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Tool Use By Humans Pushed Back By 800,000 Years
gpronger writes "The journal Nature reports that newly discovered tool marks on bones indicates that we were using tools at minimum 800,000 years earlier than previously thought. This places the start of tool use at 3.4 million years ago or earlier. The most likely ancestor in this time frame would be Australopithecus afarensis. The researchers, led by palaeoanthropologist Zeresenay Alemseged of the California Academy of Science, San Francisco,and Shannon McPherron, (an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany) state that cut marks on the bones of an impala-sized creature and another closer in size to a buffalo, indicate butchering of the animals by our distant ancestors. However, they do not believe that they were in fact hunters, more likely scavenging the remains left behind by large predators."
Turns out we're not the only animal that uses tools so there's no reason why it would have appeared recently in human evolution. What's more impressive is our ability to design tools to attain a certain objective by using only our imagination (abstract thought) rather than the ability to pick up a rock from the vicinity to carve up a carcass. That's likely much more recent.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
I can put up a shelf. But I can't butcher a carcass. Evolution in reverse eh?.
The other day I was sitting in a release planning meeting, listing to a discussion about our version control system and related tooling. Suddenly I had this thought that we were all just a bunch of apes, manipulating abstractions of abstractions of tools ultimately designed to help us catch our dinner. Now I don't know how we do it at all. It all seems so unlikely.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
The real abstraction you're talking about is post-industrial capitalism. Meat eaters often consider themselves somehow kin to the Great Hunter, that by eating a bloody steak they are somehow closer to the earth and it's mortal realities yet they couldn't be further from it. Rather, they cowardly pay another to kill a sick beast - stoned on antibiotics so that it can actually live and eat corn - on their behalf. I say that as someone that grew up on a farm and often ate what I killed with my own hands.
Unlike our hunter forebears, people caneat meat every day because of the abstraction of late capitalism. I encourage every meat eater to take the life of the thing they want to eat, at least once in their lives. Look at the beast in the eyes, take its life and then eat parts of its body. A highly valuable dietary - and somehow even spiritual - reality check.
Tool use by humans pushed back again, and by 800,000 years? I can't wait that long. I have to fix my brakes this weekend.
More music, fewer hits
Maybe I didn't get the memo, but as far as I know salad shouldn't have an eye.
The first person to think of trimming a sharp rock for better performance was a genuine innovator.
Sadly, the word innovation and all the derivative vocabulary that comes with it due to overuse in the latest marketing fodder triggered an image of a caveman named Zog making a sharper rock. When he had finally created this technological marvel the word quickly spread in the local tribal community. The tribe would go out hunting, and those whose rocks didn't meet required sharpness criteria would be considered to be fools clinging to obsolete technology. In a matter of days, Zog had ascended from lowly rockbasher to an expert in the field of innovative hunting.
Zog had it all: finely cut food from the most tasty animals the local wildlife had to offer, the adoration of the masses, commanding power over the world because of his fearsomely sharp weaponry, and a veritable harem of alluring females. A few weeks after his rise to power though, things weren't looking so great anymore for Zog. Nerg, the foul smelling tribal lunatic, had taken his innovative rocksharpening technique and had improved the process by a factor of 2 by means of sustained repetitive bashing. No longer did Zog have the sharpest rocks in the tribe, and almost instantaneously he lost it all. The masses no longer adored him for they were too busy hunting with Nerg. His power over the world stagnated and eventually had to make way for the sharper weaponry of Nerg. But most important of all, his considerably sized harem of willing females left him for the newer more powerful rocksharpener.
And that is how the Tribal Patent Orgnanization was formed. Scratched into a cavewall for all eternity we find the worlds first patent: "TPO Issued Patent #00000001 : A technique for sharpening rocks by bashing rocks against eachother.". It includes various drawings on rock sharpening techniques and a vague description of acquiring a harem by the use of these techniques. Unfortunately Zog never got to sue Nerg in a tribal court of law, because Nerg bashed in his skull with an incredibly sharp rock several minutes after filing the patent.
To this day, Nerg is remembered as the worlds first innovator and harem owner.
True story!
(I apologize for the precious time I stole from you to read this, but the code I'm writing right now is slowly killing my brain unless I entertain it a little in small doses. Tune in next comment, when Dorg invents fire and accidentally burns down his cave, and is remembered throughout history as the worlds smartest and most stupid caveman of all time. Don't miss out on how Dorg later also invents insurance fraud.)
I disagree. What I see is that our civilization behaves like biology does not exists. All the numerous useful facts and predictions of evolution and ecology are constantly and often deliberately kept unintelligible to the general public. Biology is the queen of all sciences, hands down, and it is the most relevant to us as a species. Sure, physics, maths and inorganic chemistry are all very important and necessary foundation, but organic chemistry and biology are the real deal.
Almost nobody understands evolution properly. I am just back from lunch with my fantastically intelligent colleagues-physicists and they definitely did not know evolution. I mentioned to them that during the domestication of wolves as much as we selected them, they selected us too. They were baffled.
I said "Imagine that the wolves are coming closer to human settlement. The bravest wolves come the closest and try to pick some left overs. Eventually over time a mutually beneficial system emerges - we feed them, they help us hunting and guarding the settlement. We selected the wolves that are most-human friendly (least afraid of humans) and then encouraged their survival and procreation. All is well. Now, suppose that in the neighboring settlement a behavior "I hate/ I am afraid of wolves/dogs" occurs among the humans (genetically or socially determined or both). Well, this village will not have the benefit of guarding dogs against predators or other humans. They will suffer more casualties than the first village. Over time the difference becomes more and more significant until the "I hate/ I am afraid of dogs" behavior becomes negligibly small or vanishes. The net result - humans selected by wolves...even after this example which is quite clear IMO, I did not see the spark of enlightenment in the colleague's eyes. Even to this people - non religious, highly educated (from three different continents too), "selection" could only be a directed, conscious effort.
Here is a small story to illustrate:
The History of the Universe according to me (or why biology is the queen):
In the beginning it was physics - a set of forces and rules and looooong time. Everything that could happen, happened, so we got stars and most of the elements and all the possible inorganic components between those elements and all the possible products and processes of nuclear physics. That was the first of the "phase spaces" the Universe explored.
And among the elements there was carbon, which could chain with itself within certain limits of temperature and pressure. And it opened the second of the "phase spaces" - organic chemistry. And it was good, because the number of possible products and reactions was huge compared to inorganic chemistry and nuclear physics. Just the number of different chemical reactions between organic compounds in the "primal soup" of the Earth for a mere millions of years greatly exceeds the number of all atoms in the observable Universe. And since the time scales were still truly vast, anything that could happen, happened. And among the things that happened was the first immortal (but imperfect) replicator making copies of itself from components in its environment. And thus evolution began.
And once the so-called "nervous systems" of the living beings became so complex as to allow conciseness to emerge, an Observer of the Universe, the third "phase space" was accessible - the "phase space" of the mind, which is not even a material thing (as atoms) but "merely" a process carried out by a living, evolved beings.
And the complexity, intricacy and relevance (to us) of those phase spaces increases from the first to the second to the third. Thus biology, with its subsets like medicine, ecology, neurological sciences est. is the queen. And thus, it is no small matter at all when people are deliberately kept ignorant of it.
So, until society smartens up enough, we must challenge ignorance given half a chance. Our very survival is at stake!