Re-Think What "Tools" Can Look Like

Always interesting to see what they find in the Old World. Some of it is relevant in the Americas, but in my opinion too many people try to find similar examples here without the same degree of context and rigor. They sort through a 1000 rocks in a creek and find a couple that looks similar if you stare at them long enough.

Lots of tools combined with scientific dating and a healthy dose of what the article refers to as “First-rate fieldwork and analysis” is critical for identifying these multi-million year old tools from the dawn of humanity.

In a creek in Kentucky, they might be artifacts that are 15,000 to 200 years old, geofacts, or cobbles crushed by a bulldozer 40 years ago. Hard to say much more than that.


 

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"By 2.6 million years ago, they were beginning to understand the relationship between the folk physics of where to strike something, and how hard to hit it, and what angles to select,".

I love how they compare humans to modern primates!!

Somehow I feel like this is completely off base.
How would these people, with their advanced hands (which included fingers and a thumb just like today), not be fully leveraging tools? It is OK to call them people isn't it?

I find this theory that we were mindless animals that accidentally evolved into humans bizarre.

Were we just learning language as well? "Me Joe..You mine"
Maybe just monkey sounds.
 

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When people came to the Americas, they brought sophisticated tool making skills with them. They weren't still trying to figure out the best way to crack a rock, or what type rock to use. So, IMO, here in America, we don't need to confuse ourselves by thinking every broken or jagged rock is a tool, and we don't need to re-think what stone tools look like. If one wants a larger collection, call whatever you like a tool, but what you'll end up with is just road bed material.
 

We have found denisovan fossils in only two locations despite the fact they contribute up to about 5 percent of the dna in some modern populations, and this only in the last ten years. We are gradually being fed information to allow us to acclimate to the fact sapiens wasn’t the first in the new world.
 

Kray : Your position is heavily dependent on an assumption -- that people originated somewhere else and came here later. Hueyatlaco pretty well puts "paid" to that.

In general, kindly notice a constant in discussions like this : Somebody posts a rock and asks "Was this a tool ?" That's a multiple choice test (Yes/No/Maybe).

What strikes me as humorous (just a little bit) is that the same people who appeal to scientific dogma in support of their beliefs on the matter (that all of the "Maybe' responses ought to be "No"s) (or most of them) turn right around and ignore Ockham's prohibition of "Special Case" exceptions (like, "In Africa, that can be a tool. Over here, an identical item can't be one") when that suits them.

Any time you're looking at a stone, and people are telling you that what's important about it isn't the stone's characteristics but the set of assumptions you view it from, you're seeing, (IMHO) an unconscious Bait-&-Switch operation that isn't recognized as one because it's so common everywhere.

By all means, list the considerations that go into forming your opinion (lack of systematic secondary edge trimming excepted). But admit (at least privately) that those influence the Maybe conclusion one way or the other, without being conclusive. Case in point , Being a habitual stone gazer like the other hard core artifact hunters here, I once killed some time while staying at a motel in south central Pennsylvania (down river from Shoop) by poking through the ornamental pebbles around the shrubbery planted in front of it. And in the space of five minutes, among the quartz pebbles, I found three or four chert endscrapers of the type common at Shoop -- both in form and material -- that had clearly been edge-blunted by having been run through a gravel mining/ sorting operation. Which leads me -- if no one else -- to conclude that the virtual certainty of heavy machinery involvement does not rule out "artifact" status (any more so than it did at the Clovis site in New Mexico).

Executive Summary : the safest answer (IMHO) is "Maybe."
 

PS "Clovis site in new Mexico" = Blackwater Draw.

Sorry -- ageing memory is making things interesting.
 

Hi, thanks for all the GOOD replies to this thread! (this is a great forum, isn't it...?)

