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Stone Tools Found On Crete Push Back Humans' Maritime History
The New York Times reports that stone tools discovered on the Greek island of Crete, and reported last month at an academic conference, are strong evidence for rethinking the maritime capabilities of early humans. The researchers who found the tools (hand-axes, cleavers, and scrapers) estimate them to be at least 130,000 years old; if they're right, humans have been traveling long distances at sea (Crete is 200 miles from the northern African coastline) for at least several tens of thousands of years longer than earlier believed.
132,010 BC @ 00:12 Webster9 wrote: First Post
In a related story, next to one of the axes they found a mast with the words "First Post".
But the amazing part was the -1 Offtopic heading right beside the inscription.
Yay, now I'm a troll too
...and pretty much have always been.
Humans didn't evolve genetically to this modern technological state, the cleverness has always been inherent.
Although they state that the tools have been dated to be around 230-190k years ago, but that tools could have been made far prior to that, giving a possible estimate of the tools being up to 700k years old. Despite this, they never really say why this changes their view on sea-faring of ancient times. Currently the north shore of Africa is about 200 miles from crete, but what they seem to have failed to take into account (or at least mention in the article) is that in ancient times sea levels were much much lower. This is estimated to be due to deglacification around 7k years ago. The National Institute of Oceanography states that in studies the sea level of India's coast were about 100m lower about 14k years ago, so extrapolating (a dangerous game I know =) we could say it may be possible that at some point the voyage to Crete was either walkable, or a very short sea voyage. It should also be noted that the technology is of the Acheulean type. Regardless it is still a fascinating discovery, and it never ceases to amaze me at how much we underestimate our ancestors, until we slowly find things that we never thought possible before, for example the Antikythera mechanism. Who knows what we'll find out tomorrow.
"It's ok, I'm completely secure as long as my iron is off"
Okay. So you don't have any archaeological training and you haven't studied them under a microscope to verify that they were indeed used as tools (this can be determined by examining the amount and direction of ... uhm, microscopic marks. Don't know what it's called in English).
But just because you don't know anything about a subject doesn't mean you have to have opinions about it.
I knew someone was going to say that.
Many primitive stone tools look like plain rocks at first glance, but there are distinctive chip and wear patterns on tools that just don't occur by chance. An expert will be able to tell you very quickly if you're dealing with an actual tool or just a rock that's assumed a suggestive shape.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Crete has been an island for more than five million years, meaning that the toolmakers must have arrived by boat. So this seems to push the history of Mediterranean voyaging back more than 100,000 years, specialists in Stone Age archaeology say.
There have been some pretty severe ice ages within the last million years when the sea levels were very low. For instance Japan used to be connected to Korea (and the Sea of Japan was a lake) only 18,000 years ago. Crete was probably really close to Greece back then too, maybe even connected.
An expert will be able to tell you very quickly if you're dealing with an actual tool
Seriously. You're just asking for a smartass remark.
"Don't talk to me about humans' maritime history. It's nothing but primitive stone tools, sodomy, and the lash."
FTA:
Stone tools found on an island indicates that humans were capable of rudimentary sea travel in order to get to Crete from the mainland. Also FTA:
That is an awful lot of stone tools to have just "washed up on to the beach" wouldn't you think so?
TFA states that the team was originally looking for much younger tools on the order of ~11,000 years old when they found these instead. Also FTA:
In other words, the dating of the soil associated with the tools indicates that they are at least 130,000 years old and are of a tool style used by humans/ancestors that is very ancient. The tools were not neccessarily made by early humans as at the time these tools were likely created, humans were not the only hominids. The upper limit for the date of these tools is ~700,000 years which would pre-date modern humans although it seems unlikely that they are that old.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
To the untrained eye that is all they would appear, sure. I dont think the troll moderation was entirely fair - I would bet that a lot of readers looked at the photo at the top of that page and thought the same thing.
But, look for instance at the second piece from the right at the top of the story. Look at the top-left edge. See those repeated scallops that define the edge? That is not a naturally occuring stone, that is a hand-axe or "chopper" which has been intelligently worked and shaped for a purpose.
