Was the Stone Age the Wood Age?

[tuggi]

http://archive.today/HWex0

[retrac]

Of course. And bone and antler, too. One of the primary techniques for manufacturing stone tools - shared by Neanderthals and probably other pre-human hominids - was (is?) using a piece of wood or bone, as the hammer. The wood is softer, but it's elastic, and it deforms when it impacts, and transfers the energy in a different way. The resulting tools are distinct, and the development of the soft hammer techniques might have been one of the first advances, beyond trying to make a rock with a sharp edge at all.

Very exciting to find actual evidence though. Organic implements almost never ever survive.

[bee_rider]

That’s interesting. Nowadays I think (although I’m certainly not very handy) soft faced hammers are mostly used to protect what you are hammering, right? So it is mostly an aesthetic thing.

Of course ancient humans also had a sense of beauty, but I guess I tend to assume they were much rougher with their construction. I wonder what they were trying not to scuff.

[flockonus]

What about string age?

Doesn't seem mentioned in the text or comments. This short video blew my mind: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/T4Couxopo2w

[rendaw]

I think that's probably right but... that video basically says "you could use string for lots of things long ago, the movie Castaway proved it was necessary, we use string for lots of things today." Short-form videos are not a useful source of information.

[soperj]

It's funny that they mention the wheel when the Inca didn't use the wheel, but used ropes and tension everywhere.

[aixpert]

that's probably part of the Mesolithic or upper Paleolithic when people also started to use bone tools much more

The small brother of a string is a threat

[aixpert]

At least for the Kebaran culture in the levante there is increasing evidence that a wood age in architecture preceded the stone temples of Gobekli Tepe. (Wadi Hammeh 27)

[pclmulqdq]

Here's the great thing about wood: every age is the wood age. We have always put the most advanced tool technology of the age toward working with wood, because wood has been eternally useful. And in turn, wood-based technology has advanced with the tools used to craft it. In a symbiotic relationship, those uses of wood advance the uses of other materials, too.

Almost every building today (most of them are small house-like structures) is made of wood, and it has been that way for recorded history. Wood shows up in many places where you would expect humans to have come up with a more advanced material today, too.

In that way, classifying a "wood age" is not all that useful.

[retrac]

The electrical distribution grid where I live is mostly wood and pottery.

[Findeton]

In Europe almost no building is made of wood, except for decorative floors.

[kragen]

most buildings in america are concrete and/or brick, though the usa is an exception. in most of america, wood is used only for roofs and illegal slums, and even most slums are mostly brick

i don't know what the situation is on other continents but i've sure seen a lot of photos and videos of concrete and brick buildings

[ronald_raygun]

The Devonian certainly wasnt a wood age

[slowhadoken]

Trees were most likely fell with stone axes though right?

[pvaldes]

As the Flinstones teach everybody, don't do the work if a beaver can chop it for you

[cratermoon]

I'm led to believe that punching them with bare hands, while slow, gets the job done.

[swaginator]

I really recommend this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Age-Wood-Material-Construction-Civili...

It is about how wood is arguably the most important material in human history. Covers a lot of its useful material properties, and makes very compelling arguments for how wood was instrumental in each era of human development.

[blastonico]

Yes, Ronnie Wood played in the Stones in the same age.

[TomK32]

They even had electricity thanks to Charlie Watts.

[naveen99]

We are in the wood age again with cellulose / rayon.

[szundi]

Historians like to name things after weapons technology eras

[Tagbert]

Stone tools were not really weapons. Some could have been used that way but most of the tools we’ve found were about obtaining and preparing food and clothing. And maybe about shaping wood.

[jansan]

They like to name the eras after the relics they find. And since wood rots, the name "stone age" may be a great example of survivorship bias.

[GolfPopper]

Articles like this always make me wonder, if there was another intelligent species in Deep Time, if they never engaged in wide-spread reshaping of the planet (huge population, large-scale mining and construction, etc), how would we be able to tell they existed?

[lumost]

The concept of prior industrial civilizations was explored in a 2018 paper https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.03748. If you exclude industry, it could be exceedingly improbable that we would find fossil evidence of such creatures unless the species existed for several million years.

[lupusreal]

There's a problem recognizing intelligent species for what they are even if we can meet them face to face. Dolphins, crows, octopus, orangutans, ... Since they don't build civilization as we conceive it, asserting their intelligence is controversial.

[BirAdam]

Were there some other intelligent species (or even our own) that developed some advanced civilization before 13 thousand years ago, we’d have evidence in plant and animal life. Supporting large populations required humans to selectively breed all of the plant and animal foodstuffs that humans eat today. As such, we’d expect to find animals and plants that were different from wild specimens at the same layers in Earth.

[slowhadoken]

Some prehistoric group probably didn’t shape the planet on a large scale because there weren’t that many of them and they weren’t knowledge or organized enough.

[AnimalMuppet]

Depends on how long ago it was.

Two billion years ago? We wouldn't find traces of their industrial activity in rocks - almost all the rocks are gone. We wouldn't notice evidence of mining activity - those mines have been buried by sedimentation, subduction, or vulcanism. We wouldn't find it in atmospheric gas isotopes - those isotopes have long since decayed.

Now if it were 10 million years ago, it is much more likely that we would know.

[pvaldes]

> if there was another intelligent species in Deep Time, if they never engaged in wide-spread reshaping of the planet (huge population, large-scale mining and construction, etc), how would we be able to tell they existed?

Because they will survive. Are we talking about sharks?

[mikepurvis]

Aren’t there certain atmospheric gases that are felt to be only likely to be present in quantity as a result of industrialization, therefore if we see the spectral signatures of those it’s a candidate planet for civilization?

[HumanProtractor]

Ancient Greeks believed in a wood age IIRC.