I think archaeology requires a multidisciplinary approach that has only recently begun to emerge. For too long, especially in past centuries, archaeologists focused on history and languages while neglecting engineering, chemistry and the practical techniques that enabled survival and innovation.
That's why the general public views our ancestors as 'primitive,' when in reality they possessed techniques many of which we've lost or still don't fully understand.
I wonder if the bow drill principle for boring holes evolved from fire-starting techniques, where the same reciprocal motion was already understood and mastered in that years.<p>Just speculation, but it suggests how practical problem-solving builds on existing techniques rather than appearing fully formed.
For the curious, Clickspring has recreated something a lot like this and uses it on his Antikythera Mechanism videos on YT.
Bow drills were still commonly used in India in 25 years ago.<p>Because electricity was unreliable and machinery was expensive.
I keep one of those Amish hand-crank drills in my vehicle toolbox. I have one in the closet too.<p>I have a thing for old tools, but not much can substitute a drill when one is needed. And the ones I refer to are surprisingly effective, and built to last. Borders on art for me.
Indian carpenters always had a drill with large spindle around which a long rope is wound. A person pulls the rope back and forth spinning the drill. Another person holds the drill in position using a flat wood piece at the top with small hole to hold the drill axle.<p>Same technique is also used for spinning a wooden churner to get butterfat out of curd. A standing woman would pull the rope back and forth for a few minutes on the long churner stick that is churning the curd in a clay pot placed on the floor.
Hominin history is millions of years old. 5300 years is merely a drop in the ocean of human history.
It's what a lot of engineers have been saying for decades: Looking at the surfaces of the artefacts, it's obvious more advanced tooling, than what was claimed by archaeologists, must have been used. Oh irony, the bits were already lying about in the museum's archive for a century.
Quite frustrating how archeology swings over the years from "we'll believe anything" to "we won't accept any claim without a preserved example". While some of the excesses of the past were clearly excessive, drilled holes should have been sufficient evidence of drills, people living on islands should be sufficient evidence of boats, rope-worn bones should be considered evidence of rope and so forth.
<i>people living on islands should be sufficient evidence of boats</i><p>Historical sea levels were wildly different at different times, so not necessarily. For instance, the British isles were settled at a point when it was a part of the mainland: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Doggerland.png" rel="nofollow">https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Doggerland.png</a>
Balance would be nice, yes, but I think the conservative approach is closer to correct, especially given the natural human bias toward believing sensational theories.
Maybe not closer to correct, but definitely less likely to admit errors. But sometimes the negative space around a particular thing becomes overwhelming. To me this is like circumstantial evidence—in general it’s weaker than physical evidence, but in high enough numbers it can serve.
The problem is that you get a vastly distorted picture because of different survivorship rates of artifacts. In the Stone Age people used mostly wood tools but stone tools didn’t rot away.
That's an interesting thought. I wonder if you can quantify this belief? That Weibull (presumably) distribution would be an interesting and useful thing to know.
Quantify the belief that humans are biased toward sensationalism? No, I have no idea how to do that. Actually you could make an argument that it's a bit circular, that "sensationalism" is defined as the kind of ideas that humans are biased towards and which are therefore more able to cause a "sensation".<p>But if you don't see how people yearn to believe in big dramatic things like conspiracies, aliens, bigfoot, or even simple narratives about single people changing the course of history, and how they only accept the complicated and/or boring reality with conscious effort, then, well, you seem to be living in a better universe than I am.
they dont even accept claims with properly documented and preserved samples. your methodology doesnt matter if it disagrees with the common accepted 'truth'.<p>archeology is a cesspool.<p>not to mention tons of hings being twisted into weird shit only to try and push colonial agendas!
> archeology swings over the years from "we'll believe anything" to "we won't accept any claim without a preserved example".<p>Could you provide some evidence of your own? Archaeology has always been tied to evidence, as any scholarship is.
> we'll believe anything<p>Can you explain what you're referring to? Obviously "ancient aliens" does not count as archaeology, despite your insistence otherwise.
It's possible to put holes through things without a drill. People can get onto islands without boats. How do you define rope, and what else might cause similar wear? Are you certain you can distinguish them?<p>Archaeology has come a long way over the last couple of centuries. It used to be little better than grave robbing and crackpot (often racist) theories. Archaeologists made all sorts of assumptions that turned out to be ridiculously (and sometimes tragically) wrong. Excavations once involved dynamite and bulldozers. Things have changed. Techniques for re-analyzing and extracting new information from old finds are allowing archaeologists to make discoveries without digging at all. Even a careful, modern dig is a destructive act that can only be conducted once.<p>It's not frustrating. It's progress.
