
Mystery of two-million-year-old stone balls solved - fortran77
https://www.livescience.com/ancient-stone-balls-bone-marrow.html
======
205guy
The stone ball tools in question are from the Qesem cave in Israel and dated
to 400 to 200 thousand years before present. The 2 million in the headline
must refer to other similar tools dated to earlier times but whose use
couldn’t be determined. The cave was discovered in 2010 during roadwork.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qesem_cave](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qesem_cave)

The article describes how the researchers made replicas and used those to
crush bones, which they did better than unshaped stones of similar size. The
replicas also had marks after use similar to the original artifacts. I really
like when scientists do this kind of validation.

This article taught me about ancient humans; I did not know we had such
archaeological evidence from them. I had heard that anatomically modern humans
have been around for 100 thousand years, so art in Lascaux caves from 17,000
years was made by people like us (just pre agriculture and civilization), but
I had no idea about humans 200,000 years ago using tools.

For perspective, this cave was used (likely intermittently) by humans for
200,000 years, so 100 times the Christian Era or 40 times the span recorded
history (oldest writing dating back to Egypt around 3rd millenium BC). But
then it was unused, probably covered up and undiscovered for the same length
of time until present.

~~~
irrational
It still blows my mind that a human that lived 100,000 years ago was
anatomically modern. I take that to mean that we could've taken one at birth
and raised it in a modern home and it could've grown up to receive a physics
PhD. In other words, a human 100,000+ years ago was 100% capable of
understanding general relativity, or how to design and construct the Saturn V
rocket, or any other modern STEM topic. What were we doing for all those years
banging bones with round rocks? There must've been a lot of intellectually
frustrated people.

~~~
theelous3
> There must've been a lot of intellectually frustrated people.

This is funny. As if they were just hanging around with the luxury to want to
be challenged.

They didn't live very long, their lives were harsh, they were probably banging
out kids at an unbelievable rate.

There's something just fantastically out of touch about your statement here.
Very silver platter.

Even now, there are much more intelligent people than you or I with no time or
resources for intellectual pursuits, and following that, no particular drive
either.

If you're hungry and your living conditions are risky, you probably don't care
about lacanian this or knot topography that. Much too busy.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
I recall a study of 'primitive' people of the Amazon, vs the 'modern' Japanese
farmer. The primitives spend 3-4 hours a day foraging, and the rest at
leisure. The farmer spent 10-hour days with 4 or 5 holidays per year. And
lived in simple wooden huts as well.

Depending on the environment, ancient people's lives didn't have to be nasty,
brutish and short. Leave that to the modern overcrowded slum.

~~~
nathancahill
There was once a businessman who was sitting by the beach in a small Brazilian
village.

As he sat, he saw a Brazilian fisherman rowing a small boat towards the shore
having caught quite few big fish. The businessman was impressed and asked the
fisherman, “How long does it take you to catch so many fish?”

The fisherman replied, “Oh, just a short while.”

“Then why don’t you stay longer at sea and catch even more?” The businessman
was astonished.

“This is enough to feed my whole family,” the fisherman said.

The businessman then asked, “So, what do you do for the rest of the day?”

The fisherman replied, “Well, I usually wake up early in the morning, go out
to sea and catch a few fish, then go back and play with my kids. In the
afternoon, I take a nap with my wife, and evening comes, I join my buddies in
the village for a drink — we play guitar, sing and dance throughout the
night.”

The businessman offered a suggestion to the fisherman.

“I am a PhD in business management. I could help you to become a more
successful person. From now on, you should spend more time at sea and try to
catch as many fish as possible. When you have saved enough money, you could
buy a bigger boat and catch even more fish. Soon you will be able to afford to
buy more boats, set up your own company, your own production plant for canned
food and distribution network. By then, you will have moved out of this
village and to Sao Paulo, where you can set up HQ to manage your other
branches.”

The fisherman continues, “And after that?”

The businessman laughs heartily, “After that, you can live like a king in your
own house, and when the time is right, you can go public and float your shares
in the Stock Exchange, and you will be rich.”

The fisherman asks, “And after that?”

The businessman says, “After that, you can finally retire, you can move to a
house by the fishing village, wake up early in the morning, catch a few fish,
then return home to play with kids, have a nice afternoon nap with your wife,
and when evening comes, you can join your buddies for a drink, play the
guitar, sing and dance throughout the night!”

The fisherman was puzzled, “Isn’t that what I am doing now?”

~~~
heavenlyblue
And then the fisherman dies from blood infection at 42, leaving his kids
working at the age of 10. The kids like reading about sciences but can’t find
time to do so. This story repeats for centuries.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Just like the Japanese farmer?

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yashwanthcp
From South India here. Round stone ball (like the one in the pic) is still a
very common tool in the kitchens here. We use it to quickly grind spices like
pepper or make paste of ginger or garlic.

------
hirundo
Here's a video of a capuchin monkey demonstrating the technique on a nut:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mvt9ZZis3GY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mvt9ZZis3GY)

So this is more of a simian tool than a human one.

~~~
mkl
The monkey didn't create its tool by shaping an appropriate rock to suit the
purpose.

------
gumby
Interesting: whoever edited that article miscorrected "cobble" to the likely
more familiar but incorrect "cobblestone".

I've seen a huge increase in such errors over the past decade, both in terms
and tense. I don't know how to explain it but it is discouraging. Sometimes
the errors are quite confusing until you realize what happened; this one is
quite minor.

