[HN Gopher] Homo Sapiens lithic technology in South Asian rainfo...
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       Homo Sapiens lithic technology in South Asian rainforest (C. 45k -
       8k years ago)
        
       Author : rntn
       Score  : 48 points
       Date   : 2022-10-14 16:50 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (journals.plos.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (journals.plos.org)
        
       | JoeAltmaier wrote:
       | Lots about the stones; not much about why 'Homo Sapiens'. Is it
       | just because these tools are attributed to Homo Sapiens? I
       | skimmed the article but didn't see anything about human remains
       | or dna analysis.
        
         | acjohnson55 wrote:
         | (I'm totally not an expert here)
         | 
         | There's a ton of archaeological research into human-made stone
         | tools, worldwide. There's very high degree of confidence at
         | this point into which artifacts can only really be human-made,
         | versus made by other animals or natural processes. My guess is
         | organic evidence of human activity would be really unlikely to
         | survive in the South Asian rainforests, so I'm guessing this
         | one of our better sources of information on human activity
         | there.
         | 
         | If you're asking how do we know this refers to Homo Sapiens,
         | versus other species in the genus Homo, I'm guessing we can't
         | really tell that.
        
         | AlotOfReading wrote:
         | The whole paper is about microliths, which are only known to be
         | associated with anatomically modern humans (AMH, aka us). This
         | is just "general background knowledge" in the field, so they
         | don't spend any time explaining or analyzing it in the paper.
         | 
         | The particular typology they use here (shea's modes) is also
         | more complicated on this point than the traditional clark
         | framework where you can just say "mode 5 == AMH".
        
       | hulitu wrote:
       | They had electric cars 8000 years ago ? /s
        
         | LeifCarrotson wrote:
         | Lithic, meaning stone - think flint knapping.
        
         | yellowapple wrote:
         | How else do you think they built the Pyramids?
        
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