The shoes found are the oldest in Europe, but there were shoes discovered in Oregon, USA that date back approximately 9,000 years in Fort Rock Cave. The shoes were woven from sagebrush bark and they were found with winnowing baskets. They have been able to pretty definitively date the artifacts by several methods. The artifacts were also below a level of ash from Mt. Mazama eruption (present day Crater Lake) that erupted around 7,700 years ago. In another nearby cave called Paisley Cave they have even found human feces that has given archeologists huge insights into their diet and lifestyles. Further East near Burns, Oregon there is a current excavation going on that is dating back between 16,000 and 18,000 years old. Might make for an interesting topic. Thank you and keep up the great work! I love your videos!
Yeah, I have read about the Oregon shoes. It’s a shame that Simon is so spread out that he is not able to check the writing. I know others write for him, but I find him saying things contradicting other videos of his. Specifically the tomb of Alexander, but I’m sure in 200 years people will laugh at the historical narratives we’ve come up with.
Sandals made from yucca fiber dating back at least 8,000 years have been found in caves in the south western United States. Being arid and all I guess they look like they were left there not very long ago.
I ran into the folks who made those discoveries a few months ago and the guy who found the shoes bought me a drink and we talked about our favorite paleolithic sites in central Oregon. Awesome folks I have to say.
The grass in the shoe is used by many cultures. It is specific grass species that are used. They serve as a softener towards the ground. They were used when I was a kid in Greenland and I believe in Northern Norway as well.
I read a comment recently from a badly educated US woman bemoaning that the US has no ancient stuff like the old world. I am European but know better just from casual reading........ah. that could be the clue. I read a lot.
@@helenamcginty4920 It's not merely a lack of reading. If you live in the US and are not a native American, you inhabit a land whose ancient past was cut off from you on purpose. That's the result of white settlers claiming the land without commingling with the native people. Instead of joining their blood, culture, and history with our own, and sharing in their connection to the land and the ancient past, we tried to erase them. And in the process we erased a lot of that history, that context, that understanding.
Bit of a nitpick: The image of a "footprint" shown at 11:18 isn't a footprint at all. It's an ironstone concretion found in Fisher Canyon in the US. It's been falsely identified (and used as "evidence" of young Earth creationism) by creationists as a footprint, but it's a common geologic feature that occurs all the time.
And the images he shows when talking about the Lomekwi tools are absolutely not the Lomekwi tools. He also says the creators of them "remain identified". Immediately turning this off because it's shown to be lazily made from the start
What if the flute was created when someone used one with hyena holes to make funny noises and then they just developed it over time to make one that actually played notes they wanted to play?
a lot of things in our history came silly things. like fashion. high heeled shoes can from Turkish horse archers. during/after the crusades, the French nobility thought it was cool, so they started wearing shoes with heels (the men). then once the fashion was catching on with everyone, the upper nobility decided to wear red high heels, that only the high nobility could wear.
You should have mentioned the Denisovan Bracelet. That, along with the shoe, also feels surprisingly familiar and modern. Even our human ancestors had monkey brain for shiny rocks and wanted to make a fashion statement. That bracelet really does look like a bangle you'd see being sold in a crystal shop.
I would say "shocking" to describe seeing the Denisovan artifacts collection but that doesn't to it justice. There is a serious level of sophistication there that smacks you right in the face, particularly the level of quality in the eyed needle & the jade bracelet among a few others. It almost makes me wonder if at the time of their creations if Denisovans or the group of Denisovans in that region could of been more advanced than homosapians in certain aspects.
I agree. I have always been fascinated by the sheer number of arrowheads you can find pretty much anywhere in rural America. There might be literally trillions of them laying around the country. That doesn't really add up, for the number of humans we found when we arrived here. Well, it stands to reason that for every bundle of arrowheads a person might have owned, that at some point they also owned a cup or a plate, or other objects they crafted. Most of the really old stuff we find, was preserved by some accident of nature, like a mudslide. Every day it all decays more. Every day more of it becomes dust.
Archaeological sites are often intentionally destroyed by construction companies who don’t want to have to suspend their work and the valuable contracts that come with it. It’s a sad fact that in our society, the pursuit of money trumps the pursuit of knowledge much of the time.
I appreciate the discovery of pre human tools being found. I only took a first year archaeology course in uni (loved it). From my understanding there is an open question as to "why bipedalism" & "why tools." It makes sense to me that if tools were early enough, both questions get answered. "Why tools" is as simple as pointing to all primates, and intelligent birds, who use tools. And "why bipedalism" is "because they were using tools." Obviously an oversimplification, but I can't imagine it being contentious.
I think the question shouldn't be "why bipedalism," but "why bipedalism that is different from other bipedal animals?" Most if not all other bipedal animals have their legs on the underside of their bodies while our legs go straight down from our bodies, dinosaurs were bipedal and yet didnt develop tools, living birds will utilize objects as tools but havent invented any, and then there's us. I hope everyone reading this realizes i only used birds and dinosaurs because of having truly bipedal members of their various species, with all living birds being fully bipedal.
No, bipedalism was loooog established before anything else. We used to walk upright way before the split with gorilla's and chimp's. We walked in the tree's using our arms to stabilize and hold on to branches long ago. When the trees gave way, some of our ancestors began to stay on the ground. Gorillia's and Chimp's began to knuckle walk, we stayed upright.
Oldest wooden structure was also recently confirmed. Something like 200k+ years old. This was probably filmed just a few weeks before the discovery was made.
