Very interesting. That's long before homo sapiens and around the times of homo erectus. Amazing.

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Stonehenge and the pyramids, for context, are about 5000 years old.

Humans: borrowing since day one.

This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 78%. (I'm a bot)

> A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in Spain, working with two colleagues from France and another from Germany has discovered an Obsidian handaxe-making workshop from 1.2 million years ago in the Awash valley in Ethiopia.

> More information: Margherita Mussi et al, A surge in obsidian exploitation more than 1.2 million years ago at Simbiro III, Nature Ecology & Evolution.

> Citation: Obsidian handaxe-making workshop from 1.2 million years ago discovered in Ethiopia retrieved 26 January 2023 from https://phys.org/news/2023-01-obsidian-handaxe-making-workshop-million-years.

Extended Summary | FAQ | Feedback | Top keywords: workshop^#1 research^#2 ago^#3 Obsidian^#4 years^#5

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The Story of Prometheus is basically that

It's amazing how fast technological advancement has become compared to when we started.

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So a meteor

Most old stories are just muddied history

Sounds like a whole lot of bollocks

This pairs well with the news that we've been cooking fish for 750,000 years, pushing back from the original fire use timeline from 170,000 years ago by neanders

Wtf are you even talking about?

Graham Hancock *Orgasms*

Please tell me more

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Winter is coming!

Fun fact that winter actually did come. Big time.

Thank you for this one

Just look at an infinite curve.

Ancient nukes? Duuuuude!

A cutting edge made by banging rocks together is not at all the same as “ancient nukes.”

Ancient peoples did not have nukes. There is absolutely no real evidence of that. It is just a conspiracy theory.

I recommend The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow. It’s an excellent accounting of early man and our mis-interpretations of history.

Thanks for the recommendation.

Which minecraft server is this?

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> Dating of the material around the axes showed them to be from approximately 1.2 million years ago.

But that just means the dirt is 1.2 million years old. These axes could have been tossed into a hole that had 1.2 million year old dirt in it, and the axes themselves could have been made only 20,000 years ago.

You get about a million cave men to grab the ropes of the mega-sling. Then, another million load a ball of onyx about twenty miles in diameter into the sling and the cavemen run in a wide circle until there’s enough force to hurl the thing into the neighboring village. Mass destruction. Mostly crushing, but, those of us in academia refer to it as an ancient nuke.

Modern Egypt is 5000 years old, they just moved into the pyramids then.

Awesome recommend!

Hey guys, let's take these 20,000 year old artifacts and throw them in this 1.2million year old dirt I found!

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it was only 1.180.000 years old at the time, it looked much younger

I thought fire use predated Homo Sapiens, and that Homo Sapiens have been around for 300,000+ years. Although, I'm completely ignorant and at most an extremely casual layman when it comes to paleoanthropology

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Experts suggest a long span around ~3000 years BC (sources, PBS, Wikipedia) but nobody knows for sure. Do you have anything to suggest they're older?

Try 288,000 years. Homo Sapians have had the same brain size since then, probably earlier.

You mean, they utilized the pyramids and surrounding area for prestige, right?

Tons of podcasts and stuff from alternative history guys like Graham Hancock or Ben Van Kerkwyk. Of course nothing they've put out has been accepted as fact, it makes more sense that the Egyptians moved into a previous civilisations society, because the oldest pyramids in Egypt are the best built, and as they get younger, the quality and craftsmanship disappears. The last pyramids built in Egypt are sloppy mud bricks, while the oldest have precision cut blocks of quartz.

That’s not how science works. Dirt isn’t carbon 14 accessible, one needs decaying matter. Such as, wood, plants etc. saying these fragments were “thrown into a 1.2 million year old hole” is on par with saying everyone of those scientists wants their career destroyed by publishing fake data. It doesn’t make sense

No, I mean like all the greatest works of construction in Egypt, were there before the people we consider to be the builders moved in. The pyramids are way older than egyptologists claim, but because they don't want to admit they moved into the area instead of building them. They can't explain how they built them, but they know they did it some how.

Yes, they moved in and claimed the massive works for prestige. To impress and wow everyone.

Oh yes! Haha sorry, didn't understand what you wrote the first time!

I'm sure there were people in Egypt >5k years ago, just there's no accepted evidence/reason to believe the pyramids themselves are older! Same with Stonehenge.

Can't wait until we uncover a 1.2 million year old OSHA violation.

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There's tons of evidence, but you're right, it's not accepted.

The ignorance is not an excuse for denial of information at hand. Sometimes the additional language skill is needed but there are translators ...

https://www.ancient-hebrew.org/ancientman/1054.html

It is an ignorance to think that we are the only civilization to live on a planet that is 4.5 billion years old...

https://www.ancient-hebrew.org/ancientman/1054.html

Not even close.

https://www.ancient-hebrew.org/ancientman/1054.html

Look, ancient people did not have nukes. This is an absurd thing to even suggest, and is a conspiracy theory with no basis in fact or proper scientific research.

I bet they threw it in there to own the libs /s

I suggest a more thorough research - there are a lot of evidence about that but as it hasn't been in line with the "main stream history line" one needs to dig it out.

Ever wondered why ChatGPT worries so many main stream media and some IT companies? Because it will have an unrestricted access to everything that is hidden in a plain sight.

