Oldest Technology Gets Older

Ephemeris writes: ""A collection of bone tools dating back 70,000 years is raising new questions about human evolution. The discovery suggests that our early human ancestors were far more sophisticated than previously thought..." This story has the details of the find. Any armchair anthropologists want to toss up ideas as to whether or not spoken language (a necessary precursor to the recent anomoly known as civilization) was alive & kicking 70,000 years ago?"

Eighty to 100,000 years?

[yerricde]

From the article:

Royden Yates, one of the team that discovered the tools, told the BBC: "Every indication that we have been able to gather suggests that we are looking at something between 80 and 100,000 years old.

In other words, the bone sculptures may just barely be old enough not to qualify for effectively perpetual copyright under the Sonny "Bone"-o Act [wikipedia.com]?

(Yes, I knew they meant 80K to 100K years, but I couldn't resist.)

This should be expected

[JMZero]

I would hope that by (now-70000 years) man would have been using simple tools. 70000 years is a significant, but not a huge evolutionary interval.

Current human language is a tremendous evolutionary accomplishment, both in terms of mechanics and brain wiring (I believe the brain is wired to learn language - it has a "Language Acquisition Device"). Surely 70000 years ago these structures were developing, and surely they were giving evolutionary advantages to those brutes possessed of them. Evidence: our current level of ability.

Optimism

[zpengo]

Any armchair anthropologists want to toss up ideas as to whether or not spoken language (a necessary precursor to the recent anomoly known as civilization) was alive & kicking 70,000 years ago?"

70,000 years ago? What about whether or not it's alive and kicking today?

Re:Optimism

[Valdrax]

"Any armchair anthropologists want to toss up ideas as to whether or not spoken language (a necessary precursor to the recent anomoly known as civilization) was alive & kicking 70,000 years ago?"

70,000 years ago? What about whether or not it's alive and kicking today?

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Re:Atlantis

[Rubyflame]

That theory sounds pretty crackpot to me. How did the people get to Europa? Big stone-age spaceships? ;-)

Anyhow, it seems unlikely to me that any culture could last for the 70,000 years needed for the Egyptian and American civilizations to arise. And if these people already knew how to build pyramids, what were they doing for the past 70,000 years anyway? Watching TV?

For that matter, if any culture from 70,000 years ago did survive that long, it would not have remained confined to Egypt and America. It would be everywhere.

Mixing up

[Man of E]

Whoa, slow down, things are getting mixed up. Old stone tools have nothing to do with human language at all. While language may be a prerequisite for civilization, stone tools are not. We can hypothesize all we want on when our ancestors learned to speak (and somehow, we'd have to define what a true "language" is, versus a collection of grunts and hand signals), but this discovery sheds no light on it at all.

All we know from this is that people used bone tools; I assume this means knives and spear heads, mostly. The article also mentions "modern behaviour" - I'm not quite sure what that is, exactly. Still I doubt that creating bone tools (which is arguably not easy) requires "civilization" or "language". That's a different discussion entirely.

Can anyone clarify what "Modern behaviour" means in this context?

Re:Mixing up

[re-geeked]

Oh, I think he just tossed that in to give us TWO things to talk about.

However, there is an association between tool-making skills and language skills, that being the ability to think abstractly. To become a good toolmaker, one must transfer skills and designs to new situations -- new materials, new uses, new toolmakers. Which means being able to consider the tools and designs as separate from their manifestation in any single artifact. What are those separated abstractions, and how are they remembered, recalled, reused, refined, and passed on? Isn't something that performs as a language required?

Also, the questions of "when did language emerge" and "when did bone tools emerge" are parallel in that they're versions of: "how far do cultural adaptations lag physical adaptations? and is there a lag at all?" Did shorter palms and bipedalism allow us to stumble across toolmaking, or did a toolmaking culture make these post-ape adaptations advantageous? Similarly, did the restructuring of our throat and vocal chords (bipedalism at play again) allow a richer language, or did a precursor language afford an advantage to those with the new physiology?

