
45000 years ago in Ethiopia humans built a paint workshop; used it for millennia - xaedes
https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/05/for-4500-years-stone-age-humans-returned-to-this-mysterious-cave/
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JPLeRouzic
It is an incredibly long time, but places like Ounjougo in Mali have been
inhabited for hundred of thousand years by several species of humans:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ounjougou](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ounjougou)

An explanation lies in the fact that in those ancient times there was little
numbers of humans, sometimes less than 20,000 (on the whole earth) so it is
not surprizing they inhabited the same places over and over. They had no
manpower to even build a village. That would come much later with neolithics
when population will explode in numbers, but perhaps not in quality of life.

~~~
FilterSweep
> they inhabited the same places over and over

It must be jarring for a new cohort of humans to come across artifacts
invented and developed by predecessor that they can't understand.

Our archival-based approach to history is a complete opposite, but I wonder if
the relics of the past helped influence the future generations of ancient
human.

~~~
gumby
> It must be jarring for a new cohort of humans to come across artifacts
> invented and developed by predecessor that they can't understand.

As others have pointed out your position is a modern one; the "wonders of the
ancients" is a several thousand year old perspective. And in fact for a good
chunk of recent European history (last couple of millennia) the prevailing
view was one of declinism when compared to the Romans of the late Republic and
early empire.

But we don't know if the users of this cave had that jarring experience. 4500
years is a long time but it's quite possible -- likely even -- that there was
continuous use, so it was "just part of the landscape" with knowledge
accreting and being passed on.

The reason I say "likely" is that presumably the color technology evolved over
some period of time, and if the users died off and the cave was later
rediscovered after a gap, the new discoverers would have to re-invent a bunch
of the tech somewhat from scratch (although results and possibly raw materials
would be right there to provide hints).

It's interesting to speculate what kind of speech and culture they might have
had.

~~~
simonh
Technology development was unbelievably slow back then, so re-inventing tech,
which seems like a routine thing to do to us, was next to unimaginable back
then. We see exactly the same artifices made exactly the same way over
stretches of eover a million years (the Acheulian had axe). In that era lost
technology was simply gone for all intents and purposes at a community level.
This site lies in the Middle Palaeolithic era which lasted about 300 thousand
years.

~~~
gumby
Even with good communication that remained true until very recently: read the
debates on the constitutional roots of the US patent system and it was an
explicit "bribe" that you received a government-guaranteed monopoly in
exchange for explaining how to make your invention. Otherwise the information
could easily be lost. Obviously that's not how the system works today

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ilamont
There are other sites that served similar functions for ancient peoples over
long periods of time. I recently learned about one of them in the Blue Hills
just south of Boston; it was a quarry used by native people for thousands of
years to make stone tools such as spears and axes:

 _Wampatuk hill, one of the many that make up the ridges of the Blue Hills, is
made entirely out of a material called rhyolite. Essentially this hill
represents a portion of the lava column located within the volcano that
solidified so quickly that it’s silica (or glass)- rich magma turned into a
crystalline fine grained blue rock with tiny flecks of quartz. It is the
natural blue color of the stones of the Blue Hills that gave the area its
name, and it is this one particular type of blue stone that brought Native
people from the surrounding area to Wampatuk to mine and work its natural
stone. The entire area surrounding the hill consists of massive boulders and
outcrops of blue hills rhyolite, each one slightly different, and each one a
type of stone that I have found turned into tools that we excavate on
archaeological sites throughout the area. These range from the deep blue-black
stones east and south of Wampatuk to the oddly speckled material you find on
Wampatuk itself. This hill was a Mecca of stone tool production.

As you walk the Sawcut Notch path along the northern boundary of the park, you
will pass great dome and little dome. These two small hills are made out of
Braintree slate and Massachusett hornfels. Keep an eye open for scoop-like
marks in the stone where thousands of years before a Massachusett Native
person was standing exactly where you are striking the slate to remove
portions of it to turn into tools. Turn around and behind you will be small
mounds of stone fragments.

These mounds are not natural deposits, but heaps of stone waste, each the
result of stone striking stone working raw slate down to a spear preform or
perhaps a stone adz. These are all viewable from the path and artifacts lie
within the path itself. ...

... The natural hillside was not in fact natural, it was, and IS, a quarry of
truly monumental proportions. The terraces I had walked were not simply
erosional, but were in fact carved into the raw rock by Massachusett Native
people quarrying stone from the hillside for thousands of years, and the
mounds and pathways I had been climbing over were mountains of stone debris
consisting of Millions upon millions of stone flakes each individually struck
by human hands._

[http://friendsofthebluehills.org/keynote/](http://friendsofthebluehills.org/keynote/)

~~~
camelNotation
Exact same thing at Morrow Mountain in North Carolina. It was a quarry used by
natives for thousands of years to obtain Rhyolite for tools and weapons.
Apparently Rhyolite was a big deal everywhere. Who knew? It feels as if I'm
missing out on some sort of universal human experience of making sharp stuff
out of Rhyolite.

~~~
saalweachter
People overlooking Native American sites because they were on too large of a
scale and assuming they're natural formations is kind of a cliche at this
point - the mounds left behind by the uncreatively named mound builders are
another example.

~~~
Mendenhall
It amazes me how few know about the mounds. I look through a lot of the books
from 1840's that detail them all in Oh/Mi/IL/etc.

Link with cool descriptions and maps etc of those in Ohio. I located some on
modern maps that you can still see and that havent been disturbed in a long
long time.

[https://archive.org/details/descriptionsofan00whit](https://archive.org/details/descriptionsofan00whit)

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sneak
They made paint here for 4500 years.

People have been programming computers for 70.

That is a terrifying thought.

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carlob
Funny that the main researcher on this study on ochre would be called Rosso
(red in Italian).

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nradam123
How many things we don't know from that age! I heard Indus Valley Civilization
used to domesticate animals and had a network of sewage system in place.
Pretty cool for 3000 BC.

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kkoomi
4,500 years _

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hanselot
Good thing paintings are so tasty.

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interfixus
" _Then they treated the powder by heating it or mixing it with other
ingredients to create the world 's first paint_"

Nitpick. "The world's first _known_ paint". Future-proof and more to my taste.

~~~
phailhaus
You should comment on the article, unlikely that the author is going to read
the comments here.

