Archaeologists discover oldest wooden structure

https://news.liverpool.ac.uk/2023/09/20/archaeologists-discover-worlds-oldest-wooden-structure/

by gnufx • 3 years ago

188 104 3 years ago

news.liverpool.ac.uk

pleb_nz• 3 years ago

Awesome find and I am not surprised at all by the age. I wonder which species it was?

derbOac• 3 years ago

Combretum zeyheri

orbital-decay• 3 years ago

The article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06557-9

jl6• 3 years ago

How do they know the wood was used 476,000 years ago, as opposed to a human 6000 years ago finding and using some 470,000 year old wood? This gives a hint:

They used new luminescence dating techniques, which reveal the last time minerals in the sand surrounding the finds were exposed to sunlight, to determine their age.

... but it seems like there might be other explanations for that sand being there?

sam_goody• 3 years ago

They do not have extraordinary evidence, but they believe that the claim is not extra-ordinary.

varjag• 3 years ago

It's strange, for a jump from historical to an evolutionary timescale. I find this really hard to believe though naturally archeologists must be knowing what they're doing.

labrador• 3 years ago

Where do you find 470,000 year old wood that isn't petrified?

anotheraccount9• 3 years ago

I would really like to know the answer, if anyone wants to share.

diogenes42• 3 years ago

How do they know the wood was used 476,000 years ago, as opposed to a human 6000 years ago finding and using some 470,000 year old wood?

Seems absurdly unlikely—is there a reason to suspect this is the case? Even if you were to find half-a-million-year-old wood why would you use it to build a structure?

satvikpendem• 3 years ago

I mean, we use rocks that are millions of years old in our own structures, why wouldn't it be likely that an early human saw some wood and thought that it'd be a strong building material without knowing or considering the age of that wood, or something to that effect?

bluehorizon2• 3 years ago

I had the same question but the article said that the wood would have rotted by then. Makes sense since even lumber will dry rot in years if not taken care of. So I can buy the idea that it’s very old because it was preserved in an accidentally special way.

I’m just wondering if it being submerged in water would have affected any readings or measurements they made since who knows what hundreds of thousands of years or even thousands of years might do to the things they are measuring.

danparsonson3• 3 years ago

This is the usual way of dating buried archaeological finds - you work out when the thing was buried by studying the surrounding material. In this case the specific dating technique is new, but the principle is well established. If you find something buried in material that was laid down 470,000 years ago, then the thing was buried at that time. Assuming teleportation doesn't exist, how else could the artefacts get there? The only other option I can think of is deliberate burial and I imagine archaeologists would already have considered that idea.

As to finding and using extremely old wood - wood does not survive that long except in cases of very specific environmental conditions like this one; surely another reason to expect that the wood has lain undisturbed for its entire history, rather than having been dug up and turned into some structure a few thousand years ago (then buried again).

1letterunixname3• 3 years ago

TL;DR: superposition.

pixelfarmer3• 3 years ago

Depending on the soil (they seem to have rather colorful soil there), you will see disturbances of any kind because refilling a hole will show different colors. The newer the dig is, the clearer the line between undisturbed and disturbed parts, i.e. it "washes out" over time. That is how for example you can figure out locations of house posts despite the wood not being there at all, or finding out that an old grave has been partially robbed in olden times.

Which also means it was not really about making sure you have old wood in old soil, but to determine the age of the wood itself by dating how long ago the sand surrounding it was exposed to sunlight (as they had to make a dig or disturb the soil at that point of time).

SomewhatLikely• 3 years ago

I was wondering instead what their dating method would do with old sand that had been dug up and quickly buried during the construction. Does a very short exposure to sun reset the mineral signature they are looking at? If not, then the structure could be much newer then the last time the sand spent an extended time in the sun. In fact, if the sand digging and moving happened in the evening to avoid the heat of the sun then the sand may have been dug up and used while never being exposed to the sun.

Maxion4• 3 years ago

How do they know the wood was used 476,000 years ago, as opposed to a human 6000 years ago finding and using some 470,000 year old wood?

Surely we have not fallen this far away from nature as a species? Wood rots.

IMO you're just being facetious about the find.

greatpostman• 3 years ago

Timelines of all human achievements keep getting pushed back.

foota4• 3 years ago

How amazing would it be to discover that an ancient civilization existed with a technology level on par with the iron age or so? I guess if we were finding dinosaurs though the odds we wouldn't have found anything from that time are maybe slim.

tshaddox• 3 years ago

It could have been a long time before dinosaurs, and/or limited geographically in areas where the geological activity over tens of millions of years would make finding traces of them even more rare than average.

