Slashdot Mirror
Discovery of Early Human Tools Hint at Earlier Start
SternisheFan writes in with a story about early humans passing down their tool making skills. "Sophisticated bladelets suggest that humans passed on their technological skill down the generations.
A haul of stone blades from a cave in South Africa suggests that early humans were already masters of complex technology more than 70,000 years ago .
The tiny blades — no more than about 3 centimeters long on average — were probably used as tips for throwable spears, or as spiky additions to club-like weapons, says Curtis Marean, an archaeologist at Arizona State University in Tempe who led the team that found the bladelets.
Twenty-seven such blades, called microliths by archaeologists, were found in layers of sand and soil dating as far back as 71,000 years ago and representing a time-span of about 11,000 years, showing how long humans were manufacturing the blades.
Clever crafters The find lends credence to the idea that early humans were capable of passing on their clever ideas to the next generation of artisans, creating complex technologies that endured over time. John Shea, a palaeoanthropologist at Stony Brook University in New York, says that it also suggests that 'previous hypotheses that 'early' Homo sapiens differed from 'modern' ones in these respects are probably wrong'."
Memorable quotes for
Looker (1981)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082677/quotes
"John Reston: Television can control public opinion more effectively than armies of secret police, because television is entirely voluntary. The American government forces our children to attend school, but nobody forces them to watch T.V. Americans of all ages *submit* to television. Television is the American ideal. Persuasion without coercion. Nobody makes us watch. Who could have predicted that a *free* people would voluntarily spend one fifth of their lives sitting in front of a *box* with pictures? Fifteen years sitting in prison is punishment. But 15 years sitting in front of a television set is entertainment. And the average American now spends more than one and a half years of his life just watching television commercials. Fifty minutes, every day of his life, watching commercials. Now, that's power."
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"The United States has it's own propaganda, but it's very effective because people don't realize that it's propaganda. And it's subtle, but it's actually a much stronger propaganda machine than the Nazis had but it's funded in a different way. With the Nazis it was funded by the government, but in the United States, it's funded by corporations and corporations they only want things to happen that will make people want to buy stuff. So whatever that is, then that is considered okay and good, but that doesn't necessarily mean it really serves people's thinking - it can stupify and make not very good things happen."
- Crispin Glover: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000417/bio
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"It's only logical to assume that conspiracies are everywhere, because that's what people do. They conspire. If you can't get the message, get the man." - Mel Gibson (from an interview)
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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." - William Casey, CIA Director
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"The real reason for the official secrecy, in most instances, is not to keep the opposition (the CIA's euphemistic term for the enemy) from knowing what is going on; the enemy usually does know. The basic reason for governmental secrecy is to keep you, the American public, from knowing - for you, too, are considered the opposition, or enemy - so that you cannot interfere. When the public does not know what the government or the CIA is doing, it cannot voice its approval or disapproval of their actions. In fact, they can even lie to your about what they are doing or have done, and you will not know it. As for the second advantage, despite frequent suggestion that the CIA is a rogue elephant, the truth is that the agency functions at the direction of and in response to the office of the president. All of its major clandestine operations are carried out with the direct approval of or on direct orders from the White House. The CIA is a secret tool of the president - every president. And every president since Truman has lied to the American people in order to protect the agency. When lies have failed, it has been the duty of the CIA to take the blame for the president, thus protecting him. This is known in the business as "plausible denial." The CIA, functioning as a secret instrument of the U.S. government and the presidency, has long misused and abused history and continues to do so."
- Victor Marchetti, Propaganda and Disinformation: How the CIA Manufactures History
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George Carlin:
"The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they're an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehous
cute editing work right there :)
Rich
More food for thought on the evolution of language.
Nobody Seems To Notice and Nobody Seems To Care - Government & Stealth Malware
In Response To Slashdot Article: Former Pentagon Analyst: China Has Backdoors To 80% of Telecoms 87
How many rootkits does the US[2] use officially or unofficially?
How much of the free but proprietary software in the US spies on you?
Which software would that be?
Visit any of the top freeware sites in the US, count the number of thousands or millions of downloads of free but proprietary software, much of it works, again on a proprietary Operating System, with files stored or in transit.
How many free but proprietary programs have you downloaded and scanned entire hard drives, flash drives, and other media? Do you realize you are giving these types of proprietary programs complete access to all of your computer's files on the basis of faith alone?
If you are an atheist, the comparison is that you believe in code you cannot see to detect and contain malware on the basis of faith! So you do believe in something invisible to you, don't you?
I'm now going to touch on a subject most anti-malware, commercial or free, developers will DELETE on most of their forums or mailing lists:
APT malware infecting and remaining in BIOS, on PCI and AGP devices, in firmware, your router (many routers are forced to place backdoors in their firmware for their government) your NIC, and many other devices.
