https://apnews.com/article/oldest-wooden-tools-marathousa-1-...
https://archaeologymag.com/2026/01/430000-year-old-wooden-to...
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 preserved tools" said the ad -> I bought some, surprisingly expensive for a hammer -> it's a mishap and inform piece of wood -> straight to dump
There's bound to be a lot of vital archeological evidence of the development of humans and our cousins below the water. Past peoples probably lived near the coasts and the rising water would have obscured or destroyed a lot of the evidence of their existence. I think a lot about what must be or have been just out of reach of our current studies.
That’s rapidly changing. Underwater archaeology has been going through a mini-Renaissance in the last thirty years thanks to multibeam and side scan sonar. Now with the proliferation of underwater drones capable of high-resolution 3D photogrammetry, that is rapidly accelerating into a full blown revolution. As usual the problem is lack of funding to do excavations. There are far more known sites than there are funds to study them.
The thing I’m continually surprised by is the usage of obsidian by nearly every ancient-ish civilization. The usage of bow & arrow predates farming, insane.
I guess that before metal working, obsidian would have been the best knife edge available.
It's a far, far better knife edge than metal even now. It's used in some specialized scalpels. It's just fragile.
Not really that insane, hunting is a much faster reward cycle than farming. On the surface, it makes sense that tools for hunting are produced earlier than tools for farming
Estimates will continue to go earlier, and more things that were, or are, alive will be considered exceptional. Seems to be a function of looking.
> 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*.
I am tired of this. No. Archeologist only claim what they have discovered. They don't speculate because they work based on evidences. Journalists should better. This wording sounds like archeologists were wrong. That only fuel the narrative that layman's opinion is more informed than professionals.
I'm not so sure if that's too wrong.
Science works by scientist having a model of reality and then testing that model against reality, gathering evidence that fits or doesn't fit the model, evaluating how well the model corresponds to reality.
If there is a widely accepted model in the archaeological community, and the new data contradicts it, the wording "than archaeologists thought" seems plausible enough.
Of course, depending on the model, the model itself might admit regimes of "non-applicability", or have some measure of confidence... If archeologists have large uncertainty whether human ancestors made tools 500,000 years back or not, then they shouldn't be surprised upon finding evidence that the ancestors did.
I don't know any specifics about this case, just arguing that that kind of wording by itself is not always wrong by default.
True but every science headline is misleading, loaded or exaggerated. My pet peeve "X found where it should not exist". What they mean is "scientists are pleased because there's some new evidence that is not explained by their current models and that means they get to improve their models which is the goal of science anyway, so pretty much just another day for science but glad to keep you updated"
I wonder how would we react with tools dating back to, say, 5MY ago ...
That would shake our knowledge from the foundations.
No it wouldn't, as we already think it's pretty likely. Chimpanzees use tools, so our most recent common ancestor with them, something like 6 million years ago, may well have used tools too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_use_by_non-humans, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee%E2%80%93human_last_...
I don't think so, have you read 'The Bonobo and the atheist'? Humans are not the only ones using tools and in reality there isn't much difference between humans and animals. The conclusion I get from the book is that the only difference is religion. Although, I have a feeling that humans do have a more developed intellect (problem solving) but this was not explored in the book.
5 Million years ago would be insane... but what about..
5 BILLION years ago...
we might find some, in 4,5 billion years
Ok, since I moved to the US from Europe a few years ago my perception of wood has changed a lot, especially for construction. Seeing this reinforces my view.
Wood lasts for fucking ever under the proper conditions. Old construction in Europe often only had the beams made of wood, and I always thought that was orders of magnitude more durable than wooden houses, like thousands of years vs decades. I don’t think that’s true anymore.
And this might be one of the few environmentally friendly decisions that Americans got better than Europeans, I guess. Wood is still prevalent in construction here, and as far as I know concrete and cement production are quite bad.
BTW, I’m a total ignorant about all this so just intuition and probably wrong
Northern Europe still uses wood, se have a lot of it.
>concrete and cement production are quite bad.