The article is pretty crappy though (as is expected with "science reporting" unfortunately.) The commentary regarding early human sea-crossing capabilities is a bit... well... warped. Even though there is a throwaway mention of non-modern humans it is given no context and the rest of the text appears quite ignorant of it. The fourth paragraph is one big facepalm. It implies several times that this find somehow indicates a 200-mile crossing from Africa, when it does nothing of the sort. Given the loose dating (prior to 130kya by geological strata) it would seem quite likely that the ancient population who made these tools crossed at or near a glacial maximum, when sea levels were much lower than today, making for much less open sea even if they did come directly from the African coast. And, at least from what I can see, there is no reason whatsoever to think they came from that direction anyway. More likely they came in over much shorter distances from the north, at a time when sea levels were low and the voyage would have been very short. If the dating comes in as early as some of the quotes indicate, this could even have been at the same time that the hippopotamus made the same journey.
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I'm not so sure the find is suggestive of "maritime capabilities". To prove such a statement, you would have to prove evidence of navigation. Even if it were only celestial navigation, stronger evidence would be to find more than one such remote site with similar styles of survival technology. From the article: More than 2,000 stone artifacts, including the hand axes, were collected on the southwestern shore of Crete, near the town of Plakias. The question, at least for now, should be whether or not they went back.
Crete is 200 miles from coast now. How high was middeterean see during the ice age and have there been islands in between? Maybe they did not travel 200 miles but much lower distance.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
These are quartzite. The three types of stone that can be cleaved to make tools are quartzite, obsidian and flint. Quartzite is the worst of the three because it doesn't cleave well. If these hominids were "going to sea" you would think they could trade up for flint or obsidian. I'd guess that stone-age teenagers used the area for beach barbeques (the stoned-age). A few thousand tools simply mean a well used party spot. Turning a few old tools into a theory that humans were sea travelers a hundred thousand years before previously thought is a stretch.
But just because you don't know anything about a subject doesn't mean you have to have opinions about it.
I know there's a joke in here somewhere that includes the words "Uh dude," and "Slashdot," but I can't quite make it out.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
Its pretty easy to island hop from mainland Greece to Crete. You would be looking at 20km at a stretch. Thats very easy in a modern sea kayak. Even if proper hulls were beyond them they could build a sailing raft. There was more wood around in those days.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
You can thank sound bites and modern politics for that.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
The Mediterranean Sea has an average depth of 1500 meters. It is possible that parts of the sea body were shallow enough to have exposed a few islands although it would seem that a great deal of it would still be very very deep and likely rather difficult to traverse without some sort of raft/boat technology.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Maybe they were just very good swimmers?
Most of the primitive tools here at Slashdot don't have any marks to indicate they had any kind of function at all. ;-)
See those repeated scallops that define the edge? That is not a naturally occuring stone.
I always take issue with statements like this. Given enough time and situations there is a probability of 1 of stones with that shape occurring and human brains (and cognitive bias) are fantastic at reading into things that aren't there. I grant you it may well just be shorthand by specialists in the field when talking in general public though.
Which is not to say these aren't the real deal.
Sure, if you can smuggle the mathematical concept of infinity in you can always get absurd results. :)
But in reality these are indeed as you say 'the real deal' - stones dont knapp themselves. If you ever get a chance to see how things things were made up close you will understand why. It's quite a fascinating - and painstaking - craft.
I'm still thinking the article is melodramatic fluff though. It's not at all surprising to see these things on Crete with such a date. We know archaic homonids made them, we know they spread out all along the coastlines 'beachcombing' just as our own ancestors did a little later. And island-hopping to Crete during a glacial maximum should have been well within their capabilities - other large mammals were doing it too, the hippos I already mentioned, elephants, even deer made that crossing at various points.
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They could have been carried by swallows.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
striations?
weinersmith
i was going to make the same note, only about the "suggestive shape" part...
weinersmith
Sure, if you can smuggle the mathematical concept of infinity in you can always get absurd results. :)
There's no need. I always carry a zero with me. (Eyes glaze over) "Stay away! I have a zero and I'm not afraid to use it!"
