When I was in school, one day in class, we learned about “Lucy,” some bones and bone fragments from an Australopithecus, discovered in 1974, that comprised and were thought — at the time — to be from the oldest Homo remains. I recently read that tools were discovered a bit over a decade ago that predate homo sapiens by hundreds of thousands of years.
As it happens, there is an archaeological site near the west bank of Lake Turkana is Kenya. It’s called Lomekwi, and an archaelogical team from Stony Brook University accidentally discovered it in 2011. This archaeological site suggests the civilization discovered there predates the genus “Homo” by ~500,000 years.
It’s wild/ridiculous to me that we have, at best, theories of how we got here and when, yet humans are like, “Time to surgically implant robot parts so we can live forever and colonize space.”
But I digress.
The discovery of the Lomekwi remains is fascinating, in particular, because it demonstrates a few things: firstly, this shows us the difference between scientific theory and fact in stark terms. Secondly, this discovery shows us Homo sapiens were not the only species to fabricate and use tools extensively.
In effect, these artifacts were discovered after the researchers took a wrong turn, but they quickly illustrated that our prior timeline for history was significantly incorrect.
Now, to be clear, when working with tools and bones found at an archaeological dig, it’s not like you find things that look like a hand holding a hammer or whatever. Indeed, I remember learning about “Lucy” and being sorely disappointed. To me, those remains looked like junk — something I’d step on without a second thought — which is probably part of why I’m not a researcher of prehistoric stuff. Ultimately, when researching very old things, a lot of what was is now gone. Even the so-called “forever chemicals” that companies use in stuff today will be gone in 500,000 years (not a moment too soon). As such, much of what persists today is in the form of, say, rock. When looking at really old rocks for evidence of human intervention, researchers are looking for evidence of particular manipulation/intervention. In my mind, as I was reading about this, I was envisioning like a rock fastened to a stick or something. No — that would be far more advanced. Instead, the primitive “hammer” here was simply a rock. However, the evidence of it being used as a “hammer” is found in the form of chips of it having broken off while striking other objects.