Modern concrete construction uses iron rebar liberally. That means every concrete structure built today will crack and crumble in a few hundred years at most, as the iron absorbs oxygen, it swells from the rust. Which is a shame, roman concrete buildings without rebar will still be standing 1000s of years from now.
How about petrified wood? Would that also crack and crumble in the long run?
Roman construction was also much less efficient because they had no material (besides wood) capable of carrying load in tension. Rebar allows us to make cheap practical structures that are impossible with just concrete - roman style or not.
It would be quite fascinating to see what kind of structure we could produce if we decided to make the longest lasting cement structures we could create with modern technology, and assuming minimal maintenance over the lifetime of the building. A one-and-done kind of structure.
I bet we could do fairly well. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of years. We've learned a lot about how to form exceptionally long lasting cement. We just choose not to do it that way, most of the time.
It's not totally a "decision" on the part of the Americans to use a lot of wood in construction. It's just that America has tons of space, including space useful for growing Douglas Fir and Southern Yellow Pine, which then can be turned in to 2x4s and other construction lumber.
Most of Europe long ago exhausted easily accessible natural forest resources, and where it's not densely populated tends to prefer using land to do other stuff (like grow food). Hence, stone and concrete and similar materials in European construction.
While some lumber production happens in the United States, most lumber is imported from Canada. That's because while the USA does have good tracts of land on which lumber is grown, Canada has much, much more. This is why you see "Made in Canada" stamped on quite a lot of plywood and plenty of timer used in residential construction.
The part that I don't quite know how to make sense of is why Canadian producers seem to have a near monopoly on sandpaper products.
What's incredible about this too is they found it in England, which means they had to first build a boat to get there and leave the tools on the island
England wasn’t always an island
Now find the tools used by the Egyptians or the people before that lived there and made the tool markings..
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[stub for offtopicness]
Website has problems, NYT version: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/26/science/archaeology-neand...
Thanks, we've switched to that from https://archaeologymag.com/2026/01/430000-year-old-wooden-to... and put a couple extra links in the toptext.
That is paywalled. Try https://archive.ph/mHlUT
Recommend mods change it to this (or parent)
Website appears to be down from too much traffic
I actually saw the website, pictures of the tools and text and everything before it gave me the database error message. It would have been totally fine.
Ironically even archive.is just has the 503 page cached.
Yeah, that was me. I threw the link into archive.is to check if it had a snapshot, but it just created a shanpshot of the 503 before I could figure out how to cancel it.
Top box: my url is alive and I want to archive it's contents
Bottom box: I want to search the archive for saved snapshots
I have defaulted to using the bottom box first, since it's usually much faster
God made things earlier than previously thought. Ha
For anyone else absolutely baffled by this statement: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jun/09/75-million-y...
Red blood cells, and collagen from dinosaur bones. With the idea that even current museum hosted bones might have more??? Today is a wild day for me.
It hit the HN hug of death it seems :(
the site never loads
maybe the trump administration can learn something from these tools to offset the 10k STEM PhDs that have resigned and moved onto to greener pastures...
I have always believed that the human evolution consensus which is usually based upon finds of advanced toolmaking in absence of culture cues, to be questionable by orders of magnitude. So it seemed natural to simply double generational concepts of the village along a trade route, from ~500kya (like the Nile) to 1 million YA as a hyperstable span of evolution of the 'trade route village'. I even wrote a book about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtxgpaXp9vA that might seem like whole fiction. But science seems not to ask, how many times might we have started over?
That's ridiculous. Scientists absolutely ask these questions. We just don't have the answers so we don't make assumptions. It is implicitly assumed there is an enormous amount of proto- and pre-human culture and technology that is undiscovered or undiscoverable. We have very long known that hominins made tools, art and structures out of organic material that has decayed beyond our ability to detect.
I can’t be the only one that saw the aforementioned tools and thought: did I misread stool?
You're the only one.
There is archaeological evidence of tools going back even further, potentially over a million years, but it's ignored for the usual reasons of dogma and not conveniently fitting into the paradigm of the current priestly class. I'd highly recommend this talk Michael Cremo (author of "Forbidden Archaeology") gave for this "Authors at Google" program in 2014:
That book name is... off putting, and his wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Cremo) isn't encouraging in a quick scan...
