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.)

Optimism

[zpengo]

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?"

70,000 years ago? What about whether or not it's alive and kicking today?