400,000-year-old 'School of Rock' Found in Prehistoric Cave

[Skywizard]

Ancient toolmaking school found in Qesem Cave in Israel,
suggest that modern humans developed much earlier than thought.

Scientists may have just discovered the oldest school in history. Archaeologists from Israel’s Tel Aviv University uncovered a cave where humans seem to have taught each other to make tools 400,000 years ago. No word yet on the price of tuition.

Conventionally, anthropologists have thought that our modern species, with all its speaking and technological prowess, is around 100,000 years old. But this discovery may mean modern humans have been around much longer.

Archaeologists uncovered a bunch of flint tools and tool-making leftovers in Israel’s Qesem Cave.

If you’re an ancient human making a tool, there’s a good chance you are taking a big piece of flint and splitting pieces off it for spears and other tools. This splitting process was pretty difficult, and you can tell when someone messed up. And the archaeologists found a lot of mess-ups in the cave. They also found a lot of expertly split pieces. Since they found both good and bad pieces together, the archaeologists think that teachers probably taught students how to make tools there.

Rocks used to make ancient tools found at Israel’s Qesem Cave.

It’s a bit like walking into a kitchen and seeing a bunch of perfectly made pies alongside some blobs of burnt dough. You probably walked into a cooking class.

“I wouldn’t talk about a school in the modern sense, but we can see a specific tradition, a specific way of doing things in the cave, which was passed on from generation to generation,” explained Ella Assaf, the Tel Aviv University grad student running the study. “There was definitely a mechanism of knowledge transmission.”

Speaking of kitchens, the cave’s hearth suggested that the humans who lived there could control fire quite well, another sign that humans were much more advanced back then than previously thought. In fact, some scientists are saying that all these advanced firemaking and toolmaking skills mean that humans must have had language because it would have been too hard to teach this stuff without it.

Not just hominin see, hominin do

There have been other studies that indicate knowledge transmission amongst prehistoric humans. These mostly involve remains dated to the Upper Paleolithic, however, hundreds of thousands of years after Qesem’s time.

The discovery of what seems to be a school for advanced flint tool-making raises the key question of how this prehistoric show-and-tell took place. Did the hominins who lived so long ago already have a language with which to teach their children? Can such complex behavior be learned just through imitation?

When our ancestors began to talk is controvesial. Some researchers suggest that, at least physiologically, they may have already been speaking as early as 1.75 million years ago, as they began to create more complex and standardized tools, which required some kind of knowledge sharing.





Source: http://earthmysterynews.com/2018/01/...an-we-thought/
Source: https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/...rael-1.5626671



peace...

[Justplain]

No surprise. One day they'll admit finding sunken cities 100k+ bce. Who'd have thought?