@@jacksavage7808 Wood can be fossilized or petrified. If it was in somewhere like the Atacama it is entirely feasible. I've no issue with people building crude shelters 200.000 y/a. They were using tools, fire, make up, etc - I expect some hunter-gatherers/nomads built seasonal/trail camps etc on their travels.
The flute as the oldest instrument amazes me! But I still think that drums would be played before as they are more simple to understand, produce and play.
It only makes me wonder when did wooden tools arrived, probably a 1-2 million years after stone tools but for them to be preserved it would be extremely difficult
@@maau5trap273 The oldest worked piece of wood we have found was discovered just recently. It is over 400k years old and appears to have been part of a simple structure. Wood doesn't generally last long, but this one was buried in mud. They have to keep it wet because if it dries out it will disintegrate.
I see why these would be seen as the oldest tools because they look like they came from a smashed rock then got refined by a small rock by hand.... So cool. 👍
That's like giving a lifetime award to newsreader. He is just a repeater of known "facts?" he has no ability to see fakes from real he is a intelligent moron. Dont you agree?
Consider how iconic the round eyed wild haired visage of Einstein has become. It literally represents the concept of genius in our culture. Simon's shiny pate and bearded jowls will someday be as iconic for information as Einstein's face is representative of brilliance.
I absolutely love thinking about how that instrument evolved. I like to believe it was a series of happy little accidents. You have a bone, you're digging around in it probably for sustenance reasons, before long someone blows in it to try and push matter out one end, and it makes a whistle. Before long you have people carving them, refining it finding out exactly how to produce the whistle, and one day someone gets a little too ambitious with his cavity and pierces through the surface. He blows through it, notices it doesn't make the same sound, so he plugs the puncture with his finger and now it produces TWO sounds! That becomes the fad, and before long someone punctures a second hole and now there are 3 sounds! so on, and son on. Humans are awesome.
One of the most fascinating milestones in human evolution is often overlooked. A lot of focus is on when our ancestors started to walk upright, and the host of changes seen in the skeletons of Australopithecus c. 4 million years ago which show upright adaptations - the way the knees lock, how the hip bones and pelvis work together, how the spine attaches to the skull, etc. But one seemingly minor adaption that emerged probably in Homo Erectus about 1.5 million years ago gave our ancestors the ability to make and handle tools as no other animal could, and therefore make and use far more complex items. It involves the middle finger, more specifically the long bone of the third finger that is within your palm and connects to one of the wrist bones. The surface of that bone is grooved in such a way that it allows us to "lock" our hand and wrist, making tool-making and tool use far more efficient, an adaptation that virtually no other creature has. The bone in question is the third metacarpal, with its styloid process - a pyramid-shaped protrusion that locks into the adjacent wrist bone, the capitate bone. The second and fourth metacarpal also have locking surfaces to the capitate, but the third metacarpal has the biggest attachment.
I think of the saying “the more we learn, the less we know” watching this video. So much knowledge sitting on this planet just waiting to be discovered
The photo used for the ancient stone tools shows them as very sophisticated (arrow heads, shaped hammers), much more so than the later ones shown from Ethiopia. Is it a library/stock photo?
As others have pointed out they are Zhou Dynasty. The Lomekwian tools are real, but MUCH more rudimentary. This video as a whole is very sloppy. Unfortunate given the already plentiful amount of pseudohistorical and pseudoarchaeological videos on UA-cam
The oldest consistent provable human concept has to be the constellation Taurus the bull as seen in the 12,000 year old cave paintings of a bull with the Hyades around it’s head with Aldebaran and the other stars plus Pleiades above the bull and two the stars Castor and Pollux to the side. Seeing cave paintings in Lescaux cave in France Pablo Picasso left saying “we have learned nothing in 12,000 years”.
Its pretty cool to see people factchecking some of the pictures given here. Say a lot of good Things about the community:) maybe put te sources in the pictures
You can see how it spread around the world. The Inuit here in Canada have been making boots that could handle minus 60 Celsius, tools weapons ect from about 8000 years ago up to about 150 years ago.
OMG friday night special! We have no idea how old humanity is. Imagine a giant wooden city built 500,000 years ago. Nothing would have survived to today.
Thanks I’ll look into it But I am skeptical that the dating will hold up overtime. After all that’s the ice age the flood the younger dryas in addition to simple wood rotting. But maybe it was preserved some how covering over and preventing oxygen from allowing bacteria and fungi from rotting the wood
05:58 Imagine the feeling you would get holding a tool made over 2 million years ago, before humans even existed. That would be a very special privilege indeed.
The majority of people have absolutely 0 clue on the worlds timeline and where we come in. If you look at earth's timeline, we humans have not been around for that long. Fun fact, Dinosaurs roamed around earth for roughly 160 million years. We humans have only been around for roughly 6 million. In our Homo sapien evolution it's only about 300k years. Let that sink in.
im not one of the people who thinks the world is only a few thousand years old but i dont think the people who think that are silly. They just think that God is powerful enough to do it like that.
“The shoe was filled with grass, the function of which remains the topic of debate among researchers.” **5,500 years ago in a cave by the Arpa** “Hey Agra, do you think I can throw my right shoe further than my left one if I fill it with straw?” “Probably. Just make sure it doesn’t land in the- Oh for the gods’ sake! I’m not helping you fish it out.”
The movie 2001 A Space Odyssey has an ape using a bone as a weapon signifying a huge leap in human evolution but the far bigger leap is apes using weapons to smash stones to reach the rich bone marrow.
Or, at least, we have great difficulty in doing so and must relearn how to walk to compensate. Pardon, I work in medical rehab and have worked w/folks who've had whole sets of toes amputated. It's possible, but I agree difficult and far less balanced and stable.
