Comment by drakythe 5 days ago
430,000 years? Am I reading this headline correctly? (since the site seems to have fallen victim to the HN-hug-of-death). That seems wildly further back than I understood humans to have tools, or even homo sapiens to have existed.
ETA: Today I learned I had a much much larger gap in knowledge than I thought I did. Thanks to everyone for the information and links!
Well, today I learned something! Thanks for the information, I guess I know which rabbit hole I'm going down today.
Just edited to add two paper citations for the phytoliths and microwear studies. Have fun! It’s a deep rabbit hole largely ignored by popsci publications so there’s lots to explore.
I don’t read popsci but if you’re interested in a rigorous treatment I’d recommend The Human Career by Klein which has the broad overview and The Human Past edited by Scarre which is more of a textbook.
I mostly just read the papers as they are published but I’ve heard good things about those two books (they’re on my reading list but I haven’t read enough to form an opinion)
I think a quite unexpected (but more common sense) picture begins to emerge:
1. Language already emerged with early hominins (paranthropus and such).
2. Habilis et al developed toolmaking to a level that carrying stuff around was of critical importance.
3. H. erectus emerged from walking, and brought technology to a "civilized" level.
4. Anything post erectus evolved for civilized society.
5. The destruction of soils in eurasia about 24000 BC
6. The destruction of soils in the Americas about 9500 BC
7. Old metallurgy age.
8. Tin bronze age.
9. Recorded history.
But the article says "our human ancestors" which implies they are not talking about other hominins."
Edit: Okay I just found that Human can also refer to other hominids
from: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/human
- a bipedal primate mammal (Homo sapiens) : a person
- broadly : hominid
That's wild! Thanks for sharing. I didn't realize these things went so far back. So are you saying these were straight up non-human primates using tools? Or is this all traceable to our lineage?
The first identified tools were 3.3 million years ago, which is before the homo genus emerges. Thus, those were either by Australopithecus afarensis or by a yet unidentified hominid species -- they were still very likely our ancestors (but technically TBD).
Then around 2-2.5 million years ago you get the first homo species in the genus homo such as Homo habilis and they created the Oldowan tool culture.
Both Australopithecus afarensis and Homo habilis are our ancestors -- however they are also the ancestors of other homo lines that diverged from us that we are not descendents of (which are now extinct).
People often forget how widespread and varied the Homo genus was before all our cousin species went extinct (likely in part due to us).[1] Homo erectus colonized the entire old world very effectively 1.5 million years ago!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo#/media/File:The_hominin_f...
Last I knew, the 3.3 mya evidence from the site Lomekwi 3 in Kenya was debatable, though a serious possibility, and the 2.58 mya evidence from the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania was considered the sure thing.
Also, more than primates use tools: Many corvids (crows, ravens, etc.) do, as do other animals. Look up New Caledonian Crows in particular.
But don't take all this from HN commenters debating each other; find some authoritative sources. A recent review article in a scientific journal would be a great start. Google Scholar lets you search for review articles.
I believe the evidence is animal bones that show marks from butchery, as well as actual sharpened stone flakes and other things found primarily in what is now Kenya: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lomekwi
Even today there's plenty of non humans (and non-primate) tool use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_use_by_non-humans.
In terms of tools by homonins, there is a roughly ~3million year history of stone tool use by various species, and the main thing preventing that date from being pushed further back is the difficulty in discerning between stones that have been shaped intentionally and those shaped by natural forces.
Our last common ancestor with our closest non-human primates (Pan genus) diverged about 6-8 million years ago, so what constitutes “human” is murky and I don’t think archaeologists give the matter much thought. “Human” means homo sapiens, “archaic human” means a few subspecies like neanderthals up to about 600 kYA, and the rest are just “hominins”.
We have both observational and archaeological evidence of tool use in chimpanzees, macaques, and capuchins so it’s a pretty widespread behavior. I think the archaeological evidence for monkeys only goes back about four thousand years but thats because we havent studied the issue as much in archaeology.
> Tools predate homo sapiens (which emerged about 300 kYA)
I’m going to use a charged word because Jane Goodall used it.
Goodall asserted that humans and chimpanzees (and wolves) are unique among animals in that we have a genocidal tendency [1]. When a group attacks us (or has “land and resources” we want) we don’t just chase them off. We exterminate them. We expend great resources to track them down to ensure they cannot threaten us.
