I'm just some guy, but why would hominins settle so high in what are now the Philippines when a lower altitude would have given better access to water and game.
Is it possible there are settlements, they're just under the ocean now, on what used to be large flat land bridges?
I don’t know, I have the same question for Floridians every summer..
Why don’t they just move!
But seriously I think that’s why it’s called settling. Ok I’m tired of moving I’m going to stop here and build a life and that’s it. And then they actively ignore any evidence it’s a bad decision. I’m guessing people of yore were similar.
With greater heights you have less problems with insects. It could very well be that there were humans everywhere but those who lived there did better.
This is actually a really big problem for studying humans migration across the Bering Sea- most of the lane that was coastal at the time is now deeply under water. Beringia[0] was a huge land mass, possibly full of people and it existed for thousands of years. What we consider the coast now was much higher ground, probably less suitable for habitation, in part because the world was colder (ice age)- and thus, no signs of human habitation in those parts.
All the answers, if any remain, are deeply under water.
There's a small carved figurine of a horse, dated to 32000 years ago, and we know nothing about that society either. It is fascinating and it is fun to speculate about...
I think what's more impressive is that if the dating is correct those artifacts span 10,000 years. This means that that ISS is closer to the great pyramids those are to each other.
What's really interesting to me is they had a second expedition after the first wholly within the sediment that the first archaelogical excavation put aside as waste.
My partner is an archaeologist and this is an entertainingly common occurrence with older digs. She reassessed a few as part of some old work in the past few years and found that some bones were from lunch on the dig-site :|
Could be I suppose - though before announcing something like this you'd think they'd check more frequently.
In addition, I'm assuming the dating has a margin of error which was not stated in the article, so I'm curious what this margin is. (But even so, I doubt it's a large enough margin to get close to the 600k that was stated, which is already 'far out there')
The article links to a description, i did some hunting but was unable to find any hard number for a margin of error.
Electronic spin resonance: ESR, which measures trapped electrons using magnetic fields, is related to magnetic resonance imaging, the medical technique that allows doctors to look for tumors or peek inside your creaking knee. Because ESR essentially tracks the activity — the “spin” — of the electrons without freeing them, the sample can be subjected to repeated dating attempts. ESR also has a longer range — some researchers claim up to 1 million years — but it’s more complicated than other trapped charge methods, leaving it more susceptible to error.
The scientific paper stated that the rhino's age came out to 709000 +/- 68000 years. The number was consistent with other measurements made of the age of the depositional layer.
Before releasing a claim like this, I would have to believe they were extremely careful in the testing and interpretation. If they have this wrong, it could be a career killer.
Oh man, scientific errors are everywhere, remember the mystery serial killer striking in multiple countries seemingly at random? Turned out, the swabs in the DNA kits were contaminated at the manufacturer by a single person.
> Researchers working at a site in the northern part of the island of Luzon report the discovery of 57 stone tools found with more than 400 animal bones, including the mostly-complete remains of a rhino (the now-extinct Rhinoceros philippinensis, a poorly known subspecies… having a specimen that’s about 75 percent complete is an achievement in and of itself).
> Using the electron-spin resonance method on its tooth enamel, the team established that the rhino was about 709,000 years old. Thirteen of its bones, according to the study’s authors, showed signs of butchering, including cuts and “percussion marks” on both humeri (forelimb bones), which is typical of smashing open a bone to access the marrow.
Birds don't typically use stone tools heavy enough to split a rhino's bones.
Brings up a good point: the article didn't mention how old the rhino was when it died; maybe the rhino was carrion and the hominins were opportunists on the scene? or has this been ruled out & we know the animal was hunted?
I don't think that matters too much; the important thing is that the bones were split with what appeared to be human tools, whether it was hunted or found.
We've been using stone tools for ~2.6M years. Is the mystery which hominin is responsible? Or is this the oldest of stone tools to get at bone marrow? I'm trying to understand what's interesting here.
That; as far as we know, tool-using hominins hadn't spread that far by that point, and couldn't have because you can't swim that far without a boat that requires more civilization than we think was around then.
Brides have been known to use tools and there are a few species of prey dropping birds out there that drop their prey on the ground to crack it open.
Now I’m not suggesting that there was a bird capable of picking up a rhino but possible capable of picking up individual bones and dropping them or like crows picking up rocks and dropping them on the carcass.