If you find a man made hole with a perfectly vertical shaft and high aspect ratio (tall and narrow), it was drilled. Individuals can float or be washed ashore on an island, populations can't. If you find entire civilizations on distant islands, they got there by some sort of boat or advanced raft. Rope generally implies twisted or braided fibers, so maybe it's difficult to tell if this was artificially twisted or a natural one like a vine. But if it looked like a rope, and was used like a rope then it was a rope.
It sounds very un-archaeologist to not investigate the gap between artifact and tooling (like that’s their job?).<p>For me the ‘archaeology not accepting things’ has been fueled by Graham Hancock etc. Archaeology is a lot like science, it sits on a body of research, if there’s evidence of advanced tooling and it’s properly investigated and written up, verified, no archaeologist would deny it.
This is true in many, many, many, many places. It takes a significantly higher bar of evidence to put forward specific tooling than an engineer's intuition to make the mark in archaeology.
Given need, access to anything that might serve as string, pieces of wood, and too much time to think about the problem, most singular humans will come up with that within the year, if not within days.<p>That thing has probably been independently invented a hundred thousand times over. Trying to figure out who did it first is silly.<p>Also that is not a "sophisticated" tool at all. It's literally one step above hitting rocks together. Sharp rocks happens to be the only tool you need to make a basic bow drill.
I think it is several steps up and beyond from hitting rocks together.<p>You need to create string. You need to cut the wood for the bow. The bow and the string need to be the right sizes too. You need something that is sharp enough to work as the drill bit but also small AND approximately round enough to work in the bow. That also needs to be made of a material that is harder than the one you are drilling - here in this story there was some sort metallurgy involved to create the alloy, so that likely involves working with ores etc (mining, identifying, processing etc etc).<p>There are a lot of steps. You can't just find a random "vine" to wrap snuggly and securely around a random thing you find to use as a drill bit that is like 1cm in diameter - you'll need something of consistent size and highly flexible for the string, similar for the drill bit needs to be the right size and so on.<p>The next step up from banging rocks together is probably using sharp stone chips as scrapers or crude knives. Even napped stone axes are quite difficult to create and require skill, even if the raw components are literally laying around.<p>I suspect the average person would struggle to make fire, let alone hand tools.
> You need to create string.<p>That region typically used flax for string. That's another thing that can be done with virtually no tools.<p>Even if you skip the retting and merely hand-strip the fibers you still get something usable enough for some use.<p>These people didn't sit inside looking at screens all day. If your region had a plant that can be trivially turned into usable string you'd know - especially since they had contact/trade with neighboring Asia and there's evidence of flax processing in Georgia another 30k years earlier.<p>> I suspect the average person would struggle to make fire, let alone hand tools.<p>It took us maybe a few days of experimenting to finally figure out as boys. We used some modern string, random sticks, and an assortment of materials to try to start a fire with. It's harder than it seems, but not much so if you're determined. If some bored 8 year olds can do it, then so can anyone of any era.<p>I don't think the linage of anyone for whom that was truly so unattainable would have survived to this day.
Alloying copper with silver and lead is sophisticated. How could they have got to this without structured research, experimentation, controlled manufacturing. It’s a lot closer to our drill bits now than a sharpened bone.
It is likely that only silver was the intended alloying element.<p>Except for native silver, which is very rare and usually mixed with gold, most silver is extracted from sulfides where it is mixed with lead (because silver ions and lead ions have the same size), so simple smelting will produce a mixture of silver and lead.<p>There are techniques of purifying the silver from the lead (i.e. "cupellation"), which were well known in later antiquity, but, at the time of early tools like this, probably the purification was not yet efficient.<p>The knowledge of the fact that pure metals are soft but mixing them makes hard metals is extremely ancient. Before learning this, metals could be used only for jewelry (except for very rare natural alloys, like the meteorites made of Fe-Ni-Co-Ge, which were the source of the oldest iron-based tools found in Egypt and elsewhere, thousands of years before the discovery of how to extract iron from its minerals).<p>Before discovering tin and the bronze made from copper and tin, which happened relatively recently, for many thousands of years various weaker copper alloys were used, but which nonetheless were much harder than pure copper.
But to make a drill bit of highly alloyed copper you need a bit more tools and knowledge
> Trying to figure out who did it first is silly.<p>True. Good thing no one is trying to do that.
Basic research is never silly.