_a_a_a_2• 3 years ago

Iron artefacts are likely to last much better than wood ones, so if that was so we'd likely have much evidence collected.

foota4• 3 years ago

Yeah, I guess it would have to have either been long enough ago that it's been erased by geology (which seems somewhat infeasibly long ago wrt the evolutionary timeline) or recent enough that we would likely have found a trace of it by now. I guess the only chance is for some missing link far in the evolutionary past that was erased by e.g., one of the past mass extinctions.

kijin• 3 years ago

Actually, iron rusts away so quickly that it's hard to recover them from the ground after only a millennium or two. Bronze tends to fare much better in that regard.

Wood can last quite a while if it's buried in an environment that inhibits microbial degradation, such as a highly acidic bog, where iron doesn't stand a chance.

alehlopeh2• 3 years ago

We have found many ancient civilizations with a technology on par with the Iron Age. They’re called Iron Age civilizations.

foota4• 3 years ago

Sorry, I mean, long before the iron age.

asdff3• 3 years ago

We find many dinosaur fossils because there were so many dinosaurs over so long of a time. The actual events that lead to a dead dinosaur fossilizing and then having it be in a place we find it all these years later is astoundingly rare, and speaks to the scale of numbers we are working here when we find these fossils. There were probably orders of magnitude less humans over orders of magnitude smaller amounts of time in question here than say, dinosaur finds. Then you have the issue of early humans generally settling in places that are poor for long term preservation, like along shifting coastlines. The fact we find so many hominid remains in places like caves isn't really because that's where people spent a lot of time, but that these people were all over the environment and of all the places for their remains to end up, in the cave is a good place for it to not only survive the elements but to be found by spelunkers in modern times. Most people probably died and left evidence of their life in places exposed to the elements or to time.

Maxion4• 3 years ago

Exactly. The historical remains that we have are all very biased compared with how people lived.

Even from a few hundred years ago, there's not much record of how the average person lived. Most things that survived are stone castles, and other remnants of noble life.

pixelfarmer3• 3 years ago

The Bronze Age. I think the best entry for that is via the "Late Bronze Age collapse" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse), which gives you an indication of how networked things were back then already. That includes trade of amber: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber_Road

pvaldes5• 3 years ago

Don't understand why they had seen a refuge there. Looks much more like a bonfire to me.

This wood looks cut in a tip and partially burnt in the other, and the fire makes this notches easily when two logs overlap. Also explains the preservation of the wood, as it was sterilized by fire (maybe minutes before a rain fell or a flood hit). Also the size of the logs (1,5m is too short for a home, but perfect to be carried and stored. Plus the near presence of the classical fire hardened sticks. Is pretty obvious.

So first evidence of "structural use" of wood is a too premature claim. nope. I don't think so.

twobitshifter• 3 years ago

There are chopping marks and striations that show the notches were worked with tools. It’s only two logs so I can’t jump to structure but it’s wood that was worked to lock together for some purpose. Maybe structure is meant in the more general sense?

pvaldes5• 3 years ago

I would need to see it. Marks in wood would be totally expected in a bonfire used to create and test tools with fire hardened tips

If we are both talking about the same structure, I don't see striations, but the photo mentions two cracks. If those are really cracks (and not engravings carved superficially) this would reinforce my theory.

pvaldes5• 3 years ago

Seen. Is a nice computer 3D image, and looks very clean and professional, but the interpretation is still wrong.

My opinion didn't changed a dime. Slope too wide. We don't work like that, so they neither would. Those are not man made.

Maxion4• 3 years ago

You do know that this paper is published in Nature, right? Unless you're an archeologist with a credible track record I doubt that you have the expertise to effectively argue that this is find is not credible.

Just because you find something hard to believe, does not mean it isn't true.

sudofail• 3 years ago

Considering beavers make wooden structures for their own benefit and survival, it's not really surprising that ancestors of Homo Sapiens did as well.

diogenes42• 3 years ago

Considering beavers make wooden structures for their own benefit and survival

It's more like they have a compulsion to stack wood where they hear running water. The implication here is intention and a cognizance of purpose, which is not unheard of in the animal kingdom but is fairly rare.

steve_adams_864• 3 years ago

We don’t know that it’s purely compulsion, do we? Perhaps they know that still pools of water are best for survival so they’re motivated to prevent water from running away. The level of compulsion could be more sophisticated than we imagine. This seems to be true with many mammals. Not long ago in North America, it wasn’t uncommon to think of dogs as meat-headed automatons. Today it’s common to recognize that they have emotions and personalities much like we do, and there’s little evidence to suggest otherwise. I’m not convinced beavers are like giant fruit flies trying to plug holes.

verisimi• 3 years ago

Maybe this one of many half a million year old wooden beaver structures, given that they build in water.

