
Ancient human ancestors carved handaxe from a hippo femur 1.4M years ago: study - clouddrover
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/17/world/ancient-tool-hippo-handaxe-scn-trnd/index.html
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bosswipe
Back of the napkin estimation: a million years is 40,000 Homo generations, you
might get a valuable mental mutation maybe every 500 generations, that's only
80 mental mutations between us and the Homo species that made this axe. So
these guys were just about as smart as us.

On the other hand, modern human's super-intelligence might have come from a
lucky admixture of Neanderthral and Denisovan genes rather than slow mutation.
There's evidence from cultural artifacts that even 100,000 years ago humans
were less intelligent then us.

~~~
zipwitch
Perhaps not less intelligent, but just possessed of a mental framework that
was less capable.

From a paper describing "the Romulus and Remus hypothesis"[1],

"the leap from rich-vocabulary non-recursive communication system to recursive
language 70,000 years ago was associated with acquisition of a novel component
of imagination, called Prefrontal Synthesis, enabled by a mutation that slowed
down the prefrontal cortex maturation simultaneously in two or more children"

1
[https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/166520v9.full](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/166520v9.full)

And here's a summary: [https://neurosciencenews.com/language-imagination-
evolution-...](https://neurosciencenews.com/language-imagination-
evolution-14656/)

~~~
canjobear
The idea that recursion was the key mutation that led to language is not doing
so well lately. It turns out that non-human animals already can produce
sequences with recursive structure [1]. It's also not clear that all languages
have nested recursive structures.

[1]
[https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/26/eaaz1002.full](https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/26/eaaz1002.full)

~~~
andrewflnr
The hypothesis here is quite a bit more nuanced and specific than that. As a
laymam, I found it worthwhile to read the whole article. In the course of
making its case it touches on many fascinating topics. I found the case quite
compelling, though I can't rule out that someone more familiar with the facts
can poke holes in it.

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decasteve
What was published about the Kalahari Bushmen by the Marshall family (Laurence
Marshall, co-founder of Raytheon) provides some of the best real connections
we have to early human life.

If you’re interested in this stuff, I really enjoyed Elizabeth Marshall
Thomas’s “The Old Way” and recommend it.

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catalogia
I wonder if they were hunting hippos, or if they scavenged the bone from a
carcass. Hunting hippos must either be an act of extreme confidence, or
extreme desperation.

~~~
prennert
Humans have hunted mammoths and other dangerous animals with low tech weapons
and a lot of ingenuity, planning and teamwork.

So I would not be surprised if it was extreme confidence.

~~~
catalogia
They often used things like cliffs to help hunt mammoths though, right? Seems
a trickier thing to accomplish with hippos, although I suppose you could lure
them away from the water. Planning and teamwork must have been key.

~~~
arrosenberg
Dig a pit, fill it with sharp sticks, and cover with branches and brush. Then
all you have to do is taunt a hippo into charging.

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29athrowaway
Curious fact: the hippos that were imported to Colombia by the infamous narco
Pablo Escobar are now an invasive species.

\- 4 hippos were introduced to Escobar's private zoo in 1981.

\- The animals escaped in 1993.

\- By 2007, they were approximately 16.

\- In 2020, they're at least 80.

\- By the end of next decade it is estimated they will be at least 150.

Those hippos are reported to have increased fertility. African hippos begin
reproduction at age 7, while Colombian hippos begin at age 3.

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sradman
> The craftsmanship of the tools at the Konso site, as well as other sites,
> "suggest that Homo erectus technology was more sophisticated and versatile
> than we had thought. And the bone handaxe occurrence fits in nicely," Suwa
> said.

H. erectus used advanced flaking techniques to create the hand axe. Tools,
fire, advanced social organization, and migration through a large part of
Eurasia; all without spoken language.

I don’t think the name H. erectus is meaningful to the general population. I
wonder if we shouldn’t associate Turkana Boy as a stand-in much the way Lucy
is well known in popular culture. This is a unique and important Homo species;
“ancient human ancestor” is too nebulous for my liking.

~~~
amanaplanacanal
How do we know they didn’t have spoken language? I haven’t heard that before.

~~~
sradman
According to Wikipedia [1] the science is not as settled as I thought but my
understanding is that from the nerves needed for breath control to various
vocal apparatus, erectus’ speech would have been primitive at best. Speech,
however, is not the only way to express language.

An innovation in spoken language is one of the theories used to explain the
Great Leap in modern sapiens.

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_erectus#Language](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_erectus#Language)

~~~
sebastialonso
I'm trying to come up with alternative ways to convey meaning as precise and
detailed as to carve handaxes from bone without using spoken language,
primitive or not.

Maybe some mix of sign language, sound and pantomime?

~~~
mkl
Hand axes would be easy to convey: demonstrate creation and use, repeatedly,
and help learners do both. Homo Erectus made hand axes the same way for a
million years, without much innovation, to the point that it's been
hypothesised they were more like bird song or bird nests than cultural
artefacts. See e.g.
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5066817/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5066817/)

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dutch3000
this is a complete joke. probably a bone fragment sheered off from the hippo
fighting with a saber tooth tiger. these “discoveries” from so long ago are at
best theories. maybe a since extinct giant beaver, carnivore rodent species
was chewing into the femur to create a notch to secure it to another bone
while framing out it’s bone, beaver den.

~~~
yobi-ponti
Academics, under pressure to produce new studies, rushing to conclusions and
making lofty claims on limited evidence? No way! Not these people! /s