The former is actually a thing:
The bearded vulture has learned to crack bones too large to be swallowed by carrying them in flight to a height of 50–150 m (160–490 ft) above the ground and then dropping them onto rocks below, which smashes them into smaller pieces and exposes the nutritious marrow.
Sure, but the article makes it sound like these are very specifically hand-tools - but I didn't read any of the actual research. And as I recall, the Pacific is one of the places where some pretty damn big birds live, probably big enough to crack open big mammal bones with just their beaks.
Some city crows have learned to drop nuts onto a pedestrian crossing and let the cars crush it. They then wait for the traffic light to change before safely retrieving the food.
Isn't it true that anatomically modern homo sapiens date back 400,000 years? Go back further, and you probably have something close to a chimp. Chimps hunt in packs, so I'm not surprised some hominid group could bring down a Rhino 700,000 years ago.
We couldn't have jumped from "close to a chimp" to homo sapiens. Evolution is a gradual thing, and if we've been largely the same for 400k years, then someone 400k years ago could look back another 400k years and also see someone that's largely the same. So whoever butchered that rhino would be much more like us than like a chimp.
Not necessarily. Chimps eat carrion gladly when available. Some chimp (cultures?) populations in Côte d'Ivoire are also known to look actively for marrow in bones
Stone tools and fire were used more than 1 million years ago. The last common ancestor with chimps is estimated somewhere more than 4 million years ago, so it was probably not “something close to a chimp”.
I’m not sure from the article or the limited bit I know whether the butchering was the surprising part, or just the presence of hominids in the Phillipines. It sounds a bit more like the latter.
It is the latter. In my understanding, if this were in Africa or closer parts of Eurasia, this wouldn't be that surprising, since earlier Hominids than Homo sapiens are known to hunt and butcher animals.
> According to the conventional view in paleoanthropology, only our species, Homo sapiens, had the cognitive capacity to construct watercraft. And to reach the island where the rhino was found, well, like Chief Brody says, “you’re gonna need a bigger boat.”
I think if you throw enough hominins in small boats at the ocean, at least a few of them are bound to survive the trip, right? I wonder how many island settlers in pre-history were just castaways who happened to hold on to a tree long enough to survive a monsoon-spurred ocean trip.
I agree with your point about just a few on crude boats being needed for this outcome, but the log thing is probably a no-go. Even warm water below body temp will be enough to kill you from hypothermia before you can cross an ocean. Water conducts heat very well, so it would need to be a very quick trip. Crude boats or rafts though, or mats of vegetation could probably work given enough chances.
I guess most people like me haven't thought about the necessity of a fire pit on wooden boats. Only other thing I could think of would be well fed exothermic animals onboard.
Well-fed, well-clothed exothermic humans do just fine so long as they're staying dry - air doesn't conduct heat the way water does, even if it's adjacent to water.
In his Journal of Researches as well as the condensed recount found in The Voyage of the Beagle, a young Charles Darwin describes his considerable astonishment at the constitutional robustness of the indigenous peoples he encountered in Tierra del Fuego in the 1830s. At that time they were called Fuegians, though in more modern times they are referred to as Yaghans.
Despite their homelands being situated among the harshest, most inhospitable climes on Earth, with year round temperatures frequently near or below freezing and constant powerful circumpolar winds from the 'furious fifties,' they were able to tolerate such extreme conditions despite their traditional attire consisting of little more than a loincloth and an occasional loosely draped shawl. They frequently went without protection on their upper body and lower extremities altogether. Darwin describes a vivid scene where a Fuegian mother is standing in a shallow boat that approaches the Beagle in order to conduct raid. She's wearing nothing but newborn nursing at her breast, and she and her child both seem indifferent to the the snowfall and freezing rain melting on their skin.
They did not use permanent dwellings, and basically lived as gatherers using simple temporary makeshift huts with one side facing the wind and the other side open, and of course a fire, which gave the region its name. But it was not uncommon for them to spend days foraging for mussels, drenched in the frigid crashing breakers of the Southern Ocean.
This is 30 years before he published the Origin of Species and long before he had developed an articulated concept of natural selection, but The experience did inspire him to remark how it made intuitive sense that as the population of mankind spread across the Earth, that it would have differentiated and adapted to different climates in accordance with whatever underlying principles had driven the same process he had observed this happening with other species.
If curious, Google around for Jemmy Button and York Minster, these being too individuals who had been kidnapped from Tierra del Fuego and taken to England on a prior Beagle expedition, and returned on the one accompanied by Darwin.