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
See those repeated scallops that define the edge? That is not a naturally occuring stone.
I always take issue with statements like this. Given enough time and situations there is a probability of 1 of stones with that shape occurring and human brains (and cognitive bias) are fantastic at reading into things that aren't there. I grant you it may well just be shorthand by specialists in the field when talking in general public though.
Which is not to say these aren't the real deal.
Gee thanks for the meta-dialetic FUD. So enlightening. Follow that logic and the (impossible) infinite number of monkeys will, eventually, produce the entire works of Shakespeare...
Now I need another beer ;-p
Try 5.33Mya.
Excuse me, wtf r u doin?
No, you are thinking of the black sea. The mediteranean is 5 million years old.
The Med has not been a dry basin for millions of years. You could have learned that if you'd RTFA or just did a little basic homework before spouting off a totally false statement like that.
You need to read less science fiction.
lemonade was a popular drink and it still is
In fact, I don't know if you know this or not, Greeks were spawned by niggers
Really? That's absolutely fascinating. I had previously assumed that, unlike all of the other humans on the Earth whose ancestors came from Africa, the Greek civilisation had sprung full-formed from the head of Zeus. Thank you for correcting my belief.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
What if it is a stone with a suggestive shape, but was actually made that way by someone? People used to make a lot of those...
left behind when some friends and I were camping. You can keep them.
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
FTA:
Stone tools found on an island indicates that humans were capable of rudimentary sea travel in order to get to Crete from the mainland.
Don't jump to conclusions. Maybe they just built a bridge.
In addition to carbon data there are other strata around things dug up that give an indication to its relative age. Another indication of a tool's age is mentioned in the article's fourth paragraph: style of manufacturer.
Since those folks didn't leave readme files or cookbooks around, everything was taught by learning how the person a little older than you did things. For that reason there's a remarkable amount of consistency in materials and manufacturer, given how difficult making stone tools with stone tools can be. The tools they used were fashioned to provide enough direct force at an angle of impact to provide the right fracture on the right material so a chip would flake off. For example, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clovis_culture.
It was so difficult to make those tools stone age peoples in Colorado, USA would carry them over the Continental Divide west of the Denver area to the present day Denver area when hunting. A cache of them were found recently in a private yard where some landscaping work was done. Their protected condition and careful placement suggested the original people may have stashed a set here for a return hunting trip or similar.
These tools are very hard to make. Given a few months of time people today would do nothing but learn how to live with two fingers instead of ten. When I was an anthropology student I not only the chance to see these tools up close but watch a demonstration of someone making them. And that was rock on obsidian for arrow heads and knives.
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
No, the bridge was built by apes.
According to TFA(or at least one of the many I've read on this subject so far), the tools are of a style used by pre-humans 700,000 years or so ago. They're not saying that these tools are necessarily that old, or that they're made by pre-humans, just that the tools are of that style. It's a bit like finding a katana in a rubbish tip in New Jersey. You can't say that it was made by someone who was Japanese, but you can say that it might have been. The discovery is very new, and they'll find out more in due time.
As to the rest of it, what does it matter whether they came from Greece or from Africa. They think based on the evidence(the style of the tools, the known populations at that time) that it's more likely Africa, but it doesn't really matter.
Two thousand tools is a hell of a lot, you're talking about a large number of individuals even if they weren't all there simultaneously. That means at the very least a community of some description, and likely a fairly large one for that kind of time period. To get a population that large you'd have to get there, likely on purpose. Yes 20 miles is a lot less impressive than 200, but it's still sea travel. It's still taking enough people to build a population 20 miles over the sea. To get from mainland Greece they'd have to do it several times. Even under those circumstances it's a hell of a lot more than we thought people at that time were capable of.
There's no stoppin' the cretins from hoppin' You gotta keep it beatin' For all the hoppin' cretins Cretin! Cretin! I'm gonna go for a whirl with my cretin girl My feet won't stop Doin' the Cretin Hop Cretin! Cretin! 1-2-3-4 Cretins wanna hop some more 4-5-6-7 All good cretins go to heaven
They could have been carried by swallows.
