Half-million-year-old wooden structure unearthed in Zambia

[Bowler1]

Hey VB.

They had digging sticks and stone tools, all very basic I'm sure, but these are hunting and gathering tools the early humans used. I think shelter and some place safe to sleep would be priority number one, with everything else being secondary. So if clever hunting tools were found why are clever shelters such a surprise? To make stone tools requires selecting the right type of stone and stone knapping, which is reasonably deep knowledge in my view. So if a level of skill was known in stone tools, I would assume woodworking for shelter, food storage and who knows, maybe even artworks.

I think it's a lack of imagination on our part not to assume the possibility of a range of skills to survive in the wild. If you can make a stone axe, then it's likely your chopping down trees and not belting unsuspecting animals on the head all day long. This find will at least have the boffins questioning the step change from apes to early man and what this could mean. I think we should give early man more credit for creative thinking and ability to change the world around them, as we can.

 

[Robert Zwilling]

Archaeologists have a very simple rule which is supposed to keep everything presented in orderly fashion. If there is no evidence of people or animals having something in the past, then that means until the evidence is discovered, they simply didn't have it. In hindsight this rule is shown to be extremely lacking in common sense and has also been abused. Its way too easy to look around in the present and see everything we have and when confronted with no evidence of it in the past, to think that people of the present times have to be far more advanced than people of the past.