...Anyway, those lithics show me some use or grinding on (unifacial?) surfaces - no pics of the
other surfaces of the rocks, to give a good call on this, BUT definitely/maybe man-made....
I'd hand them over to the lab to get good fingerprint of the rock, source it, etc-etc, even chase your theories, dig some more, give talks, write books....on what...?!
...ahhh, isn't science wonderful? :laughing7:
 

Recently, a paper was published that purported to prove that the mastodon bones excavated at the Cerutti Mastadon Site in Ca., a site which is 130,000 years old, were in fact broken, not by ancient hominids, but rather construction equipment. Jason Colavito, a well known debunker of virtually anything that upsets orthodoxy, leaped on this finding, mostly to use it as a means of hammering Graham Hancock and his alternative history of the Americas. However, the author of the paper in question, never bothered to even look at the original findings. If one scrolls to the bottom of the comments at Colavito's blog entry, and reads the exchange between one of the authors of the original Cerutti study, Bradford Riney, and Historian, the two discuss the mistakes made by the paper that purported to debunk the Cerutti Mastodon site.

New Journal Article Concludes Cerutti Mastodon Bones Broken Recently by Construction Equipment, Not Hunters 130,000 Years Ago - Jason Colavito

Now, granted, a heck of a lot more research, and actual sites, are required before we can conclude some species of the genus Homo was present in the Americas at such an early date, be it Homo sapiens, or another group. Heck, it took forever just to overturn the Clovis First paradigm. We may, or may not, find that Cerutti is a true archaeological site, and not just a paleontological site. Deciding which it is is at the heart of the debate surrounding that site.

But, you can be sure that, regardless, defenders of orthodoxy, in any discipline of science, enjoy citing the so-called "Sagan standard", named for Carl Sagan, who popularized this aphorism: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". IMHO, that's a ridiculous standard. Science does not have different categories of evidence at all. Extraordinary claims simply require evidence sufficient to demonstrate that the claims are correct. As well, labeling a claim "extraordinary" is itself a subjective judgement. IMHO, the Sagan standard, more often then not, is used to bludgeon any claim that rocks the orthodox boat. Orthodoxy in science is like that. The old guard defend their dominant paradigms, just like Clovis First was defended to the hilt. This is why it is sometimes said that "science advances one funeral at a time".

The Sagan Standard:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagan_standard

"The aphorism has been criticized both for its apparent support of "orthodoxy" by raising the evidential standard for claims which are outside current social consensus, and for introducing subjectivity and ambiguity in determining what merits an "extraordinary claim". David Deming writes: "science does not contemplate two types of evidence. The misuse of ECREE ["extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"] to suppress innovation and maintain orthodoxy should be avoided as it must inevitably ****** the scientific goal of establishing reliable knowledge."[SUP][2][/SUP]
 

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The rocks Require too much interpretation and will always be debatable, the advancements in recovering dna and interpretation of that evidence will eventually provide the proof that will convince. I’m sure the real answers haven’t even been imagined yet.
 

uniface said:
Kray : Your position is heavily dependent on an assumption -- that people originated somewhere else and came here later. Hueyatlaco pretty well puts "paid" to that.

In general, kindly notice a constant in discussions like this : Somebody posts a rock and asks "Was this a tool ?" That's a multiple choice test (Yes/No/Maybe).

What strikes me as humorous (just a little bit) is that the same people who appeal to scientific dogma in support of their beliefs on the matter (that all of the "Maybe' responses ought to be "No"s) (or most of them) turn right around and ignore Ockham's prohibition of "Special Case" exceptions (like, "In Africa, that can be a tool. Over here, an identical item can't be one") when that suits them.

Any time you're looking at a stone, and people are telling you that what's important about it isn't the stone's characteristics but the set of assumptions you view it from, you're seeing, (IMHO) an unconscious Bait-&-Switch operation that isn't recognized as one because it's so common everywhere.

By all means, list the considerations that go into forming your opinion (lack of systematic secondary edge trimming excepted). But admit (at least privately) that those influence the Maybe conclusion one way or the other, without being conclusive. Case in point , Being a habitual stone gazer like the other hard core artifact hunters here, I once killed some time while staying at a motel in south central Pennsylvania (down river from Shoop) by poking through the ornamental pebbles around the shrubbery planted in front of it. And in the space of five minutes, among the quartz pebbles, I found three or four chert endscrapers of the type common at Shoop -- both in form and material -- that had clearly been edge-blunted by having been run through a gravel mining/ sorting operation. Which leads me -- if no one else -- to conclude that the virtual certainty of heavy machinery involvement does not rule out "artifact" status (any more so than it did at the Clovis site in New Mexico).

