430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found

I honestly have no clue what word you used was 'charged'. Considering any of those words charged makes me worry how far political correctness has gone! (I'm assuming, I suppose, politically charged?)

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ants-and-the-art-...

Related, I think this is also the mechanism for how religion tends to stabilize societies/give them cohesion. Rather than having an eventual positive feedback loop of division, the division is placed between some type of "good" and "evil" rather than your neighbor. The "us vs them" division that switch craves is put on something more metaphysical (and sometimes a net benefit, like defining evil as behavior destructive to societies).

Everything selectively bred due to environmental or artificial pressures to have big eyes, big heads, high vocal sounds, attributes of human babies

It is very strange and an aberration amongst species, one being tolerating other beings because of their entertainment value and the joy they give from looking at them, but seems to be consistent and validate what's happened over eons of homo sapien propagation

And lions. And banded mongooses. And meerkats. And ants. Lots and lots of ant species - they’re actually by far the worst, following colony pheromones to the end of the earth just to get a single ant. Ants that aren’t genocidal to their own species tend to be some of the worst invasive species (like Argentinian ant supercolonies).

I love me some Jane Goodall as much as the next guy but that hypothesis is not taken seriously by primatologists and using the word “genocidal” in this context would get you laughed out of the room. Lethal intergroup aggression, coalitionary killing, and raiding are all different aspects of violent behavior in animals and hominins are far from unique in demonstrating them.

That's an unsupported generalization.

The article describes "behaviors" that include "perhaps even genocide", and notes that wiping out populations exists in chimps and wolves too.

So not unique, there's a "perhaps", and it's not a tendency. There's no evidence we have a "gene" for it or anything.

In the vast, vast, vast majority of conflicts between two groups, we don't exterminate the "enemy". Otherwise, the human race would have gone extinct a long time ago. Wiping out entire populations is by far the exception, not the rule, of human societies. It happens, but the situations are notable precisely for their extremity, precisely because they're not the norm.

Not only are we the only species to reach this kind of technology but among humans the first group to reach space was the Nazis. Today the innovation in that area seems driven by militaristic states and by people who seem ideologically adjacent. In other words it’s driven by very aggressive territorial members of one of the most aggressive territorial species.

We can’t generalize from one example of evolution, but if this is indicative of a common pattern then there might be some scary MFs out there. Our radio signals have been spreading for a while, so for all we know something is on its way to cleanse the universe of all forms of life that offend its god (or whatever its genocidal rationalizations is).

If this is true then we die. There is zero chance of resisting something with the technology to travel the stars and perhaps a million years or more head start on us. It’d be like an Apache attack helicopter versus a termite mound.

I had this thought when I saw the ideological turn (or mask removal) of certain people in the space industry. I found it metaphysically disturbing. Again… if there is other advanced life and if this is the pattern of how you evolve to become spacefaring, then we are doomed.

Then around 2-2.5 million years ago you get the first homo species in the genus homo such as Homo habilis and they created the Oldowan tool culture.

Both Australopithecus afarensis and Homo habilis are our ancestors -- however they are also the ancestors of other homo lines that diverged from us that we are not descendents of (which are now extinct).

People often forget how widespread and varied the Homo genus was before all our cousin species went extinct (likely in part due to us).[1] Homo erectus colonized the entire old world very effectively 1.5 million years ago!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo#/media/File:The_hominin_f...

In terms of tools by homonins, there is a roughly ~3million year history of stone tool use by various species, and the main thing preventing that date from being pushed further back is the difficulty in discerning between stones that have been shaped intentionally and those shaped by natural forces.

We have both observational and archaeological evidence of tool use in chimpanzees, macaques, and capuchins so it’s a pretty widespread behavior. I think the archaeological evidence for monkeys only goes back about four thousand years but thats because we havent studied the issue as much in archaeology.

And she told us that would likely happen again, there would be a gap where our technology proved to be insufficiently durable to last throughout history. Unsurprisingly not everyone in the class thought this was likely, but I figured it was possible.

Anyway, I could go on about the archeology of tech all night, but I've got to figure out how to get the photos off this Kodak DC25 camera card. Something about a DLL from the original installer that you wrap in a Linux library? Can't remember.

Try this: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/26/science/archaeology-neand...

The original paper's abstract is much more specific (ignore the Significance section, which is more editorializing):

> Here, we present the earliest handheld wooden tools, identified from secure contexts at the site of Marathousa 1, Greece, dated to ca. 430 ka (MIS12). [1]

Which is true. Before this the oldest handheld wooden tool with a secure context [2] was a thrusting spear from Germany dated ~400kYA [3]. The oldest evidence of woodworking is at least 1.5 million years old but we just don't have any surviving wooden tools from that period.

[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2515479123

[2] This is a very important term of art in archaeology. It means that the artefact was excavated by a qualified team of archaeologists that painstakingly recorded every little detail of the excavation so that the dating can be validated using several different methods (carbon dating only works up to about 60k years)

[3] https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/behavior/getting-food/o...

That's true for pretty much everybody. Homeschooled or not. You think everyone shocked by this news was all homeschooled?

Sandpaper requires specific grades of corundum; Ontario happens to have several notable large deposits of extremely fit-for-purpose corundum. The Canadian deposits were also a conveniently close source for what would become America's largest abrasives products producer, 3M, after its attempt to mine corundum in Minnesota failed (3M stands for Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing company).

I bet we could do fairly well. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of years. We've learned a lot about how to form exceptionally long lasting cement. We just choose not to do it that way, most of the time.

The main rejection of the impact hypothesis was that the dinosaurs had already died off by the time of the impact, the idea that the iridium in the layer came from an impact was reasonably well received. In 1984 a survey found 62% of paleontologists accepted the impact occurred, but only 24% believed it caused the extinction. The Alvarez duo, who proposed the impact hypothesis, were proposing to redefine where the cretaceous ended based on a new dating method (at the time the end of the cretaceous was believed to be a layer of coal a few meters off from the now accepted boundary), and fossil evidence at the time seemed to show gradual decline. A big part of the acceptance of the theory was the development of new analysis methods that showed the evidence for a gradual extinction prior to the impact to be illusory. By the time the impact crater was identified, it was already the dominant theory. Actually in the early 90s major journals were accused of being unfairly biased in favor of the impact hypothesis, with many more papers published in favor than against.

Completely coincidentally, the theory that the chixulub structure was an impact crater was initially rejected and it wasn't until 1990 that cores sampled from the site proved it was.

Dinosaurs being warm blooded was well accepted by the late 70s.

You've worked in those settings, and you think archaeologists reject tool use older than 1 mya?

Also, you don't understand that science is a process, based on evidence, and revision is an essential part of that process? Archaeology especially advances regularly, because evidence can be relatively very rare. If they weren't revising it, it would mean the whole research enterprise - to expand knowledge - was failing.

> how many times has the earliest dates of hominids and tool use and human thresholds of development been pushed back by tens of thousands of years?

I don't know, how many times? Tool use is universally believed, in the field, to have begun at least 2.58 million years ago, and with strong evidence for 3.3 mya. Tens of thousands of years isn't in the debate. See this subthread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46782072

I like how the word “overwhelming” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

I mean that's how science works. Things can be dismissed until they're proven true. If there's a valid path to finding out it's true then you can try to get funding, it just takes work and convincing people as you're competing for sparse resources. And getting egg on your face is also part of the process.