> Yeah, what concerns me is the boat the Rhino used to get there
I laughed out loudly at the office when I read this. My coworker is wondering if I'm bonkers.
On a more serious note, the orthodox time line of human existence needs revision. There is too much contradictory evidence: oral accounts, human footprints beside dinosaur foot impressions, Gobeki-Tepli and other structures, prehistoric sculpture like lion-man and vogelherd, now this.
On the other hand, the population wasn't sustained. One or two generations of people on that island would still leave behind a good number of artifacts.
IMHO concern that the population wasn't large enough for multiple people to attempt the trick ignore the timescales involved. These events could span tens of thousands of years--longer than all of recorded history.
Today with a population of 7 billion? Sure. 700,000 years ago? There weren't many hominins back then though. Not enough to throw a bunch in the ocean and hope some of them survive the trip.
Exactly my thought. Mammals without opposable thumbs or well-developed cerebella can cross large bodies of water, clinging to floating material. I don't see why a group of hungry and adventurous proto-humans didn't cross a channel from one island to another. No boat needed. The miracle is that rhino got there. How well can rhinos swim?
The rhino didn't get there by boat, it got there walking. Actually, their ancestors got there walking when the island was connected by a land bridge to Asia, and they lived there happily for a few million years while the sea level changed and the position of the island changed.
The rhino family evolved something like 20 million years ago. See more details in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhinoceros#Evolution I still not sure how to read all the data in the table, but 20mya looks like an good approximation.
I'm not sure that the rhinos reached that place (the current island) 20 million years ago, but they had plenty of time and a lot of difference in the geography that makes a simple walk possible.
On the other hand, Homo Habilis evolved only 2mya and they lived only in Africa, they had tool but they were not very smart. I think that at that time the Philippines were already isolated from Asia.
Homo Erectus evolved 1.5mya. They were quite smart and hd more tools! They went outside Africa to Europe and Asia, but they never crossed some big sea, and never reached America or Australia. They neither crossed some smaller extensions of water to reach some island that were not too close to the continens. So ... the conclusion is that they didn't have good enough boats.
Homo Sapiens evolved 0.3mya. (I was going to write 0.1mya, the number changes too often.) They could cross to some places no Erectus has gone before, so the conclusion is that they have some kind of boats even in ancient times.
So if the rhino was butchered 0.7mya then it must have be killed by some variant of Homo Erectus that have never been found in an island that is not very close to a continent because they didn't have good enough boats because they were smart but not smart enough. So the lack of boats is a problem for the hominin.
63 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 131 ms ] threadIs it possible there are settlements, they're just under the ocean now, on what used to be large flat land bridges?
Quite possible, evidence of settlements at lower levels have been found elsewhere [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland
Why don’t they just move!
But seriously I think that’s why it’s called settling. Ok I’m tired of moving I’m going to stop here and build a life and that’s it. And then they actively ignore any evidence it’s a bad decision. I’m guessing people of yore were similar.
All the answers, if any remain, are deeply under water.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beringia
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-man#
Or is it a different one?
I was thinking of the horse figurine found in the Vogelherd cave: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogelherd_Cave
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_dating#Reservoir_e...
In addition, I'm assuming the dating has a margin of error which was not stated in the article, so I'm curious what this margin is. (But even so, I doubt it's a large enough margin to get close to the 600k that was stated, which is already 'far out there')
Electronic spin resonance: ESR, which measures trapped electrons using magnetic fields, is related to magnetic resonance imaging, the medical technique that allows doctors to look for tumors or peek inside your creaking knee. Because ESR essentially tracks the activity — the “spin” — of the electrons without freeing them, the sample can be subjected to repeated dating attempts. ESR also has a longer range — some researchers claim up to 1 million years — but it’s more complicated than other trapped charge methods, leaving it more susceptible to error.
Before releasing a claim like this, I would have to believe they were extremely careful in the testing and interpretation. If they have this wrong, it could be a career killer.
[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/910000...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_of_Heilbronn
> Using the electron-spin resonance method on its tooth enamel, the team established that the rhino was about 709,000 years old. Thirteen of its bones, according to the study’s authors, showed signs of butchering, including cuts and “percussion marks” on both humeri (forelimb bones), which is typical of smashing open a bone to access the marrow.
Birds don't typically use stone tools heavy enough to split a rhino's bones.
That; as far as we know, tool-using hominins hadn't spread that far by that point, and couldn't have because you can't swim that far without a boat that requires more civilization than we think was around then.