It instantly destroys all credibility. Any serious theory would present itself on its own merits rather than going for the victimhood angle. When you title your book in such a way as to push the perceived victimhood to the forefront, it indicates that there is no convincing evidence and therefore the only option left to you is to play at the conspiracy angle, cursing the shadowy figures who are suppressing the "forbidden truth".
Why not just watch the talk and hear his argument from himself?
Wikipedia has a bias against everything outside of mainstream academia, there are activist groups like Guerrilla Skeptics that go through articles and rewrite them to undermine anything remotely fringe. It's not as objective as people like to think it is.
Because life is short and we have to prioritize the talks we watch. And if you've seen enough bullshit, you can smell it coming. So if someone gives strong signals that they're full of it, we don't bother.
Because charismatic people can make us believe just about anything, and if we think we're immune to that we just haven't met the right charismatic person. I like to do some searching when something jumps out at me, like his book name, to get some background before I invest more time into the topic.
The self professed skeptic community is pretty extreme. Their arguments so often go beyond occams razor that is essentially absurdism to get around anything non-material or unexplained by current science / thinking.
Can you imagine was a useless mishmash of lies Wikipedia would be if it did not have a bias for mainstream academia!? Wither epistemology?
why do you think would this info be surpressed?
I'm not the person you asked this of, but I've worked in museums and research settings and can lob a response your way.
Ultimately, it's that scientists are humans, too. Despite some of them really making their research data-forward, things like tenure, career, funding, and even who would publish your work now and in the future all create normal human environments that reward small, incremental changes to a body of knowledge that don't upset the apple cart, not discoveries that suggest huge changes. In fact, large changes and discoveries can be resisted and denied further research in favor of the status quo.
This is not a new phenomenon by any means:
Both warm-blooded dinosaurs and the Chicxulub impact were both theories dismissed as fringe for decades before overwhelming evidence led to them being accepted as likely. In no small way thanks to Jurassic Park.
Recall that eugenics and phrenology both used to be widely accepted scientific "fact."
100 fairly prominent scientists signed a letter stating emphatically that Einstein's Theory of Relatively was categorically wrong and should be retracted.
Plate tectonics was seen as fanciful crackpot musings for decades. The author of the original theory died 30 years before plate tectonics was even considered possible.
Germ theory was dismissed for most of Louis Pasteur's lifetime, despite being able to literally show people yeast in a microscope.
Helicentrism has a storied past.
Quantum theory was also denied heavily at first. Now it saves photos to our hard drives.
And how many times has the earliest dates of hominids and tool use and human thresholds of development been pushed back by tens of thousands of years?
This is not an exhaustive list, by any means.
So we have ancient examples and modern ones - and everything in between. So the level of education or scientific progress or equipment are not the cause. Humans are. Humans do this all the time. So until overwhelming evidence surfaces, which can take decades or longer, claims like this shouldn't be dismissed out of hand until proven solidly in error. A theory is a theory, so let it be a theory.
>Both warm-blooded dinosaurs and the Chicxulub impact were both theories dismissed as fringe for decades before overwhelming evidence led to them being accepted as likely. In no small way thanks to Jurassic Park.
I mean that's how science works. Things can be dismissed until they're proven true. If there's a valid path to finding out it's true then you can try to get funding, it just takes work and convincing people as you're competing for sparse resources. And getting egg on your face is also part of the process.
>So until overwhelming evidence surfaces, which can take decades or longer, claims like this shouldn't be dismissed out of hand until proven solidly in error. A theory is a theory, so let it be a theory.
I like how the word “overwhelming” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
> I've worked in museums and research settings
You've worked in those settings, and you think archaeologists reject tool use older than 1 mya?
Also, you don't understand that science is a process, based on evidence, and revision is an essential part of that process? Archaeology especially advances regularly, because evidence can be relatively very rare. If they weren't revising it, it would mean the whole research enterprise - to expand knowledge - was failing.
> how many times has the earliest dates of hominids and tool use and human thresholds of development been pushed back by tens of thousands of years?