One reading of pre-history is that we had a number of hominids that were fine sharing the world, and humans, who were not. (I’ve seen the uncanny valley hypothesised as a human response to non-human hominids, as well as other humans carrying transmissible disfiguring diseases.)
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/06/does-...
“Genocidal” is charged because it projects human morality onto non-human animals. It’s about basic scientific hygiene, not political correctness.
That’s not why genocidal is a charged word in my opinion.
It’s because it implies that genocide has always been, and will always be, a reality humans will all too frequently find them selves having to contend with.
An aspect of our evolutionary success that will haunt us always, at least while its not busy being indulged in.
Army ants do something similar as well.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ants-and-the-art-...
I think this is part of the reason humans are so stupid during any sort of divisions where "sides" emerge. To be able to do commit this genocide, you need a very ugly "switch" in your head that can make your actions justifiable/right. I think this switch is the same, emotional, unthinking one that makes some people so religion about teams sports, phone OS, political alignment, etc.
Related, I think this is also the mechanism for how religion tends to stabilize societies/give them cohesion. Rather than having an eventual positive feedback loop of division, the division is placed between some type of "good" and "evil" rather than your neighbor. The "us vs them" division that switch craves is put on something more metaphysical (and sometimes a net benefit, like defining evil as behavior destructive to societies).
This was worth reading, thank you.
The line between good and evil runs straight down the centre of every human heart.
And dogs / wolves too, and definitely many / all cetaceans, because they are also cursed with the ability to be deeply affected by the presence, and absence / loss, of those they form bonds with. And that drives us all to be prepared to kill, or at least encourage others to, not out or physical necessity (nutrition) but retribution.
I’ve always considered the criminal justice system to be a euphemism for the codified retribution system.
We live in an unjust realm. All we can ever hope for is something approximating an appropriate level of retribution.
And it is a would appear as fact that that not infrequently rises to the level of not just genocide as we are familiar with it most recently, but proper extermination.
The worst part of reading this thread is I know I won't be able to google image anything interesting related to "non-human hominids" :( Your comment was oddly depressing lol. Real "are we the baddies?" moment this morning.
> won't be able to google image anything interesting related to "non-human hominids"
We were a large family [1].
> Real "are we the baddies?" moment
We were animals. We acted in accordance with our natures. Wolves and chimpanzees aren’t baddies any more than bees or hyenas. Nature is brutal.
Today, however, we are more than our natures. We have the capacity to criticize it when it arises in ways we disapprove of. In a certain sense, humans have a unique capacity to reduce suffering in a way without precedent in Earth’s natural history.
Another way of looking at it is that humans (and apparently our close brethren) are tribal, don't give up fighting easily, and can generationally hold grudges.
Invaders of days gone by knew that even the young kids would grow up to "avenge their people", so to avoid problems (violence/killing against their tribe) in 10-15 years, it's better to just totally erase the population.
> Real "are we the baddies?" moment this morning
Humans have a well-earned nickname: "murder apes"
If you think we're peaceful basketballs, you haven't been provoked. The veneer of civilization is rather thin.
Given enough time of human survival, the only species left on this planet will be ones that are aesthetically pleasing to us
Everything selectively bred due to environmental or artificial pressures to have big eyes, big heads, high vocal sounds, attributes of human babies
It is very strange and an aberration amongst species, one being tolerating other beings because of their entertainment value and the joy they give from looking at them, but seems to be consistent and validate what's happened over eons of homo sapien propagation
> (and wolves)
And lions. And banded mongooses. And meerkats. And ants. Lots and lots of ant species - they’re actually by far the worst, following colony pheromones to the end of the earth just to get a single ant. Ants that aren’t genocidal to their own species tend to be some of the worst invasive species (like Argentinian ant supercolonies).
I love me some Jane Goodall as much as the next guy but that hypothesis is not taken seriously by primatologists and using the word “genocidal” in this context would get you laughed out of the room. Lethal intergroup aggression, coalitionary killing, and raiding are all different aspects of violent behavior in animals and hominins are far from unique in demonstrating them.
It’s an interesting interpretation, but it’s sounds all very unsubstantiated. Speculation it seems to me.
> sounds all very unsubstantiated. Speculation it seems to me
What part of the study strikes you as unsubstantiated?
Sometimes when I think about this it makes me wonder if we should take the dark forest hypothesis seriously (re: Fermi paradox).