SoftTalker• 3 years ago

I find it completely unsurprising. Many animal species construct shelters/nests using available materials such as sticks, leaves, mud, etc. Humans are smart, so they do it more creatively, but no doubt our less-intelligent ancestors constructed shelters of some sort.

readthenotes1• 3 years ago

That river has been running there for 0.5 million years? That's incredibly stable!

jacquesm• 3 years ago

Parts of The Grand Canyon took 40 times longer to be carved out by a river.

rhelz2• 3 years ago

What struck me is that the two pieces of wood were found notched together at a 90-degree angle. This has got to be the first-known 90-degree angle in history.

Virtually nothing in nature has a 90-degree angle. This is an invention of the highest order.

EDIT: thanks for all the good responses; I should have written a bit more carefully--I meant to say that this might be the first-known time a 90-degree angle was deliberately constructed.

greggsy• 3 years ago

Surely stone tools have demonstrated perpendicular attributes. It’s not too far of a stretch to imagine a Palaeolithic hunter aligning an axe head against a handle in a way that made it even on either side.

rhelz2• 3 years ago

I haven't seen any stone tools with perpendicular sides. In fact, I don't know of any other 90-degree stonework until the T-stones at Gobekle Tepe. If you could point me to some examples I'd be very much interested in knowing about them.

rajamaka• 3 years ago

Naturally occuring cubic crystal systems might beat it by a few million years wouldn't they?

fsckboy• 3 years ago

plants frequently come out of the ground and go straight up. things fall straight down, which is why bipedal humans stand straight up. our bilateral symmetry (arms out!) is at right angles to our bifocal vision, and we have people to our right and to our left. birds' beaks and dogs' muzzles are a vector notation from their bodies. various types of axeheads affixed to axehandles... I'm not saying the discovery is not amazing, nor that you're wrong, this could be the first. Just saying that right angles are going to come pretty quickly after the discovery of angles.

throwaway892238• 3 years ago

There are millions of mineral and rock formations around the world with 90 degree angles. A tree/flower stem/etc and the ground form a 90 degree angle. A branch coming straight out of a tree trunk (common in pines, or some other evergreen) makes a right angle. A vine or spanish moss dangling from a branch makes a right angle. Two logs or branches that fall on each other in the forest serendipitously form a right angle. An arm, leg, etc sticking out of an animal with arms forms a right angle when extended. Water running down from two different points on a hill toward a central point could easily join as a right angle.

I'm pretty sure right angles existed before this log.

hyperthesis• 3 years ago

They're normal.

When our first ancestor stood upright, a right angle was formed with the ground.

A hand axe, a knapped stone lashed at right angles to a branch.

Some say fire or dogs are humanity's first and greatest inventions - but we only domesticated those.

I say weaving: an extraordinary crossing of threads at right angles that magically support each other, clothing that is the biblical coming-or-age of human-kind, fabric that drapes organically (and is still used today, even as threads become artificial), rope, leaves for shelter, even decorating hair.

And it directly lead to the single greatest invention of our time, that binds all things together: gaffer tape.

pvaldes5• 3 years ago

Just arrange two branches in a bonfire. Most humans will tend to create a 90 degree angle.

As any other animals, we are brain wired to recognize symmetry. Is our main way to find a desirable mate with good genetics or to detect a predator ambushed so is essential in our survival.

paxys• 3 years ago

Not sure how you can surmise that. The earliest human-made tools are from 2.6 million years ago. You think nothing starting from then to this wood house had a deliberately constructed right angle?

ClassyJacket• 3 years ago

Bismuth!

mlhpdx3• 3 years ago

Two logs connected for some purpose near a River == must be a house? Not a raft, which would be much easier and obvious and helpful?

xeromal2• 3 years ago

I think a raft would still be considered a structure or at least more than just used for fire or spears. It's a purpose-build device that was constructed to achieve a problem. I don't think what it is matters more than it was built in the first place to solve a problem. Those logs look too big for a raft though

mlhpdx3• 3 years ago

In the video they specifically talk about a platform for building on, and there is mention of this find contracting conclusions about the nomadic nature of “folks” at the time. Both indicate they went straight to the abode idea.