I don't know, how many times? Tool use is universally believed, in the field, to have begun at least 2.58 million years ago, and with strong evidence for 3.3 mya. Tens of thousands of years isn't in the debate. See this subthread:
It took about 30 years for every geologist to reach consensus on tectonic plates and continental drift. Old heads who'd invested a lot of their credibility arguing against it had a lot to lose by admitting they were wrong, so they refused to do it.
Bill Bryson's book A Short History of Nearly Everything is where I'm taking that from. It's a great read and shows all the ways in which scientists failed to see what was under their nose for decades before finally figuring out, which makes one wonder what's currently ripe for the picking.
I think it just doesn't fit into the accepted timeline so it's mostly ignored. This is a common pattern with scientific discovery where evidence that contradicts the prevailing paradigm is ignored and builds up until it can no longer be ignored and causes a paradigm shift. This idea comes from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn.
I think you're making that up. It is widely known that tools predate humans.
so you're saying archeology and anthropology advance one uncovered ancient gravesite at a time?
"extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".
As long as there is low number of samples with such age you should always assume methodological mistakes in measurement
> There is archaeological evidence of tools going back even further, potentially over a million years, but it's ignored for the usual reasons of dogma and not conveniently fitting into the paradigm of the current priestly class.
? I don't think you can find anyone in archaeology who says tool use began less than 1 million years ago (mya). Maybe you mean something else?
The univeral consensus in archaeology says tools emerged either 3.3 mya, which is still subject to debate last I knew, and certainly by 2.58 mya - the Odowan industry famously discovered by the Leakeys in the Oldovai Gorge in Tanzania, in 1969.
The same consensus continues with the development of the more advanced Acheulean industry ~1.76 mya, which dominated until ~ 400,000 years ago (arguably the most successful technology ever).
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> Am I taking crazy pills, or are you?
Please edit out swipes, as the site guidelines ask (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are.
Your comment would be fine without that first bit.
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...
> 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, but that's NYT science journalism for you. I can't think of a single charitable reading of that sentence that in any way makes sense, especially "indicates that our human ancestors were making tools even earlier than archaeologists thought". Archaeologists have known that our ancestors have been making tools for millions of years since the 1850s. It took less than half a century for archaeologists to figure that out after William Smith invented stratigraphy.
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 many different techniques (carbon dating only works up to about 60k years)
[3] https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/behavior/getting-food/o...
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)
Thanks! I'll add them to my reading list for today. Its going to be interesting, I can already tell.
To put it into perspective, we did not invent fire.
Use of fire considerably pre-dates H. sapiens, with anthropological evidence dating to 1.7 -- 2 million years ago. Sapiens diverged from common ancestors about 600,000 years ago.
"We" (Homo sapiens) did not invent fire. Our predecessor species were already using it.
Firestarting is harder to pin down and may be within the scope of homo evolution.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_fire_by_early_human...>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human#Evolution>
You and everyone else know exactly what I meant but whatever. Not sure why I train AI on this site anymore.
Which is what the comment you’re replying to means by “invent”.
Perhaps it's always been burning, since the world's been turning?
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.
>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...
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.
> 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.
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...
> 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-...
> 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.
No. We simply engage in cost-benefit analysis, because we have limited resources.
Entirely wiping out an enemy population can be incredibly risky as they'll try to also wipe you out in response. It consumes enormous resources as people on your own side get killed, your resources get used up, etc. It weakens your group making you more vulnerable to attack from third parties.
Most of the time, it's just bad strategy.
You don't need to invent instincts or tendencies or claim something is more subtle or targeted when the vastly simpler explanation is just that it's all just cost-benefit.
>going to use a charged word
I honestly have no clue what word you used was 'charged'. Considering any of those words charged makes me worry how far political correctness has gone! (I'm assuming, I suppose, politically charged?)
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.
That's kinda ridiculous to think we're not animals anymore, our nature is to use intellect for survival (and though we know we can reduce suffering further we choose not to).
As equal to their ability to cause it. It’s this dichotomy that makes us, human. We have the power of destruction, the power of criticism, the power of nurturing, and the power to advance. We are amazing animals.