@@FairbrookWingates Thank you for the clarification. I was always told it made walking next to impossible, hence even poor people are allowed to have microsurgery to reattach big toes. Most poor get social triaged out of microsurgery by insurances.
If they didn't have servants, their children were brought up with a duty of caring for their parents in their old age. (It was sometimes broken, I'm sure.) @@Yourdigitalprofits Electricians side cutters are the only good tools I've ever found for my toenails or fingernails. :) It's no good if they're too big and heavy though, a smaller size is easier to handle so long as they're still the chunky type. Electronics technicians pressed steel side cutters are all sorts of wrong.
As for oldest footwear, the Fort Rock Sandals (and others) in Oregon take that title. Fibers from more than twenty sandals have been radiocarbon dated to a range of about 10,400 to 9,100 years old. Some 75 sandals were found at Fort Rock, in SW Oregon. Seven sites in Oregon and Nevada produced shoes of similar vintage.
I know it's still a new discovery but the woodern planks in Zambia dating back 450,000 should have been here too. I hope you do more parts in this series
I'm no expert, but the holes in that flute doesn't look like random holes made from some animal eating something, they are straight, even with each other, how did an animal make them that straight? Also the flute could have also been used as a way to communicate to others during hunting, from a long distance or something like that, not necessarily to make music from. Some later tribes around the world have used such items for signaling to others on a hunt or during combat, so it's possible that is what this flute was used for too.
I think that is basically the basis of their counter-argument against animal origin. They admit that 2 of the holes could be tooth punctures but it's unlikely the third could have been because of the alignment. Also the fact that reproductions produce music(or any sound at all) make it extremely unlikely this was made by accident/chance. I don't know very many archeologists that would seriously argue that this is not an ancient musical artifact unless the context in which it was found was flawed.
I put the history of the region where I live back nearly a half million years by finding Early Palaeolithic tools, a Clactonian cleaver and reworked andesite flake, plus mammalian bone fragments, in my back garden. In the fields nearby I found a hammer stone bearing the marks of usage. Made 450,000 years ago, and originating from weathered post-Anglian Ice Age gravel deposits, the were made by Homo heidelbergensis (a European variation of Homo erectus). They're now in the British Museum. These objects would have been entirely overlooked by people with no understanding of stone tools. It's worth learning about.
At 11:25 Oldest shoe.... I thought they had it wrong, until I checked the age of Otzi, the Iceman found in Northern Italy. He's only 5300 years old....I I guess that would make his footwear, (boots, cold weather hiking boots I believe), to probably be the oldest pair of boots still in existence....and probably the oldest pair.
@@montecorbit8280 This shoe isn't the oldest shoe anyway, there are sandals found in the US that date back 9000 years. So why can't Ice Bro have 5800 year old Uggs?
@@kaldo_kaldo Ha!! Good one at the end.... Sandals, are not shoes....though they are footwear. I think he specifically stated shoes. Which would also leave out Otzi's boots that I mentioned from consideration....
Could have been when the script was written,or rough drafted,and it made it past the editor,and the reader? Or yeah,he could have lol It's not like cameras,and microphones didn't exist 4 years ago lol...
I found one, that was 3.4million yrs old, spinning it on a finger tip like I was a globetrotter, a heavy rock, yet, it defied gravity, do not know why people don't show love. These are rocks around us in certain sites, all over the world, its really super cool, tools!
In my opinion the grass inside the shoe would dry it out faster than just airing them out helping in the longevity of the use before and obviously after being used!
They found a structure in Africa that was hundreds of thousands of years old and they speculated it was older than the human race. Not sure if that made it to the video but I can't wait to finish it. Thanks Simon and crew
Sounds intriguing, but maybe you could give a little more specific info about it (?) I couldn’t find anything fitting that description using an internet search engine. Like, who are “they” (the people who say they found this thing), and/or maybe post the specific country instead of the entire continent, that would be very helpful in narrowing it down
I wonder if the creation of tools is what split us from other primates. I imagine if hares suddenly had armor they wouldn't need to run so fast and a branch could form favoring other traits such as an ability to consume more food and strength/size to support the weight of the armor. Maybe less fur since they'd be warmer.
The Lomekwi tools force us to confront the definition of our genus, so yeah probably. Homo hablis. would have probably been categorise as an Australopithecus species if Oldowan tools were not found to have been made by them. For a very long time the distinctive characteristic of our genus was manufactured tools. Lomekwi completely shattered this idea. They were found alongside Paranthropus teeth, so could have been manufactured well outside our genus.
Those tools you show at .58 are Zhou Dynasty( 1046 BC - 256 BC) artifacts from China NOT 3million year old stone tools from Africa. Then at 2:52 you are showing what appears to be Early-Archaic (8000 -6000 BC stone tools from the Mississippi/Missouri river watersheds of America. Unforgivable errors. Edit this video fast!
I felt that way, too. They were flashing a variety of pictures which weren't related. They were trying to set a context? Without commentary, though, it seems they were misleading the audience.
It's unfortunate, but a product of people producing content on periods/technology they are unfamiliar with. Stone tools look very similar to the layperson but incredibly different to the well versed.