Executive Summary : the safest answer (IMHO) is "Maybe."
Click to expand...

Goes both ways.
 

Good discussion, one of the type that I miss from the now defunct other site.

uniface said:
What strikes me as humorous (just a little bit) is that the same people who appeal to scientific dogma in support of their beliefs on the matter (that all of the "Maybe' responses ought to be "No"s) (or most of them) turn right around and ignore Ockham's prohibition of "Special Case" exceptions (like, "In Africa, that can be a tool. Over here, an identical item can't be one") when that suits them.
Click to expand...

Very valid point. As you correctly put the safest answer is maybe. I put something similar of hard to say (artifact, geofact, or crushed by a bulldozer.)

The reality though on artifact forums is generally more along the lines of: "In Africa this is a million year old tool made by Homo Erectus. Over here, this identical tool (identical to me at least although I've never actually handled a Homo Erectus tool, I have only seen pictures via google links) is proof that H Erectus was hanging out in my back yard. All of modern American Archaeology is wrong. Clovis-first was eventually discredited, which is further proof that my find cannot be ignored." All of this is usually followed by the finder getting frustrated when other people simply are not interested in or in agreement with they theory...

Charl makes a very valid point of the risk of extraordinary evidence. The problem is that 99.999% of collectors don't provide even a bare minimum of evidence. I'm not trying to minimize our contributions to archaeology, but we aren't going to have the time, budget, or access to nuclear tech for the isotope dating that goes into the "First Rate fieldwork and analysis" that the article references. We can certainly make invaluable contributions by documenting sites and finds, but until a bunch of PhD's get involved a site isn't going to change modern archaeology.
 

uniface said:
Being a habitual stone gazer like the other hard core artifact hunters here, I once killed some time while staying at a motel in south central Pennsylvania (down river from Shoop) by poking through the ornamental pebbles around the shrubbery planted in front of it. And in the space of five minutes, among the quartz pebbles, I found three or four chert endscrapers of the type common at Shoop -- both in form and material -- that had clearly been edge-blunted by having been run through a gravel mining/ sorting operation. Which leads me -- if no one else -- to conclude that the virtual certainty of heavy machinery involvement does not rule out "artifact" status.
Click to expand...

I've done some fossil & rock hunting while sitting in a drive through of a bank or fast food restaurant, I'm never one to waste an opportunity.

You've made a couple of fine distinctions here. The material was chert amongst quartz pebbles, and you found multiple examples. You were in the same area where a unique style of paleo end scraper has been documented. If you really wanted to confirm, you could probably figure out where the gravel originated. That is context that meets a certain standard of evidence if you wanted to document your finds being potentially related to Shoop or evidence of additional sites in the area depending on where the gravel was quarried. A solid first clue if you wanted to follow the thread back to a site along the river.

If you had found a quartz pebble broken in half, and said that it matched bipolar reduction strategies of the Denisovian peoples of Russia that might be a stretch.
 

uniface said:
Kray : Your position is heavily dependent on an assumption -- that people originated somewhere else and came here later. Hueyatlaco pretty well puts "paid" to that.

In general, kindly notice a constant in discussions like this : Somebody posts a rock and asks "Was this a tool ?" That's a multiple choice test (Yes/No/Maybe).

What strikes me as humorous (just a little bit) is that the same people who appeal to scientific dogma in support of their beliefs on the matter (that all of the "Maybe' responses ought to be "No"s) (or most of them) turn right around and ignore Ockham's prohibition of "Special Case" exceptions (like, "In Africa, that can be a tool. Over here, an identical item can't be one") when that suits them.

Any time you're looking at a stone, and people are telling you that what's important about it isn't the stone's characteristics but the set of assumptions you view it from, you're seeing, (IMHO) an unconscious Bait-&-Switch operation that isn't recognized as one because it's so common everywhere.

By all means, list the considerations that go into forming your opinion (lack of systematic secondary edge trimming excepted). But admit (at least privately) that those influence the Maybe conclusion one way or the other, without being conclusive. Case in point , Being a habitual stone gazer like the other hard core artifact hunters here, I once killed some time while staying at a motel in south central Pennsylvania (down river from Shoop) by poking through the ornamental pebbles around the shrubbery planted in front of it. And in the space of five minutes, among the quartz pebbles, I found three or four chert endscrapers of the type common at Shoop -- both in form and material -- that had clearly been edge-blunted by having been run through a gravel mining/ sorting operation. Which leads me -- if no one else -- to conclude that the virtual certainty of heavy machinery involvement does not rule out "artifact" status (any more so than it did at the Clovis site in New Mexico).