Not only are we the only species to reach this kind of technology but among humans the first group to reach space was the Nazis. Today the innovation in that area seems driven by militaristic states and by people who seem ideologically adjacent. In other words it’s driven by very aggressive territorial members of one of the most aggressive territorial species.
We can’t generalize from one example of evolution, but if this is indicative of a common pattern then there might be some scary MFs out there. Our radio signals have been spreading for a while, so for all we know something is on its way to cleanse the universe of all forms of life that offend its god (or whatever its genocidal rationalizations is).
If this is true then we die. There is zero chance of resisting something with the technology to travel the stars and perhaps a million years or more head start on us. It’d be like an Apache attack helicopter versus a termite mound.
I had this thought when I saw the ideological turn (or mask removal) of certain people in the space industry. I found it metaphysically disturbing. Again… if there is other advanced life and if this is the pattern of how you evolve to become spacefaring, then we are doomed.
> Today the innovation in that area seems driven by militaristic states and by people who seem ideologically adjacent.
Today it's Musk driving space technology forward, and I don't see him acting militaristic.
There could be life on other planets. It could even be (somewhat) suitable for humans to live without a full space suit
But I find it unlikely the exact combination of factors, of which there are dozens or more, will be present such that it’s any place anyone actually wants to settle. Like what if the planet was much like Earth except the gravity was 1.2G. Or the atmosphere was only 500 mb, or surface temp was just barely above freezing. That would be deal breaker for just about everyone
It doesn’t need to be rational.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/mar/03/afghanistan.lu...
The thought experiment I’m doing is asking what happens if there is a link between hyper aggressive species and certain kinds of intelligence and technological development.
It could just be a fluke of our evolution and history that there seems to be a link, but what if it’s a pattern. If true this would mean any spacefaring intelligence is likely to be quite scary.
> unique among animals in that we have a genocidal tendency
That's an unsupported generalization.
The article describes "behaviors" that include "perhaps even genocide", and notes that wiping out populations exists in chimps and wolves too.
So not unique, there's a "perhaps", and it's not a tendency. There's no evidence we have a "gene" for it or anything.
In the vast, vast, vast majority of conflicts between two groups, we don't exterminate the "enemy". Otherwise, the human race would have gone extinct a long time ago. Wiping out entire populations is by far the exception, not the rule, of human societies. It happens, but the situations are notable precisely for their extremity, precisely because they're not the norm.
We are far more subtle and targeted about it as a whole, possibly due to our social structures.
As vapid as the movie (intentionally) is, "Mean Girls" does a really good break-down of things, and perhaps the main issue is that unlike some other animal groups, people don't always stop.
The submission's subheading seems to imply that there was a gap where homo* emerged but weren't using tools then though? I can't read the article or copy-paste it due to pay wall, but it says something along the lines of the find suggesting our human ancestors were using tools longer ago than we thought.
Way back when I was in high school doing history (Money for Nothing was on heavy rotation on the radio and Bob from Stranger Things was still Mikey from the Goonies), our teacher explained that there was evidence of stone tools being used by early hominids, then nothing much except maybe fragments of rock that may have been used as hammers or axe heads, and then into an era where simple bronze tools emerged. What archeologists believed, she said, was that people went from "big chunk of rock" to "small delicate bit of rock tied with strips of animal hide to a stick" to "big chunk of metal", and the wood and animal hide had simply rotted away. There would be this whole lost chunk of technology.
And she told us that would likely happen again, there would be a gap where our technology proved to be insufficiently durable to last throughout history. Unsurprisingly not everyone in the class thought this was likely, but I figured it was possible.
Anyway, I could go on about the archeology of tech all night, but I've got to figure out how to get the photos off this Kodak DC25 camera card. Something about a DLL from the original installer that you wrap in a Linux library? Can't remember.
EDIT: Use XSane for it, as if it were an scanner. Look up on how to edit the config files in /etc https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-hardware-18/k...
> And she told us that would likely happen again, there would be a gap where our technology proved to be insufficiently durable to last throughout history. Unsurprisingly not everyone in the class thought this was likely, but I figured it was possible.
I heard that fear being muttered mostly about everything going digital and that's much harder for archaeologists to dig up than paper or stone tablets.
However, that's all nonsense, of course: the stuff that people bother to write down is seldom all that interesting. Who cares about who was king or whatever? The real juicy bits are all in our garbage dumps, and we are producing garbage that'll last much longer than anything the ancients could muster. What with all our metal, glass, plastic etc.
