I still think Homo heidelbergensis should really count as early humans though…
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Speciation is more of suggestion than a rule, though.
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With that name, I expect them all to have dueling scars and monocles. /s
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Fascinating. I wonder how they dated it
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It’s literally made of wood. Isn’t that the platonic ideal for a 14C dating?
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C14 dating only works up to c. 60,000 years ago. At some point the ratios get too small to measure with modern methods. There are other radiometric methods that might have been used though, on substances with bigger half lives.
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https://news.liverpool.ac.uk/2023/09/20/archaeologists-discover-worlds-oldest-wooden-structure/
The specialist dating of the finds was undertaken by experts at Aberystwyth University.
They used new luminescence dating techniques, which reveal the last time minerals in the sand surrounding the finds were exposed to sunlight, to determine their age.
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Yeah, my bet was on thermoluminescence or optically stimulated luminescence
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New band name.
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and their cover band could be Optically Stimulated Tumescence.
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Some follow up:
Were hominins more settled than we thought?
Those ancient hominins, such as homo erectus and homo heidelbergensis, were thought to have been nomadic hunter-gatherers. But the new site suggests that they may have hung around certain areas where it was relatively easy to make a living.
“The thoughts were that these people were moving from one place to the next. But a structure sort of denotes permanence,” says Katongo.
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It’s a plot to reintroduce base 60 into primary schools.
This new interpretation of P322 significantly elevates the status of Babylonian mathematics, and the vast number of untranslated tablets are likely to contain many more surprises waiting to be found. The discovery of trigonometry is attributed to the ancient Greeks, but this needs to be reconsidered in light of the much earlier, computationally simpler and more precise Babylonian style of exact sexagesimal trigonometry. In addition to being historically significant, P322 also brings the founding assumptions of our own mathematical culture into perspective. Perhaps this different and simpler way of thinking has the potential to unlock improvements in science, engineering, and mathematics education today.
Plimpton 322 is Babylonian exact sexagesimal trigonometry
Note that the pdf is less likely to be typographically flawed…
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Huh. So having a table of Pythagorean triples is neat…but I’m confused what makes it “trigonometry”. The whole point of trigonometry is relating sides to angles, and here they explicitly say the angles are missing. That’s not a simpler way of doing it, that’s just not doing it.
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Given the rate at which new archaeological discoveries are pushing back the accepted time periods of human innovation, I expect any day to read that the Denisovans had skateboards and movable type.
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This has been discussed here before but now the lawsuit is finally moving ahead.
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I’ve always suspected that some cycladic plank idols were actually rad decks of their time.
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