Where are the commercial or free anti-malware organizations and individual's products which hash and compare in the cloud and scan for malware for these vectors? If you post on mailing lists or forums of most anti-malware organizations about this threat, one of the following actions will apply: your post will be deleted and/or moved to a hard to find or 'deleted/junk posts' forum section, someone or a team of individuals will mock you in various forms 'tin foil hat', 'conspiracy nut', and my favorite, 'where is the proof of these infections?' One only needs to search Google for these threats and they will open your malware world view to a much larger arena of malware on devices not scanned/supported by the scanners from these freeware sites. This point assumed you're using the proprietary Microsoft Windows OS. Now, let's move on to Linux.
The rootkit scanners for Linux are few and poor. If you're lucky, you'll know how to use chkrootkit (but you can use strings and other tools for analysis) and show the strings of binaries on your installation, but the results are dependent on your capability of deciphering the output and performing further analysis with various tools or in an environment such as Remnux Linux. None of these free scanners scan the earlier mentioned areas of your PC, either! Nor do they detect many of the hundreds of trojans and rootkits easily available on popular websites and the dark/deep web.
Compromised defenders of Linux will look down their nose at you (unless they are into reverse engineering malware/bad binaries, Google for this and Linux and begin a valuable education!) and respond with a similar tone, if they don't call you a noob or point to verifying/downloading packages in a signed repo/original/secure source or checking hashes, they will jump to conspiracy type labels, ignore you, lock and/or shuffle the thread, or otherwise lead you astray from learning how to examine bad binaries. The world of Linux is funny in this way, and I've been a part of it for many years. The majority of Linux users, like the Windows users, will go out of their way to lead you and say anything other than pointing you to information readily available on detailed binary file analysis.
Don't let them get you down, the information is plenty and out there, some from some well known publishers of Linux/Unix books. Search, learn, and share the information on detecting and picking through bad binaries. But this still will not touch the void of the APT malware described above which will survive any wipe of r/w media. I'm convinced, on both *nix and Windows, these pieces of APT malware
Wikipedia has an interesting article on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_modernity , which indicates that there are two schools of thought on this, which I'll call the gradualists and suddenists. The suddenists think Something Wonderful Happened ~50,000 years ago, so this discovery will make them have to move their date earlier. However, the gradualists think there are signs of modern behavior much earlier, so this news won't make them rethink anything. (Most likely they'll just say ITYS.)
IMO the suddenists are following the same kind of thinking that made people think Neanderthals were dumb brutes, that we're a lot more different than animals than we really are, etc. ISTM that there has always been some kind of ... prejudice? conceit? ... that makes a lot of people assume that we're a lot more special than we actually are.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I wonder if Teh Management would consider truncating AC posts to a shorter "Read the rest of this comment" than the above.
Like maybe, 10 lines. If they're actually saying something relevant and interesting (which they often do), it would still be easy enough to click the link.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Put the tools there to fool you.
maybe it would be under "posts to board, then answers own posts"
what is she thinking ?
if these things were square-like with rounded corners the findings prove that pirating of ideas was advanced already there.
Sophisticated bladelets suggest that humans passed on their technological skill down the generations
It seems odd to me there was ever a dissenting view from this, I mean what about 'standing on the shoulders of giants' concept.
They only lost one bladelet every 400 years. Maybe they could help me find my car keys.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Does this finding invalidate any patents?
and has instead The project is in exactly what you've the project to downward spiral. In conglomerate in the NetBSD user like I should be product, BSD's Simpule solution the public eye: that they 3an hold shit-filled, legitimise doing obsessed - give they're gone Mac this is consistent That supports you. The tireless represents the Posts. Due to the about half of the it. Its mission is Problem stems example, if you base for FreeBSD Things in
A few thousand years from now, archaeologists will make the same observations about collections of quaint crude programming languages (the ones we use today) that they find in "digital caves"...
Too bad that the idea of patents has passed over generations.
And please thank your sister for me again.
It took a while but she finally reached my UID and she insists on doing every single UID ever. A determined woman.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
More and more in the last decade or so I have seen things that lead me to believe that humans have been basically modern humans for approximately 200,000 years. That's how far back our ancestors have been traced through our mitochondrial DNA. I have no doubt that in coming decades there will be new discoveries that will keep pushing the dates of "modern" human behavior further and further back.
This is a fascinating concept to me because it means the human race and basic forms of human civilization have been around for an incredibly long time. Basic concepts like languages, writing systems, trading, counting, money, philosophy, astronomy, martial arts and many other things have probably been invented, forgotten and reinvented hundreds of times by individual geniuses over the course of those 200,000 years. All the sci-fi stories I've ever read where it's seen as some amazing thing that an alien race has been around for more than a hundred thousand years... Well, the human race proves that's really not that amazing. Or, conversely, that the human race is equally as amazing as those "ancient" alien races. In fact, we could be considered one of those "ancient" alien races, from the perspective of an alien race.
When I was younger, the concept was that just a few thousand years ago we were retarded cave men, and then suddenly civilization happened. Nowadays what I picture is more like endless millennia of fairly intelligent people living like Native Americans in many different ways, with pockets of even more modern cultures that rose and fell through the ages, until finally a few thousand years ago a few things like writing and math were (re)discovered and remembered and propagated to enough other humans that modern civilization exploded into being and had enough momentum and population to finally stick around, where it hadn't been able to "stick" before. I think it was basically luck that things didn't develop either ten thousand years earlier or ten thousand years later. All the basic elements seem to have been there for a looooooong time.