> we are producing garbage that'll last much longer than anything the ancients could muster. What with all our metal, glass, plastic etc.
I'm convinced that in a not-too-distant few tens of thousand years, archeologists will be baffled at all these massive deposits of iron, copper, and aluminium - well on its way back to the oxides from whence it came, but chunks of highly refined stuff in among it, presumably at great expense - and for some reason labelled with extremely durable placards made out of ridiculously tough plastic with letters embossed in them. The precise meanings of "SJ12 YPF", "Y196 NBA", "RFS 131Y", or "R420 BRL" will remain lost to the depths of time.
>I can't read the article or copy-paste it due to pay wall
Try this: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/26/science/archaeology-neand...
> Even this evidence of woodworking is largely unremarkable .... this find is most notable for its preservation.
This somewhat contradicts the subheading, no?
> The finding, along with the discovery of a 500,000-year-old hammer made of bone, indicates that our human ancestors were making tools even earlier than archaeologists thought.
That subheading is complete nonsense and I can't think of a single charitable reading of that sentence that in any way makes sense. Archaeologists have known that our ancestors have been making tools for over a million years since the Acheulean industry was conclusively dated in the 1850s. It took half a century for archaeologists to figure that out after William Smith invented stratigraphy. Scientists didn't even know what an isotope was yet.
The original paper's abstract is much more specific (ignore the Significance section, which is more editorializing):
> Here, we present the earliest handheld wooden tools, identified from secure contexts at the site of Marathousa 1, Greece, dated to ca. 430 ka (MIS12). [1]
Which is true. Before this the oldest handheld wooden tool with a secure context [2] was a thrusting spear from Germany dated ~400kYA [3]. The oldest evidence of woodworking is at least 1.5 million years old but we just don't have any surviving wooden tools from that period.
[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2515479123
[2] This is a very important term of art in archaeology. It means that the artefact was excavated by a qualified team of archaeologists that painstakingly recorded every little detail of the excavation so that the dating can be validated using several different methods (carbon dating only works up to about 60k years)
[3] https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/behavior/getting-food/o...
As others mentioned, tool use wasn't restricted to homo sapiens. I think this makes sense, no? We didn't spontaneously use tools, it must have evolved incrementally in some way.
I think we see shades of this today. Bearded Capuchin monkeys chain a complex series of tasks and use tools to break nuts. From a brief documentary clip I saw [0], they first take the nut and strip away the outer layer of skin, leave it dry out in the sun for a week, then find a large soft-ish rock as the anvil with a heavier smaller rock to break open the nut. So they had to not only figure out that nuts need to be pre-shelled and dried, but that they needed a softer rock for the anvil and harder rock for the hammer. They also need at least some type of bipedal ability to carry the rock in the first place and use it as a hammer.
Apparently some white-faced Capuchins have figured out that they can soak nuts in water to soften it before hammering it open [1].
You might be old enough to have been taught that Humans are tool-using apes. That's tragically incomplete: lots of apes use tools. Birds use tools. And now, cows use tools!
I was homeschooled in a particular conservative area. Much of what I have been taught was... woefully inadequate, we'll say. Lots of my learning has come in university and afterwards, so what I've picked up is pretty obviously incomplete and leaves me with many unknown unknowns in this area. Today has begun filling in many of those gaps so they get to be known unknowns now!
> Lots of my learning has come in university and afterwards
That's true for pretty much everybody. Homeschooled or not. You think everyone shocked by this news was all homeschooled?
No, but I do think it more likely they got a more accurate world history class somewhere along the line. I was taught creationism thanks to the conservatism nature of my family and the area I grew up in. It took a long while to know and accept the world (and universe) is as old as it is.
I'm relearning a lot of stuff I was told visiting natural history museums as a kid reading this thread and the linked articles. I doubt I'm the only person in this forum who had a couple of educated parents who wanted their kids to learn more than what is taught in basic public k-12 curriculum.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronika_(cow) might be a better Wikipedia link.
Honestly I would have expected a pig or horse to be discovered to use tools, rather than a cow. Cattle are generally... not thought of as particularly intelligent.
That's the goal of https://www.cowbrushes.com/store ! They provide mental stimulation and scritches for cows. Results in extra milk, too.