Dear listener,most devices have audio settings that allow your phone to automatically tune out some of the music,and enhance the sound of voices and such...Solve your own problems! ;)
one way is to date the rock or soil layer that the artifacts are found in. lower layers are older and we have pretty good data on how old each layer is in different areas. Something that was once alive can also be carbon dated (or other methods similar to carbon dating). the problem with dating things like stone is that they cant be carbon dated so you can only rely on where it was found. and honestly if something can be made it can also be buried so in the case of those stone tools, the 200k years age could actually be much much younger. if they find evidence of humans in the same layer, like remnants of a campfire, they may be able to carbon date that and use it as evidence to back up the age of the artifact. long story short without being able to carbon date the artifact itself its almost always an educated guess and nothing more.
@@tomhenry897how carbon dating works is, carbon is in the air in the form of carbon dioxide. A known amount of it is the radioactive carbon 14. It is ingested by all living things, trees, people, etc. when you die you stop ingesting carbon 14, and measuring the amount left in the dead and calculating with the half life (the time it takes for half of it to decay) gives a pretty good idea when that thing died. But it only works for once-living items. I’ve never seen a rock breathe.
@@nbarnes6225yeah, the reason they were able to date those old stone tools is because they were found insitu (underground in their original place) if they were on the surface we wouldn’t have been able to date them.
Here is a thought, what if the "flute" was not a musical instrument at all, but used as a long range signal. Different tones to signal different messages such as danger, water or even as a signal to indicate that prey was located in a hunting group. In essence a primitive telephone.
Well thats a nice idea. Imagine a group of hunters trying to surround prey animals and they want to give the singnal to attack, but every sound of their voice would let the prey start to flee. Not if they used the flute signal that imitated bird singing sounds.
0:35 - Chapter 1 - The lomekwi tools
4:50 - Chapter 2 - The kanjera tool
7:55 - Chapter 3 - The oldest shoe
11:30 - Chapter 4 - The oldest musical instrument
14:20 - Chapter 5 - The oldest prosthetic
All heroes don't wear capes. Thanks.
The oldest prosthetic is really cool!
The shoe is much more advanced than moccasins
The shoes found are the oldest in Europe, but there were shoes discovered in Oregon, USA that date back approximately 9,000 years in Fort Rock Cave. The shoes were woven from sagebrush bark and they were found with winnowing baskets. They have been able to pretty definitively date the artifacts by several methods. The artifacts were also below a level of ash from Mt. Mazama eruption (present day Crater Lake) that erupted around 7,700 years ago. In another nearby cave called Paisley Cave they have even found human feces that has given archeologists huge insights into their diet and lifestyles. Further East near Burns, Oregon there is a current excavation going on that is dating back between 16,000 and 18,000 years old. Might make for an interesting topic.
Thank you and keep up the great work! I love your videos!
Yeah, I have read about the Oregon shoes. It’s a shame that Simon is so spread out that he is not able to check the writing. I know others write for him, but I find him saying things contradicting other videos of his. Specifically the tomb of Alexander, but I’m sure in 200 years people will laugh at the historical narratives we’ve come up with.
Sandals made from yucca fiber dating back at least 8,000 years have been found in caves in the south western United States. Being arid and all I guess they look like they were left there not very long ago.
Fake
@@HowardArnold-be9lymexican
I ran into the folks who made those discoveries a few months ago and the guy who found the shoes bought me a drink and we talked about our favorite paleolithic sites in central Oregon. Awesome folks I have to say.
I would love to see a part 2 (and 3…) of this video! It’s so fascinating how far back our “everyday” objects have been in use
The grass in the shoe is used by many cultures. It is specific grass species that are used. They serve as a softener towards the ground. They were used when I was a kid in Greenland and I believe in Northern Norway as well.
Grass, when properly packed/inserted is also one of the best insulating materials there is even today!
I read a comment recently from a badly educated US woman bemoaning that the US has no ancient stuff like the old world.
I am European but know better just from casual reading........ah. that could be the clue. I read a lot.
@@helenamcginty4920 It's not merely a lack of reading. If you live in the US and are not a native American, you inhabit a land whose ancient past was cut off from you on purpose. That's the result of white settlers claiming the land without commingling with the native people. Instead of joining their blood, culture, and history with our own, and sharing in their connection to the land and the ancient past, we tried to erase them. And in the process we erased a lot of that history, that context, that understanding.
When you were a kid? How old are you? 😂 (just kidding, of course)
Cattails too ❤
These are the types of videos from this channel that I live for. More please!
YOu know its fake right?
@@autisticsimon12 What's fake?
Bit of a nitpick: The image of a "footprint" shown at 11:18 isn't a footprint at all. It's an ironstone concretion found in Fisher Canyon in the US. It's been falsely identified (and used as "evidence" of young Earth creationism) by creationists as a footprint, but it's a common geologic feature that occurs all the time.
came looking for this comment, wasn't disappointed ❤
Not a nitpick at all.
These things should be highlighted as Creationists and flat-Earthers will seize upon anything as supposed evidence.
Thank you for adding this info
And the images he shows when talking about the Lomekwi tools are absolutely not the Lomekwi tools. He also says the creators of them "remain identified". Immediately turning this off because it's shown to be lazily made from the start
What if the flute was created when someone used one with hyena holes to make funny noises and then they just developed it over time to make one that actually played notes they wanted to play?
a lot of things in our history came silly things. like fashion. high heeled shoes can from Turkish horse archers. during/after the crusades, the French nobility thought it was cool, so they started wearing shoes with heels (the men). then once the fashion was catching on with everyone, the upper nobility decided to wear red high heels, that only the high nobility could wear.