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> Today, however, we are more than our natures.
This really depends on how you define nature. Attempts to delineate what is and is not nature tend to be motivated.
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"
Of course we are the baddies. That’s the narrative every time people need to defend terrible behavior lead by sociopaths: but that’s just human nature. Very practical fallback.
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).
Army ants do something similar as well.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ants-and-the-art-...
> (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.
Agree with your this-is-not-unique-to-primates take. But why is genocidal not accurate?
It’s an interesting interpretation, but it’s sounds all very unsubstantiated. Speculation it seems to me.
Every part is unsubstantiated. For starters, for the vast majority of H. Sapiens existence on earth--from 300,000 years ago to about 45,000 years ago, we shared the world with 4 or 5 other hominids that we know about. (Neanderthal, Denisoven, H. Luzonensis, H. Floresiensis, and still perhaps a few H. Erectus, and no doubt even more we haven't found yet.)
That's 250,000 years of coexistence. We know that we sheboinked with at least two other species, probably more, because we still carry their genes to this day. So much so that it couldn't have been just a sheboink or two; we sheboinked over extended periods of time, i.e. we formed families with Neanderthals and Denisovens.
We have no evidence of warfare between the species. I.E. We have found no Neanderthal skull with an arrowhead in it, for example. Besides the fact that we are the only ones left, I don't see any substantiation at all.
It is a mystery why they are not still here. But the last 50,000 years, since the end of the last Ice Age, has been very hard on human species, for some reason. We are the only humans left, what every got them might get us too if we let it.
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
Animals being tasty is a trait we heavily select for. I don't think chickens have any of the traits you describe but they're certainly not at risk of extinction.
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.
It’s so cool and strange to think we have examples of tools that literally predate humans.
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...
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
Most recently (January 19, 2026): cows
>Flexible use of a multi-purpose tool by a cow
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(25)...
We are talking about tool manufacture here, however, not just about tool use.
So cool! Thanks for the info.
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.
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].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFWTXU2jE14
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7sJq2XUiy8
This process also display coordination within a group and memory. Quite impressive.
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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).
Thanks for these sources. Archeology definitely is a big known unknown for me, so even getting started reading basic info about this is rough. I appreciate the links and terms.
Awesome. I've watched plenty of Miniminuteman (Milo Rossi) videos, but his tend to be more pop-sci/debunking outrageous claims and less foundationally educational. I'll check this channel out too.
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.
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-...
Not to mention the Iron Maiden song! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SF7cWpBTZ6s
And cooking kills like 99+% of pathogens, which freed us from much of the parasite/disease stress other animals must live with.
When is the first evidence for cooking?
I had thought (perhaps wrongly) that our brains got a massive "boost" in capacity when our ancestors moved to coastal areas and the diet was dominated by (Omega 3 heavy) shellfish and crustaceans.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9505798/
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!
What if the meaning / definition of ETA when used like this?
Others already clarified the confusion about your question. Just wanted to note that the HN audience is not going to hug-of-death nytimes.com.
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!
Cow tools: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj0n127y74go
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_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?
I went through public elementary and high school. The amount of world history taught there is vanishingly small.
Just for fun, ask some high schoolers who were the major combatants in WW2.
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.
Well, most cattle aren't given much to stimulate them, and they're bred for meat production and complacency. People aren't exactly looking to make the life of cattle fun or enjoyable.
That's the goal of https://www.cowbrushes.com/store ! They provide mental stimulation and scritches for cows. Results in extra milk, too.
We have evidence that non Homo sapiens bipeds (e.g., Neanderthals, Homo habilis) used tools far before we came onto the scene. A long lineage of hominin species came before humans!
And even today, our species' cousins (Chimps) are rudimentary tool users. Recently saw a documentary where they evolved their 'tools' to get honey from a 1-stick approach to a 3-stick approach.
The big secret: certain pools of ancient humans have been smart for alot longer than modern evolutionary theory wants to admit
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.
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.
It wasn’t Homo sapiens most likely. We have found stone tools made by Erectus.
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