Just my pet theory. I am not an anthropologist, obviously, just fascinated by the things that may have happened during early modern human history, which seems to extend much further back than what I was taught in grade school.
Am I the only one slightly inconvenienced by the expression "masters of complex technology" for crafting tiny stone blades?
By the same token, the hyperbole-inclined call "Mousterian technological complex" a pretty simple set of stone tools made by Neanderthals...
Right, everything is relative, but still, in historical perspective, none of these even remotely qualify as "complex". Seriously, start with the invention of the wheel, one of the six SIMPLE machines:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_machine
What if they were buried, rather than discarded? Doesn't that blow any conclusions out of the water?
"...The find lends credence to the idea that early humans were capable of passing on their clever ideas to the next generation of artisans, creating complex technologies that endured over time...."
And that approach to the development of the species worked fine for several hundred thousand years.
Then, in medieval times, people started to develop Guilds in order to keep commercial secrets. Didn't completely stop innovation, though.
Finally, in the 20th/21st centuries, they developed a complex theory of 'Intellectual Property' and, more importantly, a whole social caste of people called 'lawyers' to administer the rules for using it. Allied to this, a world-wide communication system operated by machinery enabled these lawyers to see at a moment if anyone was breaking their 'rules'.
After that, the progress of humanity went rapidly downhill, until they ended up back with the flint blades....
According to wikipedia the oldest stone tools are 2.6 to 1.7 million years old: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldowan
So what is so special about this?
After reading TFA there is one thing that leaves me mighty confused.
The only hypothesis made for these artifacts is that they were weapons or parts of bigger weapons, and that they led to a military advantage over neanderthals.
TFA doesn't even consider any other possibile use for the bladelets, like being tools for skinning, carving or sculpting. Even the requirement of having developed complex language is secondary to the craftsmanship necessary for the bladelets.
I've seen it is common among some anthropologists to consider the history of humanity in the same terms as the most recent history (last 6.000 years): in terms of war and contending parties. Is there anyone informed enough (more than me) about this topic that can tell if it is actually a trait of human history or an ideological bias?
Thanks in advance.
Could be Cow Tools.
...just sayin'
"about 3 centimeters long on average "
I am amazed that70,000 years ago these toolmakers were using the metric system - yet USA is still using inches, pounds and gallons when we are trying to explore space.
I guess they needed the multi blade shavers, they were hairy back then.
Og: Ug look happy.
Ug: Ug is happy!
Og: Why Ug happy?
Ug: Ug finish pay off student loan!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Cuts both ways palsy ... perhaps **we humans** are very much OLDER than a few rough tools make it appear. Last I read early human bones ~18+ Myr bp; you know that discovery date can only get older. Chances are even that dim-start was a long time beyond incubation so in the spirit of insanely old 1st cousins think of George Carlin-like sniping among human.esque **lemurs**.
"Heh Jackson that's a mighty hungry BOA over there..."
"That's not a BOA that's your sister" (apologies to Marx broz)
Og happy he knew Old One. He gone now but teach Og much about version control, labels, merging and gutting pigs. Og rather gut giant live boar than merge. Better than dumb Neanderthals. They still using RCS. Ha ha.
Unless you're using "tools" as a verb, there should be an "s" at the end of "hint." /grammar-nag
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
So what are they - stone blades, tiny blades, bladelets or microliths?
Early humans probably created these tools to fight off the Sauroniops. http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/12/11/08/050217/new-dinosaur-named-after-the-eye-of-sauron
Trading is really old, so it was never forgotten. It evolved just once, in East Africa before we got out of Africa. It was never forgotten
Spoken language is something we evolved into. We have the language instinct at birth. It is not something to be taught to children. They naturally try to communicate via spoken language. They know objects have names, and actions have names, and they can be strung together to express concrete events (cup-broke!) or express intent (want-juice) . So laungages were never fogotten.
Writing was invented only twice. Looking at the effort we need to undertake to teach children to write, it is clear, it is not instinctive. It was invented. There are only two instances of independent invention of writing. The linear-b alphabet found in the Mediterranean island and the pictographic glyphs of the Incas. All the writing systems of the Old World were either derived from linear-b or inspired by it. Some minor record keeping aids probably existed long back, notches on a stick or knots on a vine or shells strung up. But it probably did not blossom into full fledged writing based on symbols standing in for phonemes or words.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
It makes me sad to think we've been killing each other for that long.
> [the bladelets] were probably used as tips for throwable spears, or as spiky additions to club-like weapons
I get having sharp tips for spears - very useful for hunting. It's the "spiky clubs" that's disturbing - I don't see much use for a mace outside of hurting humans.
They got the dates wrong?
Have gnu, will travel.
Why truncate when you can downmod?
Free Martian Whores!
The hypothetical ancient civilization could not have evolved without using WATER. The fact thet we still have water proves that they never existed.
See http://blogcritics.org/politics/article/is-oil-a-renewable-energy/ :D