In 2019, researchers in Zambia stumbled upon an incredible archaeological find at Colombo Falls—nearly half a million-year-old wood that showed signs of human manipulation. This discovery suggests the wood might be part of the earliest known structure in the world. It’s mind-blowing to think that ancient humans were building things so long ago. The find gives us a fascinating glimpse into early human ingenuity. Who knew that something as simple as old wood could rewrite a part of our history?
Credit:
Palace of Knossos: Gary Bembridge from London, UK - https://flic.kr/p/2bgUXWL, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Palace_of_Knossos_Crete_Greece_(44812341684).jpg
Leather shoe: Pinhasi R, Gasparian B, Areshian G, Zardaryan D, Smith A, et al. (authors of source article), CC BY 2.5 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chalcolithic_leather_shoe_from_Areni-1_cave.jpg
Flauta paleolítica: José-Manuel Benito Álvarez, CC BY-SA 2.5 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flauta_paleol%C3%ADtica.jpg
Knossos: Bernard Gagnon, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Knossos_-_North_Portico_02.jpg
CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/:
Super alte Flöte: Marco Ciaramella, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Super_alte_Fl%C3%B6te.jpg
Rosetta Stone: Hans Hillewaert, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rosetta_Stone.JPG
Arthur Evans portrait: Gts-tg, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arthur_Evans_portrait_(frameless),_1907,_by_William_Richmond,_Ashmolean_Museum,_Oxford.jpg
Spring fresco: Zde, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Spring_fresco_from_Akrotiri,_NAMA_BE_1974.29,_191198.jpg
Phaistos Disc: C messier, edit by Bammesk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phaistos_Disc_-_Side_A_-_6380_-_crop1.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phaistos_Disc_-_Side_B_-_6381_-_crop1.jpg
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Credit:
Palace of Knossos: Gary Bembridge from London, UK - https://flic.kr/p/2bgUXWL, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Palace_of_Knossos_Crete_Greece_(44812341684).jpg
Leather shoe: Pinhasi R, Gasparian B, Areshian G, Zardaryan D, Smith A, et al. (authors of source article), CC BY 2.5 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chalcolithic_leather_shoe_from_Areni-1_cave.jpg
Flauta paleolítica: José-Manuel Benito Álvarez, CC BY-SA 2.5 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flauta_paleol%C3%ADtica.jpg
Knossos: Bernard Gagnon, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Knossos_-_North_Portico_02.jpg
CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/:
Super alte Flöte: Marco Ciaramella, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Super_alte_Fl%C3%B6te.jpg
Rosetta Stone: Hans Hillewaert, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rosetta_Stone.JPG
Arthur Evans portrait: Gts-tg, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arthur_Evans_portrait_(frameless),_1907,_by_William_Richmond,_Ashmolean_Museum,_Oxford.jpg
Spring fresco: Zde, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Spring_fresco_from_Akrotiri,_NAMA_BE_1974.29,_191198.jpg
Phaistos Disc: C messier, edit by Bammesk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phaistos_Disc_-_Side_A_-_6380_-_crop1.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phaistos_Disc_-_Side_B_-_6381_-_crop1.jpg
Animation is created by Bright Side.
#brightside
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FunTranscript
00:00A team of archaeologists digging in the far north of Zambia stumbled upon something that
00:06could change all we know about early humans.
00:09Was it a walkman?
00:10Nah.
00:11It's a wooden structure built around half a million years ago, the oldest of its kind
00:16on Earth.
00:17The construction consists of two logs that had been shaped to fit together, something
00:21like Lincoln logs, those toy building sets.
00:24There's no chance that the two logs could have just drifted along the river and merged
00:29in that shape naturally.
00:31They were carved with sharp tools before Homo sapiens, or modern humans, appeared in Africa.
00:37Researchers don't know which species of ancient humans could manage to create something like
00:41this, but they were pretty great at planning and maybe even used some language to discuss
00:47their construction projects.
00:49It also means we can't be so sure that Stone Age folks were just wandering nomads.
00:55They might have been more settled down than we thought, with enough resources to stick
00:59around in one place.
01:01Finding wooden stuff from the Stone Age is like looking for a needle in a haystack because
01:05it decomposes over time, much like Beethoven.
01:11But this one was found near Colombo Falls, near the border of Zambia and Tanzania.
01:16The construction might have been a walkway, a firewood or food storage spot, or a base
01:21for shelter.
01:22It was preserved so well in waterlogged sediments that have no oxygen and kept the construction
01:28fresh.
01:29This discovery has marks left from tools that were used to make the two pieces fit together.
01:35Archaeologists also dug up four ancient wooden tools at a site – a wedge, a digging stick,
01:40a chopped log, and a branch with a notch – all dated back to over 300,000 years ago.
01:47Scientists analyzed minerals in the sand around the goodies they found and used a technique
01:52called luminescence dating to tell the age of the finds.
01:59Experts believe that they should study more waterlogged sites because they could have
02:03more examples of ancient woodworking.
02:06Archaeologists have to be really careful while working with these finds not to damage the
02:10delicate wood, so they used plastic tools.
02:14The team that found the construction had to keep the wood wet so it wouldn't lose traces
02:18of human activity or break.
02:21They took it to the UK to study in special tanks for underwater photography.
02:26There they made 3D models of the wood.
