sapiens bipeds (e.g., Neanderthals, Homo habilis) used tools far before we came onto the scene. A long lineage of hominin species came before humans!
And even today, our species' cousins (Chimps) are rudimentary tool users. Recently saw a documentary where they evolved their 'tools' to get honey from a 1-stick approach to a 3-stick approach.
You might be old enough to have been taught that Humans are tool-using apes. That's tragically incomplete: lots of apes use tools. Birds use tools. And now, cows use tools!
Cow tools: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj0n127y74go
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_tools
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronika_(cow) might be a better Wikipedia link.
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 was homeschooled in a particular conservative area. Much of what I have been taught was... woefully inadequate, we'll say. Lots of my learning has come in university and afterwards, so what I've picked up is pretty obviously incomplete and leaves me with many unknown unknowns in this area. Today has begun filling in many of those gaps so they get to be known unknowns now!
> Lots of my learning has come in university and afterwards
That's true for pretty much everybody. Homeschooled or not. You think everyone shocked by this news was all homeschooled?
It wasn’t Homo sapiens most likely. We have found stone tools made by Erectus.
There's bound to be a lot of vital archeological evidence of the development of humans and our cousins below the water. Past peoples probably lived near the coasts and the rising water would have obscured or destroyed a lot of the evidence of their existence. I think a lot about what must be or have been just out of reach of our current studies.
That’s rapidly changing. Underwater archaeology has been going through a mini-Renaissance in the last thirty years thanks to multibeam and side scan sonar. Now with the proliferation of underwater drones capable of high-resolution 3D photogrammetry, that is rapidly accelerating into a full blown revolution. As usual the problem is lack of funding to do excavations. There are far more known sites than there are funds to study them.
I wonder how would we react with tools dating back to, say, 5MY ago ...
That would shake our knowledge from the foundations.
I have always believed that the human evolution consensus which is usually based upon finds of advanced toolmaking in absence of culture cues, to be questionable by orders of magnitude. So it seemed natural to simply double generational concepts of the village along a trade route, from ~500kya (like the Nile) to 1 million YA as a hyperstable span of evolution of the 'trade route village'. I even wrote a book about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtxgpaXp9vA that might seem like whole fiction. But science seems not to ask, how many times might we have started over?
That's ridiculous. Scientists absolutely ask these questions. We just don't have the answers so we don't make assumptions. It is implicitly assumed there is an enormous amount of proto- and pre-human culture and technology that is undiscovered or undiscoverable. We have very long known that hominins made tools, art and structures out of organic material that has decayed beyond our ability to detect.
[stub for offtopicness]
Website has problems, NYT version: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/26/science/archaeology-neand...
Thanks, we've switched to that from https://archaeologymag.com/2026/01/430000-year-old-wooden-to... and put a couple extra links in the toptext.
That is paywalled. Try https://archive.ph/mHlUT
Recommend mods change it to this (or parent)
Website appears to be down from too much traffic
I actually saw the website, pictures of the tools and text and everything before it gave me the database error message. It would have been totally fine.
Ironically even archive.is just has the 503 page cached.
Yeah, that was me. I threw the link into archive.is to check if it had a snapshot, but it just created a shanpshot of the 503 before I could figure out how to cancel it.
Top box: my url is alive and I want to archive it's contents
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
https://imgur.com/a/1cIZVDi
God made things earlier than previously thought. Ha
Finding red blood cells in 70 million year old bones. Still find that incomprehensible. Not sure King George didn't kill a dinosaur.
For anyone else absolutely baffled by this statement: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jun/09/75-million-y...
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.
It gets wilder, all of the finds mentioned so far are stuff I have heard of, then there are the intentional burials from millions of years agoby a tiny hominum in SA, deap in a cave complex that requires extream cave crawling to get into, and also from SA, there is strong evidence for the manufacture of red pigment @400kyr ago. And if you like, you can wander around certain sea sides and pick, little tiny dino trackways that have fallen out of the cliff, :)
> then there are the intentional burials from millions of years agoby a tiny hominum in SA, deap in a cave complex that requires extream cave crawling to get into
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...)
It hit the HN hug of death it seems :(
the site never loads
I can’t be the only one that saw the aforementioned tools and thought: did I misread stool?
You're the only one.
There is archaeological evidence of tools going back even further, potentially over a million years, but it's ignored for the usual reasons of dogma and not conveniently fitting into the paradigm of the current priestly class. I'd highly recommend this talk Michael Cremo (author of "Forbidden Archaeology") gave for this "Authors at Google" program in 2014:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKfGC3P9KoQ
That book name is... off putting, and his wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Cremo) isn't encouraging in a quick scan...
It instantly destroys all credibility. Any serious theory would present itself on its own merits rather than going for the victimhood angle. When you title your book in such a way as to push the perceived victimhood to the forefront, it indicates that there is no convincing evidence and therefore the only option left to you is to play at the conspiracy angle, cursing the shadowy figures who are suppressing the "forbidden truth".
Why not just watch the talk and hear his argument from himself?
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.
Because life is short and we have to prioritize the talks we watch. And if you've seen enough bullshit, you can smell it coming. So if someone gives strong signals that they're full of it, we don't bother.
Because charismatic people can make us believe just about anything, and if we think we're immune to that we just haven't met the right charismatic person. I like to do some searching when something jumps out at me, like his book name, to get some background before I invest more time into the topic.
Can you imagine was a useless mishmash of lies Wikipedia would be if it did not have a bias for mainstream academia!? Wither epistemology?
The self professed skeptic community is pretty extreme. Their arguments so often go beyond occams razor that is essentially absurdism to get around anything non-material or unexplained by current science / thinking.
why do you think would this info be surpressed?
I'm not the person you asked this of, but I've worked in museums and research settings and can lob a response your way.
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've worked in museums and research settings
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:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46782072
I think it just doesn't fit into the accepted timeline so it's mostly ignored. This is a common pattern with scientific discovery where evidence that contradicts the prevailing paradigm is ignored and builds up until it can no longer be ignored and causes a paradigm shift. This idea comes from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn.
I think you're making that up. It is widely known that tools predate humans.
so you're saying archeology and anthropology advance one uncovered ancient gravesite at a time?
"extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".
As long as there is low number of samples with such age you should always assume methodological mistakes in measurement
> There is archaeological evidence of tools going back even further, potentially over a million years, but it's ignored for the usual reasons of dogma and not conveniently fitting into the paradigm of the current priestly class.
? 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).
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> Am I taking crazy pills, or are you?
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.