Seems like not having a vessi ad while talking about oldest shoes was a missed opportunity lol
You beat me to it. That would have been hilarious, and for once, *fitting* 🤪
I know maybe im a bad person but I already starting skipping foward and.had to go back when i realized it wasn't an ad😅
You should have mentioned the Denisovan Bracelet. That, along with the shoe, also feels surprisingly familiar and modern. Even our human ancestors had monkey brain for shiny rocks and wanted to make a fashion statement. That bracelet really does look like a bangle you'd see being sold in a crystal shop.
Or the lapis tube pen looking thing
Ok, old shoe, very cool, but it leaves me asking, "what happened to the other one?"
You KNOW there's a story behind that.
@@benjaminscullion7624 The very same thing that happens when you lose a sock, it just entered the void. LOL XD
I would say "shocking" to describe seeing the Denisovan artifacts collection but that doesn't to it justice. There is a serious level of sophistication there that smacks you right in the face, particularly the level of quality in the eyed needle & the jade bracelet among a few others. It almost makes me wonder if at the time of their creations if Denisovans or the group of Denisovans in that region could of been more advanced than homosapians in certain aspects.
@@Dang3rMouSe I believe modern humans shall we say, "intermingled" with Denisovan, so they may have been our equals in intelligence.
I wonder how many ancient items go unrecognized and end up destroyed every year? Probably a lot.
And items that we never even found before they degraded, or got looted and what not.
All and all probably a lot we lost or never will find
I agree. I have always been fascinated by the sheer number of arrowheads you can find pretty much anywhere in rural America. There might be literally trillions of them laying around the country. That doesn't really add up, for the number of humans we found when we arrived here. Well, it stands to reason that for every bundle of arrowheads a person might have owned, that at some point they also owned a cup or a plate, or other objects they crafted. Most of the really old stuff we find, was preserved by some accident of nature, like a mudslide. Every day it all decays more. Every day more of it becomes dust.
🤦duh
Archaeological sites are often intentionally destroyed by construction companies who don’t want to have to suspend their work and the valuable contracts that come with it. It’s a sad fact that in our society, the pursuit of money trumps the pursuit of knowledge much of the time.
Not enough
PART 2 PLEASE this was a really good episode
I appreciate the discovery of pre human tools being found. I only took a first year archaeology course in uni (loved it). From my understanding there is an open question as to "why bipedalism" & "why tools." It makes sense to me that if tools were early enough, both questions get answered. "Why tools" is as simple as pointing to all primates, and intelligent birds, who use tools. And "why bipedalism" is "because they were using tools." Obviously an oversimplification, but I can't imagine it being contentious.
I know some of these words
I think the question shouldn't be "why bipedalism," but "why bipedalism that is different from other bipedal animals?" Most if not all other bipedal animals have their legs on the underside of their bodies while our legs go straight down from our bodies, dinosaurs were bipedal and yet didnt develop tools, living birds will utilize objects as tools but havent invented any, and then there's us. I hope everyone reading this realizes i only used birds and dinosaurs because of having truly bipedal members of their various species, with all living birds being fully bipedal.
No, bipedalism was loooog established before anything else. We used to walk upright way before the split with gorilla's and chimp's. We walked in the tree's using our arms to stabilize and hold on to branches long ago. When the trees gave way, some of our ancestors began to stay on the ground. Gorillia's and Chimp's began to knuckle walk, we stayed upright.
exactly
Think of it this way. Every wild creature on earth would be using tools if they had the brainpower. We are lucky.
"The crafters of these tools remain identified" 1:06
I, for one, am glad they get such ongoing recognition.
Oldest wooden structure was also recently confirmed. Something like 200k+ years old. This was probably filmed just a few weeks before the discovery was made.
Wood lasting 200K+ years seems a reach my friends.
@@jacksavage7808 Wood can be fossilized or petrified. If it was in somewhere like the Atacama it is entirely feasible.
I've no issue with people building crude shelters 200.000 y/a. They were using tools, fire, make up, etc - I expect some hunter-gatherers/nomads built seasonal/trail camps etc on their travels.
A biden Democrat scientist
@@tomhenry897< a Trump Flat Earther cultist.
@@jacksavage7808ever heard of fossilised wood? 😂
You know that musical instrument looks like my kids elementary school recorder after I stepped on it in the hallway in the middle of the night.
Anthropology with a jazzy piano backing...surprisingly soothing.
The flute as the oldest instrument amazes me! But I still think that drums would be played before as they are more simple to understand, produce and play.
I could have listened to several hours of these stories. Great stuff, thx.
Holy shit, I had no idea tool-making hominids were over three million years old! I love this channel
For sure, I find this really fascinating. I thought tool creation was within like... the last 50-100k years max
And we have to to take into account that the stuff we've found is not the oldest that existed, it's just what we've found so far.
It only makes me wonder when did wooden tools arrived, probably a 1-2 million years after stone tools but for them to be preserved it would be extremely difficult
@@maau5trap273 The oldest worked piece of wood we have found was discovered just recently. It is over 400k years old and appears to have been part of a simple structure. Wood doesn't generally last long, but this one was buried in mud. They have to keep it wet because if it dries out it will disintegrate.
Cairo Toe's first two albums are freakin' classics.
Great band or STD name
I'll watch literally as much of this as you make, Simon & co.
Sober me: Yay Simon!
Drunk me: Yay Simon!
Loved this episode, well done Simon & team
I see why these would be seen as the oldest tools because they look like they came from a smashed rock then got refined by a small rock by hand.... So cool. 👍
Simon Whistler deserves the lifetime achievement award for educational youtube content
I agree.
I believe he is officially known as “Fact Boy” by denizens of the internet
That's like giving a lifetime award to newsreader. He is just a repeater of known "facts?" he has no ability to see fakes from real he is a intelligent moron. Dont you agree?