02:29The earliest wooden artifact found so far is a piece of polished plank from Israel,
02:34which is over 780,000 years old.
02:37There were also some wooden tools for foraging aged 400,000 years, but none of these finds
02:43are as progressive as the wooden construction in Africa.
02:48Scientists found cotton fibers from the ancient Near East that are 7,000 years old, the oldest
02:53of their kind.
02:55The place where they were found is like a time capsule, with mud-brick buildings with
02:59all sorts of ancient goodies giving us a peek into what life was like back then.
03:04They've already found signs of ancient parties with spots for stashing food.
03:09Usually stuff from this era turns to dust, but thanks to fancy microscopes, experts can
03:14dive deep into the sediment collected from the site and uncover all sorts of organic
03:19remnants, including these cotton threads.
03:22People used to think the fabrics here were made from local plants, but it looks like
03:26this cotton might've traveled all the way from the Indus region, which is modern-day
03:31Pakistan.
03:33The ancient village of Telsaf might've been more connected than we thought, part of some
03:38international trade network.
03:40There's more evidence backing up this idea, like beads from Anatolia, Romania, and Egypt,
03:46and pottery from other countries.
03:50The oldest known leather shoe that was found so far was waiting for 5,500 years in a cave
03:56in present-day Armenia.
03:58A British archaeologist stumbled upon this gem under a busted jar at the bottom of a
04:03pit.
04:04Alongside the shoe was a deer shoulder blade, wild goat horns, a fish vertebra, and some
04:10scattered pottery shards.
04:12The shoe itself is pretty simple, made from a single piece of cowhide wrapped around the
04:17right foot, held together with a leather lace running through eyelids.
04:21To keep its shape, they stuffed some grass inside.
04:25Scientists are not sure who rocked this shoe, but they used radiocarbon dating to figure
04:29out its age along with the grass stuffing.
04:32These shoes look a lot like the ones folks still wear today on Ireland's Aran Islands.
04:38The same tech and methods used to make these shoes stuck around in Europe until the middle
04:42of the 20th century.
04:46Near Leipzig, diggers found a grave from about 2,500 years before the current era, packed
04:52with over a hundred dog teeth, all lined up neat and tidy.
04:56These teeth could've been a part of a fancy flap for a handbag.
05:00The leather or fabric that was holding it together must've disappeared over centuries.
05:04If it's true, that would be the oldest purse in the world, all the way from the Stone Age.
05:11Using dog teeth and hair ornaments and necklaces for both women and men was, you know, trendy
05:16back then, according to experts.
05:19Whoever was the owner of the purse must've had a high social status, judging by the number
05:24of materials used to make it.
05:26Keep counting all the toothless dogs!
05:30It looks like the oldest musical instruments ever crafted by humans are ancient flutes
05:37made of bird bone and mammoth ivory.
05:40They were discovered in a cave down south in Germany, a place showing early signs of
05:44modern humans settling in Europe.
05:47Using carbon-dating wizardry, the scientists pinned the flute's age at around 42,000 years
05:53old.
05:54According to the experts, these musical doodads might've been used for fun or during religious
05:59ceremonies.
06:00Some experts believe that music might've helped us build bigger social circles and
06:05expand our territory compared to the Neanderthals.
06:08Those guys faded into history about 30,000 years ago.
06:14In 2020, a team of scientists found a string a quarter of an inch long in France.
06:20An archaeologist unearthed a cord fragment next to a stone tool.
06:24Such twisted fibers could've been used for everything from making clothes to fishing
06:28nets.
06:29In prehistory, there was some advanced tech, and the Neanderthals seemed to have mastered
06:34it.
06:35Scientists already knew that these early humans made tar from birch bark and that they produced
06:40shell beads.
06:41There's even evidence of Neanderthal art.
06:44The string section and similar finds prove that our ancestors from many thousands of
06:50years ago weren't as primitive as they're often shown in popular culture.
06:54Back in the 19th century, the French found a broken slab of black granite from 196 B.C.
07:02The stone contained one text in three scripts – Ancient Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and
07:08Demotic.
07:09A French philologist was the first to crack the code.
07:12He successfully matched the Greek letters with the ones in the Egyptian script, and
07:17we were finally able to read hieroglyphs.
07:20The name of the piece of granite that made all this possible was the Rosetta Stone.
07:25With its help, among other things, scientists managed to decipher papyrus records on how
07:30the pyramids in Egypt were built.
07:35A British archaeologist, Sir Arthur Evans, excavated a vast palace complex at Knossos
07:41in the early 20th century.
07:43This was the center of Minoan culture.
07:46The palace had over 1,000 rooms with colorful paintings of dolphins, griffins, and bulls.
07:52But their biggest find was at first overlooked – thousands of slabs of baked clay.
07:57The fire that brought down the palace helped preserve the tablets.
08:01No one could read the slabs as they were in some unknown language.
08:05The scientific community had to wait for another half a century before Michael Ventress cracked
08:10the code.
08:11He was an English architect and cryptographer who studied Greek and Latin.
08:15He found that the script was an archaic form of Greek.
08:19It was the oldest deciphered language in Europe – Linear B.
08:22During the Late Bronze Age, the Greek civilization that used the script vanished.
08:27That's it for today!
08:31So hey, if you pacified your curiosity, then give the video a like and share it with your
08:35friends!
08:36Or if you want more, just click on these videos and stay on the Bright Side!