This find is another in a pattern that turns the usual "now that we could walk and sing and thread a needle, we learned all sorts of cool stuff" on its head, into "early needs to walk and sing and thread a needle helped select for advanced versions of these traits."

Logically, does it make any sense that natural selection would lead to our amazing cultural capacities if culture itself wasn't an element of selection?

Re:Mixing up

[transcend.ca]

modern behaviour... meaning I guess the exact same as you except didnt grow up watching care bears, sesame street, and reading books. Regardless of what people say about language, it's been established that even hamsters have sohpisticated communications between them. I doubt there could have been a time where we *didn't* have any communication and just wandered around mutely by ourselves. The fact that we can even communicate with foreigners while knowing no language of theirs by signing, demonstrating, etc. shows (to me anyway) it's unlikely that there was a time where there was "no language"... IMHO as soon as we could stand upright and use our vocal cords to make complex sounds, our ability to communicate verbally probably took off.

ok

[blendin]

people can barely talk today...besides...the earth is only 6000 years old

Just where I'd expect to find them

[ynotds]

The collection of 28 bone tools and related artefacts were found in Blombos cave, located on a cliff overlooking the Indian Ocean at the extreme tip of South Africa.

As an "armchair anthropologist" my working hypothesis is that homo sapiens sapiens differentiated on the west coast of Africa (yeah I know that needs narrowing down) during the previous interglacial and developed a coast hugging culture which enabled them to expand along the mostly narrow and now submerged continental shelf to reach eastern Indonesia by 60K BP.

From there the story is pretty well convered in Tim Flannery's Future Eaters [amazon.com] with clearly modern humans island hopping to an Australian continent where erectus had never ventured, and where they found themselves "masters" of the earth, establishing the cultual foundations to underpin 60,000 years of environmental mayhem.

It's my best guess that h.s.s. making the step from being a sexually selected "singing ape" to instinctive users of recursive language [amazon.com] provided the reproductive isolation needed for speciation, for bone tools, and for pretty much else we nowadays take for granted.

Re:Just where I'd expect to find them

[Cy Guy]

As an "armchair anthropologist" my working hypothesis is that homo sapiens sapiens differentiated on the west coast of Africa (yeah I know that needs narrowing down)

Just curious, but don't you mean the East coast of Africa where Ethiopia and Kenya, and thus Lucy and all the various Leakey fossil finds were located? I mean I guess it's possible that man's ancestors from millions of years ago at some point migrated from the East coast of Africa to the West coast prior to evolving into hss but you should provide some additional basis for that theory if that is the case.

I'm leaning more to the southwest

[ynotds]

Just found an interesting recent paper [ramsdale.org] from my armchair via Google, the paper saying with respect to a mtDNA divergence tree:

Whilst diverse, deep-rooting clusters remain in Africa, with different clusters in different parts of the continent, the tree suggests that a single sequence type expanded both through eastern and western Africa and out into Eurasia.

I guess my view may have been originally coloured by the probably naive expectation that the Afro-Americans who provided their mtDNA for the original sample were more likely to be from West Africa, but there is lots of other evidence that places the likely site a long way from the well known pre-erectus sites in East Africa.

In particular, more modern sites tend to be in South Africa, althoug this may in part be because it has been better surveyed than much of the continent. I also see a likelihood of the Kalahari serving to isolate sub-poulations, as evidenced by it being the last refuge for some relatively divergent African peoples following the Bantu expansion.

None of this is any more than suggestive. What I really want is a site where the sea level changes of the last interglacial could have been catalytic.

Language may have been there...

[KublaiKhan]

....just not in a very sophisticated form. For an analogy, we can look at computers. The language today, we can compare to Visual Basic--fluffy, easy, and meaningless. The language of the Elder Days, though, would best be represented by Assembler--raw, not pretty, and entirely utilitarian. I dare say there was spoken language, of a sort....it just would not have been very sophisticated.
No offence to those who must program in VB intended.