Yes it's definitely further back than homo sapiens have existed (200k - 300k years), but our ancestor species were known to have used tools and control fire. I believe we have evidence of tool use going back 1 million years. So this article is referencing the oldest known _wooden_ tools, which are obviously much less likely to be preserved across the ages.
We have 3.3 million year old stone tools https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14464. They're very simple (even more so than the Oldowan stone tools https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldowan) and basically just look like rocks, but there is clear evidence of intentional shaping by hominins (somewhere in the fuzzy late Australopthis/early homo transition).
This youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/stefanmilo has a lot of good stuff. I don't know enough to know where he's right or wrong, but provides entry points for to looking more into it.
I have gone down a couple rabbit holes based on his videos and while it seems like he's occasionally gotten some facts wrong or misunderstood an argument, I'm pretty confident he's doing a decent job accurately representing the archaeology.
We have evidence of control over fire (but not fire starting) at about 1 million years. Stone tools go even further back, at least 2 million years.
Wait hang on, would they "control" file by finding natural sources (volcano, lightning strike wildfire, etc.) and then make use of that source for controlled sources of light/heat/etc? I guess I've always thought of "control" of fire including the intentional starting thereof.
> Wait hang on, would they "control" file by finding natural sources (volcano, lightning strike wildfire, etc.) and then make use of that source for controlled sources of light/heat/etc?
Pretty much. Being able to transfer/build a fire is a lot easier than starting one. Fire starting requires bow/flint&steel and a lot of patience. Control basically means using simple torches to transfer fire from one place to another (where the initial source is either lightning/wildfire or embers of a previous fire).
Some very recently published research (Dec 2025) claims evidence of fire starting among homo neanderthalensis. This would push back fire starting know-how (not only control) from 50k to 400k years ago. Cool stuff!
[1] https://www.nhm.ac.uk/press-office/press-releases/groundbrea...
Firehawks spread fire to scare out game; that count?
https://wildlife.org/australian-firehawks-use-fire-to-catch-...
There's pretty strong evidence that the use of fire to cook food is what enabled modern humans, with their short (and relatively fragile) digestive systems and giant energy hungry brains to evolve. Cooking food makes more calories bio-available in food and also reduced the amount of energy the body needs to expend on that food to harvest calories... so there's more energy available for thinking (etc).
ah, there's a very good movie about this exact topic (not scientifically accurate, one presumes, but still very good)
Not to mention the Iron Maiden song! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SF7cWpBTZ6s
There's a 476k year old wooden structure in Zambia, and includes some tools somewhere around 3x0k years old: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalambo_structure
Fascinating stuff!
This isn't a problem for evolutionary theory. It's literally a necessary prediction of it. Most recent common ancestor of humans and chimps is 5-10 million years ago. Since we have observed tool usage in modern chimps and lots of very complicated tool use in humans, the necessary prediction is that some amount of tool use goes back at least ~5-10 million years, with increased complexity roughly tracking with the continuous increase in braincase size.
Being in a common ancestor is certainly compatible with evolution but it's not necessary because it could have evolved independently in each branch.
if it were only 2 primates that's a plausible explanation, but when it's pretty much every simean using tools, and all the old world apes making tools, it's pretty hard to argue for convergent evolution rather than a trait that exists ancestrally.
I don't understand why you think it'd be an issue?
Dumbed down understanding of mine: evolutionary theory predicts that graph goes from (0.1; 0) to (very high; in a million years). X axis: years, Y axis: progress or evolution. The only difference such discoveries make is to further refine the slope of the graph. Was the development linear or exponential? How fast did it progress? Obviously, in the past 500 years we didn't change as humans but our technological progress accelerated beyond belief.
Then ... you find out that smoking was introduced to the new world in the 16th c, and indigenous North Americans didn't start using the bow & arrow ubiquitously until after the year 1000. But! Native North Americans were using copper contemporaneously with the old world.
What if the meaning / definition of ETA when used like this?
Tools predate homo sapiens (which emerged about 300 kYA) by millions of years. The first stone industry - Oldowan - is at least two million years old and might be as old as three million. They predate what we call “archaic humans” by a long time.
Even this evidence of woodworking is largely unremarkable. We’ve got phytolith [1] and microwear [2] studies showing unambiguous evidence of woodworking going back at least 1.5 million years. Wood tools just don’t survive very long, so this find is most notable for its preservation.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...