Consider how iconic the round eyed wild haired visage of Einstein has become. It literally represents the concept of genius in our culture. Simon's shiny pate and bearded jowls will someday be as iconic for information as Einstein's face is representative of brilliance.
@@76rjackson Wipe your nose, its brown.
Great to be at work and get an upload from fact boy
I absolutely love thinking about how that instrument evolved. I like to believe it was a series of happy little accidents. You have a bone, you're digging around in it probably for sustenance reasons, before long someone blows in it to try and push matter out one end, and it makes a whistle. Before long you have people carving them, refining it finding out exactly how to produce the whistle, and one day someone gets a little too ambitious with his cavity and pierces through the surface. He blows through it, notices it doesn't make the same sound, so he plugs the puncture with his finger and now it produces TWO sounds! That becomes the fad, and before long someone punctures a second hole and now there are 3 sounds! so on, and son on.
Humans are awesome.
One of the most fascinating milestones in human evolution is often overlooked. A lot of focus is on when our ancestors started to walk upright, and the host of changes seen in the skeletons of Australopithecus c. 4 million years ago which show upright adaptations - the way the knees lock, how the hip bones and pelvis work together, how the spine attaches to the skull, etc. But one seemingly minor adaption that emerged probably in Homo Erectus about 1.5 million years ago gave our ancestors the ability to make and handle tools as no other animal could, and therefore make and use far more complex items. It involves the middle finger, more specifically the long bone of the third finger that is within your palm and connects to one of the wrist bones. The surface of that bone is grooved in such a way that it allows us to "lock" our hand and wrist, making tool-making and tool use far more efficient, an adaptation that virtually no other creature has.
The bone in question is the third metacarpal, with its styloid process - a pyramid-shaped protrusion that locks into the adjacent wrist bone, the capitate bone. The second and fourth metacarpal also have locking surfaces to the capitate, but the third metacarpal has the biggest attachment.
"The Cairo Toe was unearthed almost 2 decades ago, in the year 2000." Simon, I have bad news for you.
In my mind the 80s were 20 years ago, he's in less denial than I am at least 😂
8:46 Honestly I thought shoes would be older. 5,500 years ago was like just before the start of the first Egyptian Dynasty.
It’s insane that tools may have been handed to us by another genus and we just got lucky enough to evolve and use them more efficiently.
Most stressful part of the vid was when Simon reminded us all that 2000 was over 2 decades ago. Damn
Y2K the END of the World! wait are we still here?
@@davefellhoelter1343are we though?
Yep. And there are adults of drinking age who were born after the year 2000. And WWII was closer in time to the Civil War than to the present day.
@@Bubbaistthat’s easy in Britain, we can drink legally at 18.
Yeah, we're almost a quarter century into the 21st... 😅
Simon was positively poetic today. More like this please! 😁👍❤
I think of the saying “the more we learn, the less we know” watching this video. So much knowledge sitting on this planet just waiting to be discovered
Aliens made these tools, its always aliens
Yeah bro humans don't make anything. You think Chinese child slaves made your iPhone? 😂 It was aliens.
I think that flute is a sheppards or a scouts whistle...
Awww man I wish I could get into this video but the jazz background music is too... chaotic, sadge!
The photo used for the ancient stone tools shows them as very sophisticated (arrow heads, shaped hammers), much more so than the later ones shown from Ethiopia. Is it a library/stock photo?
As others have pointed out they are Zhou Dynasty. The Lomekwian tools are real, but MUCH more rudimentary. This video as a whole is very sloppy. Unfortunate given the already plentiful amount of pseudohistorical and pseudoarchaeological videos on UA-cam
Are the sandals found near Fort Rock, Oregon not considered shoes? They are around 9000 years old.
Everyone knows the only "old" stuff is from Afroeurasia. America didn't exist until Christopher Columbus invented it.
The oldest consistent provable human concept has to be the constellation Taurus the bull as seen in the 12,000 year old cave paintings of a bull with the Hyades around it’s head with Aldebaran and the other stars plus Pleiades above the bull and two the stars Castor and Pollux to the side. Seeing cave paintings in Lescaux cave in France Pablo Picasso left saying “we have learned nothing in 12,000 years”.
Orangutans can use many tools. They are highly intelligent.
They have generational learning too. It’s pretty incredible.
I've even read youtube comments by them.
Its pretty cool to see people factchecking some of the pictures given here. Say a lot of good Things about the community:) maybe put te sources in the pictures
You can see how it spread around the world. The Inuit here in Canada have been making boots that could handle minus 60 Celsius, tools weapons ect from about 8000 years ago up to about 150 years ago.
OMG friday night special! We have no idea how old humanity is. Imagine a giant wooden city built 500,000 years ago. Nothing would have survived to today.
Wrong. Big news 2 weeks ago was the oldest known wooden structure made by pre humans 476000 years ago in Africa.
@@davetaylor1687I’m definitely looking that up! Thanks for letting us know !
Thanks I’ll look into it
But I am skeptical that the dating will hold up overtime. After all that’s the ice age the flood the younger dryas in addition to simple wood rotting. But maybe it was preserved some how covering over and preventing oxygen from allowing bacteria and fungi from rotting the wood
@@dabronx340 Yes. The wood had been wet all the time in very rare condition. The dating is safe. This changes history.
@@davetaylor1687 in what way would I change history in your opinion?
05:58 Imagine the feeling you would get holding a tool made over 2 million years ago, before humans even existed. That would be a very special privilege indeed.
I for one am glad they kept banging the rocks together.
