[droithomme]

> For nearly 2 million years, ancient humans crafted stones into hand-size balls, but archaeologists were unsure why.

Wait, for nearly 2 million years ... humans? Starting and ending when? Do we have human remains from more than 2 million years ago? Turkana Boy is 1.5 million years old and close to modern physiology, once you get back to 2 million isn't it australopithicus and such?

> That changed when Assaf and her team came across a cache of 30 stone balls in Qesem Cave in Israel, where humans lived from about 400,000 to 200,000 years ago

I wonder if 2 million is a typo for 200 thousand?

> these stones "might have helped enhance human caloric intake and adaptation in the lower Paleolithic period," (2.7 million to 200,000 years ago), at Qesem Cave and possibly beyond, the researchers wrote in the study.

Whew, OK, so 2.7 million years ago is their starting point on this. That's interesting. Who was shaping stones that far back?

An interesting other site is the Cerutti Mastodon site in San Diego with 130kYBP mastodon bones possibly crushed with similar stones which were found at the site.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature22065

[slsii]

Learning about stone "industries" is probably one of my favorite wikipedia dives I've ever had the pleasure of experiencing.

Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldowan

You can see in the sidebar that you can traverse the industries in time (Preceded by and Followed by links). Amazingly, these span _species_, since stone tools were in use before Homo sapiens were on the scene.

[oh_sigh]

It's really incredible that at that point humans(or whatever homo species) could 1) invent novel techniques for tool making and 2) train others, who could train others, etc etc until the technique traveled flawless across the accessible world.

The weirdest part for me though is how flawless transmission of the techniques happened over a relatively short period of time, but (1) was so infrequent that each technique lasted for tens or hundreds of thousands of years. Yet not so infrequent that it never happened, or it only happened once.