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Throwing stick discovered from 300,000 years ago

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“It’s a stick, sure,” Jordi Serangeli, an archaeologist at the University of Tübingen and co-author of the study, tells the New York Times’ Nicholas St. Fleur. But calling it “just a stick,” he says, would be like calling humanity’s first step on the moon “only dirt with a print.”

As the researchers report in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, the ancient wood was likely a throwing stick used by either Neanderthals or their even more ancient relatives, Homo heidelbergensis, to kill quarry like waterfowl and rabbits.

Archaeologists found the roughly two-foot long, half-pound throwing stick while conducting excavations in Schöningen, Germany, in 2016. To date, the site has yielded a trove of prehistoric weapons, including wooden spears and javelins thought to be the oldest ever discovered. This latest find adds to the ancient arsenal unearthed at Schöningen—and underscores the sophistication of early hominins as hunters and toolmakers.

Alex Fox, “300,000-Year-Old Stick Suggests Human Ancestors Were Skilled Hunters” at Smithsonian Magazine

Paper. (paywall)


Yes, that soft noise we heard was the footfall of the subhuman receding ever further into the mist.

If early man thought like modern man (and there seems no reason to doubt it), such insights would come rather quickly—followed by rather than preceded by a long, slow process of evolution. Then there’s the question of why the pace of innnovation sped up so rapidly in recent centuries. Is it a function of a much larger human population with better communications. Are other factors at work?

See also: Homo erectus skull conclusively dated to 2 million years ago, “nearly human-like.”
We heard this “nearly human-like” stuff about the Neanderthals for decades and now we are catching up with all these stories about them braiding string, drawing symbols, and burying their dead. How do we know it’s true this time, as opposed to an artifact of not enough excavation yet?

Comments
Calibrated for maximum available context it dates to 4k YA as The ice ages set it cause and effect during the 1656 anno mundi 'Mabul' impacts year and lasted about 340, not 25M, years. Know ancient Egypt was not founded till a decade or two AFTER the 1996 dispersion from Bavel, so about one Sothic cycle more recently than current consensus. Reference volume I of the YeC Moshe Emes framework and series for Torah and science alignment.Pearlman
April 26, 2020
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This is one of the points of Carl Sagan's parable of the "Westminster Project" in his book The Demon-Haunted World, why a good,working theory is prized above all things in science. You can have all the materials or observational data you like but only an explanation that links them all together enables you to make sense and use of them.Seversky
April 25, 2020
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Late development is a big puzzle for sure. The phonograph is a classic example. All the elements were there in the Stone Age. Wheel, drumhead, thorn, wax. By 1200 the mechanisms of clocks and automata and music boxes "should" have led to a practical phonograph easily and instantly. But the IDEA of recording sound wasn't present. Even when Edison accidentally made it happen, with no predecessors at all, the idea still wasn't "in the air".polistra
April 25, 2020
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