There are still people who think humanity is like 2k years old😭
The majority of people have absolutely 0 clue on the worlds timeline and where we come in. If you look at earth's timeline, we humans have not been around for that long. Fun fact, Dinosaurs roamed around earth for roughly 160 million years. We humans have only been around for roughly 6 million. In our Homo sapien evolution it's only about 300k years. Let that sink in.
Who? Show your work, instead of vomiting a baseless claim. Creationists don't think that, and they think earth itself is only 6k years old.
im not one of the people who thinks the world is only a few thousand years old but i dont think the people who think that are silly. They just think that God is powerful enough to do it like that.
@@johnqpublic2718oh wow, what a huge difference, 6000 years over 2000.
Get real dude.
There are people who still think fetuses aren't alive 😂😂😂😂😂
“The shoe was filled with grass, the function of which remains the topic of debate among researchers.”
**5,500 years ago in a cave by the Arpa**
“Hey Agra, do you think I can throw my right shoe further than my left one if I fill it with straw?”
“Probably. Just make sure it doesn’t land in the- Oh for the gods’ sake! I’m not helping you fish it out.”
Whenever I walk my dog I think how often I might be walking over ancient artifacts
The movie 2001 A Space Odyssey has an ape using a bone as a weapon signifying a huge leap in human evolution but the far bigger leap is apes using weapons to smash stones to reach the rich bone marrow.
The oldest footwear had been found near my home in Oregon. They are sandals estimated to be 10000 years old
I live in Springfield. 🤪🤪
Simon, did you do speed before filming the intro?
The Cairo toe indicates an understanding that humans cannot walk without two big toes to maintain balance.
Or, at least, we have great difficulty in doing so and must relearn how to walk to compensate. Pardon, I work in medical rehab and have worked w/folks who've had whole sets of toes amputated. It's possible, but I agree difficult and far less balanced and stable.
@@FairbrookWingates Thank you for the clarification. I was always told it made walking next to impossible, hence even poor people are allowed to have microsurgery to reattach big toes. Most poor get social triaged out of microsurgery by insurances.
You've never met a high altitude mountaineer then ! Toes come off all the time! Little toes are actually more important to walking!
Imagine losing your shoe for 5500 years. And of course it’s just the one shoe.
As a 68 year old man, I'm starting to have trouble cutting my toenails. So how the hell did they do it 3 million years ago? Or even 3,000 years ago?
Have your wife chew them off
Electricians side cutters will do the trick
If they didn't have servants, their children were brought up with a duty of caring for their parents in their old age. (It was sometimes broken, I'm sure.)
@@Yourdigitalprofits Electricians side cutters are the only good tools I've ever found for my toenails or fingernails. :) It's no good if they're too big and heavy though, a smaller size is easier to handle so long as they're still the chunky type. Electronics technicians pressed steel side cutters are all sorts of wrong.
Lots of walking limits nail growth.
As for oldest footwear, the Fort Rock Sandals (and others) in Oregon take that title. Fibers from more than twenty sandals have been radiocarbon dated to a range of about 10,400 to 9,100 years old. Some 75 sandals were found at Fort Rock, in SW Oregon. Seven sites in Oregon and Nevada produced shoes of similar vintage.
I know it's still a new discovery but the woodern planks in Zambia dating back 450,000 should have been here too. I hope you do more parts in this series
Im gonna look this up, thanks for mentioning it
Clever man invents Divje Babe flute, and comes up with the world's first instrumental tune.
Clever man's producer: Hmmm.... needs more cowbell.
I'm no expert, but the holes in that flute doesn't look like random holes made from some animal eating something, they are straight, even with each other, how did an animal make them that straight? Also the flute could have also been used as a way to communicate to others during hunting, from a long distance or something like that, not necessarily to make music from. Some later tribes around the world have used such items for signaling to others on a hunt or during combat, so it's possible that is what this flute was used for too.
I think that is basically the basis of their counter-argument against animal origin. They admit that 2 of the holes could be tooth punctures but it's unlikely the third could have been because of the alignment. Also the fact that reproductions produce music(or any sound at all) make it extremely unlikely this was made by accident/chance. I don't know very many archeologists that would seriously argue that this is not an ancient musical artifact unless the context in which it was found was flawed.
It could be posible, good hypothesis to be honest.
The writing in this episode was particularly good!
So whose idea was it to put a cool jazz score behind Simon's narration?
I put the history of the region where I live back nearly a half million years by finding Early Palaeolithic tools, a Clactonian cleaver and reworked andesite flake, plus mammalian bone fragments, in my back garden. In the fields nearby I found a hammer stone bearing the marks of usage. Made 450,000 years ago, and originating from weathered post-Anglian Ice Age gravel deposits, the were made by Homo heidelbergensis (a European variation of Homo erectus). They're now in the British Museum. These objects would have been entirely overlooked by people with no understanding of stone tools. It's worth learning about.
Simon, this one was extra interesting, thanks!!
At 11:25
Oldest shoe....
I thought they had it wrong, until I checked the age of Otzi, the Iceman found in Northern Italy. He's only 5300 years old....I I guess that would make his footwear, (boots, cold weather hiking boots I believe), to probably be the oldest pair of boots still in existence....and probably the oldest pair.
Possibly. He could have found some boots lying around that were 500 years old and worn them though lol
@@kaldo_kaldo
That would make his boots 5800 years old....
I don't think any of his equipment like that though....but it sounds like a fun hypothesis.
@@montecorbit8280 This shoe isn't the oldest shoe anyway, there are sandals found in the US that date back 9000 years. So why can't Ice Bro have 5800 year old Uggs?
