~500 000 year old log structure

[pax]

https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/20/afric...scn/index.html

They say things keep on getting older the more field work you do in anthropology and archeology but this one takes the cake. Basically someone built a log structure 200 000 years before we came around as a species. Tho other species of humans did walk the earth back then it makes you wonder how much more might be buried out there...

Archaeologists have unearthed the oldest known wooden structure, and it’s almost half a million years old.

The simple structure — found along a riverbank in Zambia — is made up of two interlocking logs, with a notch deliberately crafted into the upper piece to allow them to fit together at right angles, according to a new study of cut marks made by stone tools.

Geoff Duller, a professor of geography and Earth sciences at the University of Aberystwyth in the United Kingdom, was part of the team that made the discovery in 2019. He said the structure, excavated upstream of Kalambo Falls near Zambia’s border with Tanzania, probably would have been part of a wooden platform used as a walkway, to keep food or firewood dry or perhaps as a base on which to build a dwelling. A digging stick and other wooden tools were found at the same site.

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[luxor]

Discoveries like this, if they are really this old, really show that we know very little about the past.
It's like this documentary on Netflix, Cave of Bones, about Homo Naledi, who may have ritualistically buried their dead and have a concept of an afterlife, a good 100,000 years before Homo Sapiens.

 

[JZL]

That's a "structure?"

 

[Destroy]

So like monkey humans made this thing. Considering it's age, I'm amazed the pieces remained whole enough to stay interlocked.

 

[pax]

So like monkey humans made this thing. Considering it's age, I'm amazed the pieces remained whole enough to stay interlocked.

While us sapiens is about from 300 000 years ago humans like antecessor or heidelbergensis were still pretty advanced forms back then. We can find humans using fire back to 2 million year ago.