The youngest of children will start assembling logs near shore when swimming at a lake. The crossing of the logs would help stabilize them so crossing would be safer and dry, which is critical in transporting some goods. The raft is more consistent with existing evidence, but less compelling to the modern world which expects homes to have floors.

DabbyDabberson• 3 years ago

Woah, every new discovery really makes Graham Hancock seem a bit less crazy.

476,000 years is a HUGE jump. They called him crazy for thinking that the Egyptians had structures 12,000 years ago.

api• 3 years ago

The crazy stuff he says is not the stuff about civilization going back further than conventional models. There are numerous archeologists who argue that and their positions are usually considered outside the mainstream but not insane.

Hancock says a lot of other things that are actually crazy, and like many people he’s gotten much worse lately.

bagels2• 3 years ago

What are the actual crazy things?

abathur• 3 years ago

It should be evident that, with effort, the date of all firsts (and lasts) will continue to approach (but probably never reach) the date of The Oldest (or Newest) Artifact We Can Plausibly Find.

It doesn't take genius, intellectual courage, or prescience to expect this to continue.

There's certainly room for theorizing about what we may find and where, but archaeologists should in some fundamental way be more limited by proof than their imaginations.

Aside: I'd love to see the citation for "They called him crazy for thinking that the Egyptians had structures 12,000 years ago", as I'm a bit flummoxed by who's stupid enough to get any further out over their skis than "we don't have any evidence for that."

Stevvo• 3 years ago

One thing Hancock is undeniably right about; "Stuff keeps getting older"

nafey• 3 years ago

Well he also thinks that Egyptians used Sonic energy of their chants to build the pyramids.

rfwhyte• 3 years ago

Hancock is a charlatan of the worst kind, in that I firmly believe he fully knows the vast majority of what he says is utter bullshit, but he keeps on saying it because it's garnering him a ton of money and attention. "They" (rightly, mind you) call him crazy for claiming the pyramids are 12000 years old, despite huge volumes of verifiable evidence strongly refuting such claims (Literally 100s of carbon dates from organic materials in mortar remnants between blocks, stratigraphy, lexical references like the Merer texts, etc.), and despite the lack of single shred of credible evidence for any of his claims other than his typical "This rock here looks like that rock on the other side of the world so the pyramids are 12000 years old and Atlantis is real" nonsense.

WalterBright3• 3 years ago

Forget the label ‘Stone Age,’ look at what these people were doing: they made something new, and large, from wood.

??? The "Stone Age" refers to using stone tools, which these people did.

Archelaos• 3 years ago

That the "Stone Age" should better be called the "Wood Age" is an adage that has been used so often over the years that it has lost its appeal for me. Here, for example, is a summary of a paper from 1985 that argues this case: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/016093...

1letterunixname3• 3 years ago

Agriculture seems a prerequisite for most other technologies because you can't invent much if you're constantly following 4 legged food. The transition to ag (small-scale gardening) began before 21k BCE (23k years ago) predating Natufian culture.

1letterunixname3• 3 years ago

I assume that they're also using superposition because radiocarbon dating is useless here. Other dating methods:

https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/dating

lkrubner• 3 years ago

Up till now there has been substantial pushback against the idea that homo heidelbergensis built small villages in France 400,000 years ago: small huts surrounding a giant long, thin building, 15 meters long but less than 3 meters wide. Up till now that find has been earliest finding of a possible gathering of human buildings, but many archeologists have had difficulty believing it and have criticized every aspect of the evidence. But now with this new find, the claims about the heidelbergensis village also becomes more believable:

https://books.google.com/books?id=LXmY3Q8qBngC&pg=PT74&lpg=P...

yieldcrv• 3 years ago

We’ve had 8,000 relatively continuous relatively good years for humankind’s continuity and civilization advancement. Within that, in some regions there were societies far more advanced than others, before falling and causing complete disruptions on that happening again for another thousand years

Within 496,000 years, there are 61 other 8,000 year time periods

The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence, on this topic

Sparkyte• 3 years ago

Oldest so far. I mean let's be legit, wood decomposes easy. We know there is older, just not preserved.

INTPenis• 3 years ago

And statistically, considering how easy wood decomposes, the fact that we find one means there was probably a lot of worked wood.

brianpan• 3 years ago

dated by luminescence to at least 476 ± 23 kyr ago

...for those wonder about the precision of the date like I was.

Archaeologists discover oldest wooden structure

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