Now I’m not suggesting that there was a bird capable of picking up a rhino but possible capable of picking up individual bones and dropping them or like crows picking up rocks and dropping them on the carcass.
The former is actually a thing:
The bearded vulture has learned to crack bones too large to be swallowed by carrying them in flight to a height of 50–150 m (160–490 ft) above the ground and then dropping them onto rocks below, which smashes them into smaller pieces and exposes the nutritious marrow.
I’m not sure from the article or the limited bit I know whether the butchering was the surprising part, or just the presence of hominids in the Phillipines. It sounds a bit more like the latter.
I think if you throw enough hominins in small boats at the ocean, at least a few of them are bound to survive the trip, right? I wonder how many island settlers in pre-history were just castaways who happened to hold on to a tree long enough to survive a monsoon-spurred ocean trip.
You should pick up Kon-Tiki - those guys discovered a lot about ancient boating.
Despite their homelands being situated among the harshest, most inhospitable climes on Earth, with year round temperatures frequently near or below freezing and constant powerful circumpolar winds from the 'furious fifties,' they were able to tolerate such extreme conditions despite their traditional attire consisting of little more than a loincloth and an occasional loosely draped shawl. They frequently went without protection on their upper body and lower extremities altogether. Darwin describes a vivid scene where a Fuegian mother is standing in a shallow boat that approaches the Beagle in order to conduct raid. She's wearing nothing but newborn nursing at her breast, and she and her child both seem indifferent to the the snowfall and freezing rain melting on their skin.
They did not use permanent dwellings, and basically lived as gatherers using simple temporary makeshift huts with one side facing the wind and the other side open, and of course a fire, which gave the region its name. But it was not uncommon for them to spend days foraging for mussels, drenched in the frigid crashing breakers of the Southern Ocean.
This is 30 years before he published the Origin of Species and long before he had developed an articulated concept of natural selection, but The experience did inspire him to remark how it made intuitive sense that as the population of mankind spread across the Earth, that it would have differentiated and adapted to different climates in accordance with whatever underlying principles had driven the same process he had observed this happening with other species.
If curious, Google around for Jemmy Button and York Minster, these being too individuals who had been kidnapped from Tierra del Fuego and taken to England on a prior Beagle expedition, and returned on the one accompanied by Darwin.
I laughed out loudly at the office when I read this. My coworker is wondering if I'm bonkers.
On a more serious note, the orthodox time line of human existence needs revision. There is too much contradictory evidence: oral accounts, human footprints beside dinosaur foot impressions, Gobeki-Tepli and other structures, prehistoric sculpture like lion-man and vogelherd, now this.
(Probably a species of rhino inhabitant swamps could swim among close islands. Elephants are surprisingly good swimmers so, why not rhinos?)
IMHO concern that the population wasn't large enough for multiple people to attempt the trick ignore the timescales involved. These events could span tens of thousands of years--longer than all of recorded history.
[1] http://www.rhinoboat.com/boat-models
The rhino family evolved something like 20 million years ago. See more details in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhinoceros#Evolution I still not sure how to read all the data in the table, but 20mya looks like an good approximation.
In Google I got this two maps of the Earth 20mya. Notice the difference in the shape of the Philippine area. http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~braile/edumod/flipbook/flipbook.h... http://www.thearmchairexplorer.com/geology/neogene-period
I'm not sure that the rhinos reached that place (the current island) 20 million years ago, but they had plenty of time and a lot of difference in the geography that makes a simple walk possible.
<oversimplification warning. See an accurate version in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo#Evolution >
On the other hand, Homo Habilis evolved only 2mya and they lived only in Africa, they had tool but they were not very smart. I think that at that time the Philippines were already isolated from Asia.
Homo Erectus evolved 1.5mya. They were quite smart and hd more tools! They went outside Africa to Europe and Asia, but they never crossed some big sea, and never reached America or Australia. They neither crossed some smaller extensions of water to reach some island that were not too close to the continens. So ... the conclusion is that they didn't have good enough boats.
Homo Sapiens evolved 0.3mya. (I was going to write 0.1mya, the number changes too often.) They could cross to some places no Erectus has gone before, so the conclusion is that they have some kind of boats even in ancient times.
So if the rhino was butchered 0.7mya then it must have be killed by some variant of Homo Erectus that have never been found in an island that is not very close to a continent because they didn't have good enough boats because they were smart but not smart enough. So the lack of boats is a problem for the hominin.