Stone Age Wood
#06—Reimagining our history.
Welcome to Mind Flexing, your weekly thought expedition to everywhere and anywhere. Strap on your boots (or put your feet up), take a deep breath, and let’s get flexing.
Last week, in A Most Remarkable Story, I left you with the idea that early homo sapiens were far more remarkable than we give them credit for. Our knowledge of our past barely scrapes the surface of our 300,000 years as a species, and it’s easy to fall into the trap of picturing our ancestors as cave-dwelling brutes, grunting and grimacing beneath their long tangled hair. There surely was a time when we grunted so, but the space between now and then is cavernous.
So cavernous it’s easy to glaze over the numbers. Our place in this story, our time on this earth, is so short that deep time is hard for us to imagine. It’s mind flexing! So as you read, please pause to contemplate the numbers.
Let’s step back into the Stone Age: a period that covers more than 99% of hominin history. That’s 99% of a period that stretches back more than three million years. Relatively speaking, our knowledge of those years is miniscule; we must rely on archaeology and science to piece together the fragments we find.
Dates for the Stone Age vary, but it is generally considered to fall between the age of the oldest known use of stone tools and the early use of metal, that is, the Bronze Age. Putting that in time, the Stone Age lasted from about 3.4 million years ago up until about 4,000 BCE.
Yes, you figured that right. The oldest evidence of stone tools dates back 3.4 million years. It comes from Ethiopia, where bone fragments were found with cuts, likely made by the ancient hominin species Australopithecus afarensis or possibly Kenyanthropus platyops. The evidence further suggests our hominin predecessors had already evolved to eat meat.
You’d have to imagine that by the time homo sapiens emerged some three-million-years later, that we were pretty adept with tools. At first, rudimentary, stone tools became more sophisticated over time and by the late Stone Age, we find other materials, such as bone, ivory and antler.
The problem with travelling back millions of years is that not much survives. Other than stone and some bone, other materials—like wood, furs, fabrics and other natural materials—rarely do. But that’s not to say early hominins didn’t use them. We just don’t have the evidence. Their lifestyles remain a mystery.
What has been discovered just recently, however, is the oldest known wooden structure, dating back 476,000 years—once again, predating homo sapiens. It’s a rare and valuable find. In September 2023, archaeologists published the findings of the earliest evidence of the structural use of wood after discovering two interlocking logs joined transversely by an intentionally cut notch at Kalambo Falls in Zambia. The report authors said:
“These new data not only extend the age range of woodworking in Africa but expand our understanding of the technical cognition of early hominins, forcing re-examination of the use of trees in the history of technology.”
All this before homo sapiens even walked the planet. It just goes to show that when we imagine our early ancestors, we should probably be imagining built structures alongside them.
Our knowledge about human history is a drop in the ocean.
We have hundreds of thousands of years of lost stories.
Hundreds of thousands of years left to the imagination.
And with that, I leap forward to the present and leave you with this video of the Armish using the ‘old ways’ to move a barn; because, well, unless you see it for yourself, you may be tempted to come up with another theory about how a barn could move from one paddock to another without being dissembled, craned, or transported by aliens.
Postscript: There are a surprising number of videos of Armish moving barns on the internet. Who would have ever thought it was a thing.
Things I’ve enjoyed reading on Substack this past week
A jolt of electricity pulsed around Substack on Friday when a post appeared by Stephen Fry, who shared an entertaining tale about buying a computer 40 years ago.
Talked With A Major Publisher Today—by Marti Leimbach
Marti shared an interesting perspective on agents and publishers, and a little encouragement too.
Ship to Shore—by Charlotte Wood
Charlotte has written a beautiful foreword to a collection of previously unpublished stories by the late Georgia Blain called We All Lived in Bondi Then. Another one to add to the reading list.
Thank you for Mind Flexing with me. If you enjoyed this essay, please subscribe, comment below, show some ❤️, or help me get this new publication off the ground by sharing it with someone you think would appreciate it.
I’ll be back next week. Until then, keep 💪.
Thank you. I am now sitting here contemplating a distant past landscape, dotted with wooden structures. It changes many things.