Try to do some math yourself - someone was manufacturing obsidian axes 1.2 billion years ago, your ancestors were manufacturing similar axes from stone 50k years ago. So nothing ever happened to a previous civilizations in between? 1 billion years passed and all we did in that time was to "manufacture" primitive axes. And suddenly a few thousands years ago we went to iron age. And since then how many years passed? 1 billion? Or just a few thousands?

So once again - it is great that this obsidian axe made into media.

You keep linking a site that doesn't provide any sources for its claims or information, and even a cursory dive into any of the specific claims reveals that the only sources for them have either been discredited directly or have themselves failed to provide any empirical evidence in support.

I think that's because history repeats itself. And that's because humans ultimately haven't really progressed or grown intrinsically. Murder, rape, theft, greed, power and corruption.

I never said that but ancient nukes? Duuuude!!

We already did. They weren't wearing eye protection while chipping at the obsidian.

Haven't we had evidence that humans have been using fire for around 1 million years a long time? I remember hearing about that like 6 years ago.

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Could you imagine having the same cognitive abilities, but language hadent been invented yet. That's wild to me.

Yeah. Fire use is a million - 1.5 million years old (as far as people can tell). We just didn't have good evidence of any cooking going on in the fires.

Which doesn't mean it wasn't happening. Just that we can't show that it was.

You're probably right, there's no way to know for sure. Written language surely followed much later so that doesn't help.

Estimates for when speech started vary extremely wildly.

Fascinating. The ability to make tools was what distinguished humanoids from their ancestors. Some animals will use objects they find as tools, but apparently tool making is unique to us.

Using various paleoclimate proxies such as ice cores and sediment samples, paleoclimatologists have been able to pin point events such as the Permian - Triassic extinction event 251.5 Mya, the K-Pg boundary 66 Mya when an asteroid / supervolcano killed the non-avian dinosaurs and ended the Cretacious, Paleocene–Eocene thermal maximum 55 Mya, and many more. They get more and more accurate the closer to modern time they get.

A mass extinction caused by a nuclear event would not go unnoticed- especially as recently as the pleistocene. There would be evidence of decaying or decayed radioactive isotopes.

If you are interested in such things as past human-oid civilizations, I suggest you put your mental energy into learning about our closest relatives such as Neanderthals, Denisovians, and Homoflorensis. Or more distant relatives like the Ardipithecus family from ~ 7mya. Truly fascinating stuff.

Otherwise, if you continue on this conspiracy theory path of "past nuclear civilizations" based only on the fallacy that it's impossible to prove something DIDN'T happen; you will end up another ancient aliens nut case or Lock Ness Monster truther and deprive yourself of a whole world of fascinating REAL knowledge about the world and it's past. Even fueling harmful controversy for real researchers trying to conduct real research about past civilizations. Please don't be one of those people...

Here's a PBS Eons video to get you started in the right direction if you enjoy learning about ancient humans

Edit: also, head over to r/AskAnthropology if you have more questions

lmaoooooooo as a construction worker

The Ancient Egyptians pyramids might be even older.

if you look at Africans from that part of the continent, they look like they have seen shit so this is not surprising

Egyptologists have very good ideas of how the pyramids were built. Dressed stone, mostly ashlar, has been used to build monuments for millennia and we have murals and papyri documenting the transportation of limestone, granite, syenite etc. to construction sites. We have evidence of how they built the pyramids with cutting tools, bevels, drilling, sawing, and sanding, with harder stone being pounded or sawn into shape with abrasives. None of the pyramids are out of reach for ancient Egyptian/Kushite labor and technology, its just labor intensive and time consuming.

Also: Why you do not allow primates to have tools

Start digging Antarctica, there should be a gate down there

This is childish ridiculousness. All of humanity has made zero progress because u/r0ndy the gatekeeper noticed that murder still exists.

Fire use predates fire making. Historically, hominids would feed a fire to keep it going but not know how to make one from scratch. Fire use started in areas with active volcanic activity and lava flows so getting a fire wasn't that hard if you lost one.

It's first primitive use was to scorch bushland. You could forage for roasted fruit, nuts, and rodents after.

Homo Sapiens while being around for 300,000 years were still evolving long after their emergence. The largest set of activity was in the brain. The most you could go back and not be able to tell cognitively between modern humans is probably 100,000 years. That's when advanced cultures started to emerge (not civilization, just cultures).

The Graham Hancock who has never published a scientific article in his life? Get out of there with this pseudo-science bullshit.

Ancient man took care of those fucking white walkers...

I think you are missing the vital point. Humans don't need to become smarter as individuals. We create societies, which are complex human systems of knowledge-transfer and development. When we are many, 1/100.000 will create the microchip or the lithium battery. More importantly we grow in knowledge for every generation by being able to speak, while other mammals (who also learn) can't pass knowledge on as effectively. That is our edge. Therefore I think that any question of our intellect and its prospects will likely be answered by technology, as it has indeed always been. The phone today is one thing, but don't tell me in 100 years implants won't be accessible and in widespread usage.

"Collective Learning" is what I heard it named. Since that is how we conquered the Earth.

Sounds nice

Also, most blocks on the pyramids we're built by mixing materials on site, pouring them into forms and stacking them next to each other. Geopolymers.

That's what people do when there is no pornhub

I heard 10500 years ago.

Humans spent nearly 1 million years using hand axes before they figured out how to make a spear. To me this suggests that for the longest time, we made hand axes in the same way birds make nests. Semi-instinctively.

Bruh evidence like what

I almost cried, thank you for bringing me back.