African or European swallows?
Doesn't wash, either way the flight speed is too low.
I've got a stone which myself and family have long thought could be a tool. Essentially it's a "flattened golf ball" sized pebble stone with a 1/4"-diameter depression approx 1/2" deep in one flattened side. Everything looks smooth, though, with no visible grooves/striations. Tool (like a spindle handle), or just a coincidence of erosion, etc? I tried looking online for comparisons but found nothing like it. Got any references for tools of this nature?
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
Those look like rocks to me, not "stone tools".
To the uneducated, a lot of source code just looks like bug ridden inane rantings from incompetent software people who have no social skills and have yet to get out of their parents basement. Oh wait - bad example.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
That's the kind of thing that has to be examined in person, I think. A local university or museum will have someone who can take a look at it, and will probably be glad to do so.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The tools were not neccessarily made by early humans as at the time these tools were likely created, humans were not the only hominids.
You're saying it's possible that another, extinct branch of our tree had boats before our ancestors?
I just assumed that whoever got boats first had to be the ones that ended up covering the globe...
You can't take the sky from me...
Trillions of rocks on the planet and you seem to think that it would be impossible for random chance to create "distinctive wear patterns"
"His name was James Damore."
While the Med is, on average, 1500 meters deep, If you look at a map that shows relative ocean depth around the island of Crete you will see that it is possible for a land bridge (or very close to one) on both the east and west sides of the island. Humans have always been known to follow shore lines during migration so this doesn't seem to be a far fetched theory.
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
Everyone went primative then.
and 100 miles from Greece. So what? Come on folks, look at the bloody map. It's only 50 miles from Turkey.
Maybe they swam.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquatic_ape_hypothesis
If enithin kan gow rong it whil. (Murfey)
Acheulian industry, yes. It was used by H. erectus, H. ergaster, H. neanderthalis, as well as H. sapiens, from nearly 2 million years ago right up to modern times.
Au contraire, it matters a great deal. If they came from Greece it would be, as I said, no surprise, just confirmation of current analysis. If they came directly from Africa that would be truly shocking however, since it would be a blue-water crossing rather than a chain of island hops.
That's just the thing, the article certainly makes it sound that way, only it doesnt even hint at any evidence that might actually indicate that.
I suspect the author was confused, or just wanted to write something dramatic.
It would have been a multigenerational expansion rather than a single voyage. A group moves to the first island in the chain, then some years later when that one grows crowded a group splits out and colonises the next, and so on. This is the way H. erectus colonised much of the planet and the way H. sapiens did it again later as well. It really isnt any more or less than is to be expected.
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[inspects large version of map, counts topo rings]
Minimum depth on one end of the chain (between Crete and the next land) is 500m, and on the other end is 750m. So appears it was still an island.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
The parent was meant as a troll, but there's actually some truth to his post. The dark curly hair found in parts of southern Europe is not native to the (relatively modern) continent, but rather was the result of African slaves (and some freemen) interbreeding with Greeks and Romans.
However, I find Zeus' explanation far more amusing :)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
A lot could have changed over 130,000 years! How many times have you seen professors professing that the sea must have been 600ft higher in the past for fossil shells to have been formed in some mountain ranges? NEVR taking into account movement of the land! 1)There may have been a land bridge. 2)The sea in the Med could have been lower. 3)The island could have 'moved' there due to continental drift. 4)There may have been islands in-between that have now sunk or been destroyed by volcanic action.
If you look at this map there is a chain of islands from Crete through Rhodes to Asia Minor in one direction and to Greece in the other. The links don't appear to be more than about 30 miles apart or within sight. I'm sure the idea of a paddle came early to man or proto-man. I don't see this as a very remarkable revelation.
Apparently no one else has seen True Romance...
I thought nerds likes Tarantino...
Hopper vs Walken
If Youtube has taught me anything, T-Pain was the first to have a boat.