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Archaeologists discover half a million-year-old wooden structure -- and it's not built by Homo sapiens (www.zmescience.com)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The researchers don’t know which ancient human species made the structure and the tools, but it’s unlikely to have been Homo sapiens. The earliest fossils of Homo sapiens found so far date from around 300,000 years ago and were found in Israel, Dull told CNN. He believes the people who made the structure were cognitively sophisticated and it would be very exciting to figure out who constructed this.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Or C this thing was dated incorrectly (which still would be my guess tbh).

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago

Dating wood can get really specific, sometimes narrowing down the year structures were built.

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

Unfortunately this structure is too old for this method

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

While radiocarbon dating is limited to about 50k years, there are other methods that work quite well. Potassium–argon dating can be used to date clay layers, but in more accurate for lava flows...

Other than that, you look for soil layers and look for global (or known local) events, then figure a date for those.

There can still be error, but less than you'd think. Tens of thousands of years at this scale, not hundreds.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

There is always an error. The important thing (apart from eliminating bias) is to know the magnitude. Radio chronological analysis is well understood and laboratories can reliably report the magnitude of the error (or more specifically the uncertainty) accompanying any determination of age. But news articles rarely publish it.

In this case the age is quoted as "at least 476,000 years" so we can infer a precision estimate of plus or minus 1,000 years.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Certainly an option, and that crossed my mind as well. But in the context of this part of thread, it kind of seemed like we were taking it for granted that the structure was as old as they claim for the sake of argument.