Oldest Technology Gets Older

Ephemeris writes: ""A collection of bone tools dating back 70,000 years is raising new questions about human evolution. The discovery suggests that our early human ancestors were far more sophisticated than previously thought..." This story has the details of the find. Any armchair anthropologists want to toss up ideas as to whether or not spoken language (a necessary precursor to the recent anomoly known as civilization) was alive & kicking 70,000 years ago?"

Comments

Eighty to 100,000 years?

[yerricde]

From the article:

Royden Yates, one of the team that discovered the tools, told the BBC: "Every indication that we have been able to gather suggests that we are looking at something between 80 and 100,000 years old.

In other words, the bone sculptures may just barely be old enough not to qualify for effectively perpetual copyright under the Sonny "Bone"-o Act?

(Yes, I knew they meant 80K to 100K years, but I couldn't resist.)

I'm leaning more to the southwest

[ynotds]

Just found an interesting recent paper from my armchair via Google, the paper saying with respect to a mtDNA divergence tree:

Whilst diverse, deep-rooting clusters remain in Africa, with different clusters in different parts of the continent, the tree suggests that a single sequence type expanded both through eastern and western Africa and out into Eurasia.

I guess my view may have been originally coloured by the probably naive expectation that the Afro-Americans who provided their mtDNA for the original sample were more likely to be from West Africa, but there is lots of other evidence that places the likely site a long way from the well known pre-erectus sites in East Africa.

In particular, more modern sites tend to be in South Africa, althoug this may in part be because it has been better surveyed than much of the continent. I also see a likelihood of the Kalahari serving to isolate sub-poulations, as evidenced by it being the last refuge for some relatively divergent African peoples following the Bantu expansion.

None of this is any more than suggestive. What I really want is a site where the sea level changes of the last interglacial could have been catalytic.