~~~
theli0nheart
Could you please explain to the linguistically challenged amongst us what the
error is?

~~~
owyn
In this case I think cobblestone is correct? They tested natural stones
(Merriam Webster: cobblestone - "a naturally rounded stone larger than a
pebble and smaller than a boulder") vs the hand made stones for this
particular task.

"cobble" is more frequently a verb in my experience, to "cobble something
together". The dictionary does say cobblestone as a noun = cobble as a noun
though. So although they seem to be equivalent I think the original objection
is that in some dialects / regions it probably just flows better in a
sentence? Probably another subtle british vs american english thing. (I'm
american) -- edit My brit friend says it's a stone until it's in a road, then
it's a cobblestone.

~~~
snowwrestler
Cobble is what a geologist would call a medium-sized water-rounded piece of
rock if it was free or embedded naturally in a matrix (like glacial till or
sediment). They’d only call it a cobblestone in the context of like, paving a
street or driveway or something.

However, I don’t think that makes it wrong for people / other disciplines to
call it a cobblestone.

------
jhoechtl
I wonder if anybody of those experts ever tried to model a stone. With tools
available 2 million years ago which means: another stone. Crafting stone balls
to reach the marrow? Any other stone would do.

------
mncharity
I saw a paper years back, which I now fuzzily recall as having people select
which size stones felt good, felt right in their hand, and then comparing that
with their biophysics parameters like arm length, with a hypothesis that
people like the feel of stones which are optimally sized for them to throw. So
among thoughts of "innovation", perhaps include "thinking with your hands",
and even beaver-style slapping mud on trickling noises "just because". Mens et
manus (MIT's "mind and hand" motto).

------
JoeAltmaier
Confused: How long did it take scientists to figure out, stone balls were used
to hit things? Why didn't they simply ask Australian Aborigines? Oh they did,
in 1912:

[http://www.aboriginalculture.com.au/stone_tools3.html](http://www.aboriginalculture.com.au/stone_tools3.html)

------
droithomme
_> For nearly 2 million years, ancient humans crafted stones into hand-size
balls, but archaeologists were unsure why._

Wait, for nearly 2 million years ... humans? Starting and ending when? Do we
have human remains from more than 2 million years ago? Turkana Boy is 1.5
million years old and close to modern physiology, once you get back to 2
million isn't it australopithicus and such?

 _> That changed when Assaf and her team came across a cache of 30 stone balls
in Qesem Cave in Israel, where humans lived from about 400,000 to 200,000
years ago_

I wonder if 2 million is a typo for 200 thousand?

 _> these stones "might have helped enhance human caloric intake and
adaptation in the lower Paleolithic period," (2.7 million to 200,000 years
ago), at Qesem Cave and possibly beyond, the researchers wrote in the study._

Whew, OK, so 2.7 million years ago is their starting point on this. That's
interesting. Who was shaping stones that far back?

An interesting other site is the Cerutti Mastodon site in San Diego with
130kYBP mastodon bones possibly crushed with similar stones which were found
at the site.

[https://www.nature.com/articles/nature22065](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature22065)

~~~
slsii
Learning about stone "industries" is probably one of my favorite wikipedia
dives I've ever had the pleasure of experiencing.

Check out
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldowan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldowan)

You can see in the sidebar that you can traverse the industries in time
(Preceded by and Followed by links). Amazingly, these span _species_, since
stone tools were in use before Homo sapiens were on the scene.

~~~
oh_sigh
It's really incredible that at that point humans(or whatever homo species)
could 1) invent novel techniques for tool making and 2) train others, who
could train others, etc etc until the technique traveled flawless across the
accessible world.

The weirdest part for me though is how flawless transmission of the techniques
happened over a relatively short period of time, but (1) was so infrequent
that each technique lasted for tens or hundreds of thousands of years. Yet not
so infrequent that it never happened, or it only happened once.

~~~
tialaramex
There's an argument that some technologies only make sense in a particular
context and so if you invent that technology without the context it dies out.

IIRC Writing died out several times, some specialists would see the value in
recording language "permanently" and embrace the invention but nobody else
did, then circumstances result in this group dying out or at least being
dispersed and the ability is lost again.

There are some edge cases too. The invention of radio almost doesn't make
sense, because they didn't yet understand enough about electromagnetism to
make anything resembling a modern radio transmitter. The "spark gap" radio
transmitter invented was totally crazy (in modern terms it's basically a
broadband jammer and thus illegal), but if nobody else has a radio transmitter
then it's all you've got. If that technology was slightly worse (say the
maximum range is a hundred times worse or getting the transmitter working is
not merely tricky to learn but such an art that few can do it reliably even
with practice) it wouldn't be useful and would have gone nowhere until the
electromagnetic theory gets better and valves are invented.

~~~
pfdietz
The Alexanderson alternator was an intermediate technology between the spark
gap transmitters and tubes. Unlike the spark gaps transmitters, it produced a
more spectrally clean waveform, but only at modest frequencies (up to 600 kHz,
according to the Wikipedia page).

