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.
I’d be much more concerned if a half million year old structure was built by homo sapiens
Curious, why do you say that?
Like others and the article said, it predates when we believe homo sapiens first evolved by a few hundred thousand years.
So if it was built by H. Sapiens either A. We really missed the mark on when we first evolved and we need to go back and really examine our findings, or B. Time travel shenanigans.
Hint: it’s pretty much definitely not B.
Or C this thing was dated incorrectly (which still would be my guess tbh).
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
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.
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.
Why?
Homo sapians didn’t exist a half million years ago.
As far as we know. Shouldn’t be concerning :)
Yes, it should be, because that would double the age of the species.
Can you explain why that would be concerning though? I would celebrate that richness of history.
Mostly because we’ve been studying H. Sapiens for a long time so being so wrong would suggest a big gap in a dating methodology and the way we’ve tracked human migration of their history.
Why should it be concerning as opposed to, say, fascinating?
Yeah but what about time traveling homo sapiens?
Those still don’t exist now