This is the best summary I could come up with:
The University of Liverpool scientist leads the Deep Roots of Humanity research project, which excavated and analysed the ancient timber.
Team member Perrice Nkombwe, from the Livingstone Museum, in Zambia, said: "I was amazed to know that woodworking was such a deep-rooted tradition.
Until now, evidence for the human use of wood has been limited to making fire and crafting tools such as digging sticks and spears.
Grains of rock absorb natural radioactivity from the environment over time - essentially charging up like tiny batteries, as Prof Duller put it.
“With this discovery, we hope to enrich our collection and use the finds to inform the interpretation of the woodworking tradition in Zambia,” Ms Nkombwe said.
Continuing the work at the Kalambo Falls site, she added, “has the potential to deepen our knowledge of ancient woodworking techniques, craftsmanship, and human interactions with the environment”.
The original article contains 652 words, the summary contains 144 words. Saved 78%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
SportsRulesOpinions@lemmy.world 1 year ago
If this pans out it’ll be insane.
fossilesque@mander.xyz 1 year ago
It’s silly to me for us to assume that we’re the only hominids that built nests and that we assume these nests are a new thing.
snooggums@kbin.social 1 year ago
Forget nests, humans and their ancestors have clearly had many thousands of years of building things based on our physiological traits of standing upright and dexterous hands. Standing upright means we are open and visible, so we would need shelter and being long distance travelers that aren't huge and tough like cattle we would need the ability to build as needed. Having dexterous hands is mostly an advantage when we use them to make things, so early hominids having opposable thumbs suggests that it was an advantage tied to something like tool creation.
So while the not too distant ice age wiped out most evidence of human culture over 20k or so years ago, it is extremely likely that humanity has been building complex and creative structures for hundreds of thousands of years that has been lost to time. Not to mention the widespread megalithic structures all over the world that suggest a long history of building being widespread cultural knowledge.
Not like ancient aliens lost sci-fi tech bullshit. Just regular old human ingenuity that has helped us live in every climate zone and survive ice ages without needing do develop fur coats like kiss mammals. We have been making our fur coats and shelters and tools for all of those millenia.