Executive Summary : the safest answer (IMHO) is "Maybe."
Click to expand...

Yes, well, I wouldn't say my "position" relies on an assumption. A position implies that I have firmly planted my feet, and intend to hold this spot. I was merely stating my opinion, based loosely on what I understand the existing evidence shows. Humans came here from elsewhere. The Hueyatlaco site scientifically shows a very early age, an anomaly compared to other human occupied sites in the Americas. I don't doubt the conclusions of the geologists and chemists. I also don't see where it contradicts my opinion that man brought his tool making skills to America. The tools found there are quite sophisticated, and there is no doubt they were manufactured.

When man came, is up in the air. But man did not arise from a different line here. Humans did not need to reinvent tools here. All existing evidence available today supports the "out of Africa" theory.

I'm not sure if we find a broken stone, that we can make the leap to calling it a tool. Context, of course, is important. Sure, someone may have picked it up and hammered on something with it, or broken open a leg bone. So what? I have used stones to drive in a tent stake, or to break something, a few times. Does that make the rock a "keeper", an "artifact"? Does it even matter?
 

In the referenced piece, David Braun tosses out a brain teaser on the possibility of tool making technology appearing, disappearing and reappearing. That's an interesting theory coming from someone with an open mind. I spent some time last night thinking about it and tried to apply his logic to North America. Based on a visual inspection of the artifacts that I own, it does appear that the theory should be given consideration. Perhaps small pockets of groups (Native Americans) were spun out or forced out of the mainstream populous prior to learning or refining tool making skills. This might be causation for tech disappearing and reappearing.
 

IMAUDIGGER said:
I don't believe there is any archaeological record which supports humans having long sharp teeth suitable for killing without the aid of tools.
Click to expand...

No, but there have been lots of groups that stopped using stone tools and switched shell/bone/wood based tool kits. (South Florida. The famous Key Marco site with the amazing wood carvings has almost no stone tools.)

But if something changes, people move away from shell sources, they will need to reinvent the wheel.

My view is that they probably don’t start from scratch and create a 2 million year old tool kit. They might see other groups of people with stone tools, they might find older discarded pieces the same way we do, they already had complex tools so they might try to recreate those with stone.
 

I always thought it took stone tools to utilize wooden tools.

I think humans have always used what is most easily adapted to the task at hand.
Obviously that changes depending on the locale and climate.
 

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"clovis first" is a nice neat little package. Clovis is well documented and all over the place. Earlier sites are scattered and without the same continuity of tech. Clovis may not be first as in....FIRST.....but it sure is first in something. Perhaps it is "first" as in "land-bridge" migration first whereas other sites may be coastal routes etc.
 

If you look at the artifacts attributed to Denisovans, they were way beyond bipolar knapping. I’m thinking something much earlier made it here, maybe even a hominid that has evaded detection. Heck, even monkeys could figure out bipolar.

Here is a cool blog that is kind of over my head but let’s you see how smart people feel about this subject.
http://anthropogenesis.kinshipstudies.org/
 

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IMAUDIGGER said:
I always thought it took stone tools to utilize wooden tools.
Click to expand...

It looks like earlier paleo & archaic peoples did carry down stone from Central Florida but the later groups generally just did without. Once you get much below Ft Meyers the odds of finding a stone tool are about as good as winning the lotto.

For the most part the Calusa & Tequesta groups in South Florida didn't utilize stone tools on a daily basis simply because you won't find any naturally occurring stones outside of a few pebbles that wash up on the beach or fresh coral that washes up. You do see some imported copper and stone, but it's usually found in high status burials. They did utilize sharks teeth quite a bit, shell adzes, shell hammers, etc. and made some amazing stone tools. The same is true for the not too distantly related Taino and Arawak groups down in the Caribbean (with the exception of a couple of small areas where chert is available in the Dominican Republic and Haiti.)
 

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