@@kaldo_kaldo
Ha!! Good one at the end....
Sandals, are not shoes....though they are footwear. I think he specifically stated shoes. Which would also leave out Otzi's boots that I mentioned from consideration....
My bet on the flute is its an animal call.
its for the women. its all about sex. its always been about sex. sex sex sex. Thats what i was tought. taught?
That second phot of finely knapped arrowheads and chisels was *not* from the prehistoric site at Lomokwi and misrepresents the video.
I lost track of the ages for the last two items. If those facts were mentioned they weren't obvious enough about it.
I love the way Simon mispronounces things
Not gonna lie Areni-1 already sounds like a model of shoes... Like: "Did you see the news? Nike is about drop the new Areni-1's this afternoon...
"Almost 2 decades ago, in 2000." .... Did you record this 4 years ago?
Could have been when the script was written,or rough drafted,and it made it past the editor,and the reader? Or yeah,he could have lol It's not like cameras,and microphones didn't exist 4 years ago lol...
I found one, that was 3.4million yrs old, spinning it on a finger tip like I was a globetrotter, a heavy rock, yet, it defied gravity, do not know why people don't show love. These are rocks around us in certain sites, all over the world, its really super cool, tools!
"I see you in your Air Jordans." I love the delivery of that line! :D
In my opinion the grass inside the shoe would dry it out faster than just airing them out helping in the longevity of the use before and obviously after being used!
Some dude with a bear bone 50 000 years ago:
"I wonder if I can play Wonderwall on this"
They found a prehistoric Croc that was made from an actual crocodile. I learned that from watching the documentary “The Flintstones”
I wish you were still doing the other channels
Interesting, Thanks Simon. 🤙
“I see you in your Air Jordans” says Simon in his Vessi’s!
This one was really cool fascinating especially the 1st chapter about the stone tools 😊please keep doing videos like this
Weren’t there some 8000 year old shoes found in the US?
They're probably hanging onto some phone line in the ghetto
I dont like your take on History or Politics but these types of topics is where you excel i believe keep em coming👍🏾
They found a structure in Africa that was hundreds of thousands of years old and they speculated it was older than the human race. Not sure if that made it to the video but I can't wait to finish it. Thanks Simon and crew
Sounds intriguing, but maybe you could give a little more specific info about it (?) I couldn’t find anything fitting that description using an internet search engine. Like, who are “they” (the people who say they found this thing), and/or maybe post the specific country instead of the entire continent, that would be very helpful in narrowing it down
@@gregbors8364🎉
@@gregbors8364I found "A structure dating back almost half a million years discovered in Zambia"
Africa has 56 countries buddy
1. Archaeologists
2. Zambia
3. Joojle it.
That prosthetic toe was cool!
I gotta take a shot every time he says Cairo toe
I wonder if the creation of tools is what split us from other primates. I imagine if hares suddenly had armor they wouldn't need to run so fast and a branch could form favoring other traits such as an ability to consume more food and strength/size to support the weight of the armor. Maybe less fur since they'd be warmer.
Elmer Fudd strongly objects to this idea.
In our lifetime, we will see the primates rise up and do things like we do.
The Lomekwi tools force us to confront the definition of our genus, so yeah probably.
Homo hablis. would have probably been categorise as an Australopithecus species if Oldowan tools were not found to have been made by them. For a very long time the distinctive characteristic of our genus was manufactured tools.
Lomekwi completely shattered this idea. They were found alongside Paranthropus teeth, so could have been manufactured well outside our genus.
We actually were never primates, per DNA studies/2019
Primates use tools. Primitive ones using found objects, but they are tools.
I found the music in this video extremely distracting, I've never had that issue with your other videos.
Those tools you show at .58 are Zhou Dynasty( 1046 BC - 256 BC) artifacts from China NOT 3million year old stone tools from Africa. Then at 2:52 you are showing what appears to be Early-Archaic (8000 -6000 BC stone tools from the Mississippi/Missouri river watersheds of America. Unforgivable errors. Edit this video fast!
I felt that way, too. They were flashing a variety of pictures which weren't related. They were trying to set a context? Without commentary, though, it seems they were misleading the audience.
It's unfortunate, but a product of people producing content on periods/technology they are unfamiliar with. Stone tools look very similar to the layperson but incredibly different to the well versed.
Ah that Divje Babe pronounciation was perfect
Respect for putting (known)
Brilliant! ❤️♾️❤️
Dear editor, can you please take the background music down a notch or three. Especially when it has a lot of bass. It overpowers Simon's voice.
Dear listener,most devices have audio settings that allow your phone to automatically tune out some of the music,and enhance the sound of voices and such...Solve your own problems! ;)
It’s very annoying and it’s in a lot of videos, nobody needs music as a background of speaking.
@billyjean3118 Almost as much as nobody needs you ;)
@jeffdroog smooth brain move jeff
@@jeffdroog16 thumbs up would indicate it’s not just one person’s problem. If you can’t advance actual help stfu.
Anyone else feel like the background music was kinda loud? Sorry to nit pick but i found it distracting
Anyone else feel like people are fucking stupid lol
The volume balance is always a bit lacking in these videos
Someone spent the rest of their life wondering where the hell they left their right shoe.
How do they know when they were made vs how old the material is? (Genuinely curious)
one way is to date the rock or soil layer that the artifacts are found in. lower layers are older and we have pretty good data on how old each layer is in different areas. Something that was once alive can also be carbon dated (or other methods similar to carbon dating). the problem with dating things like stone is that they cant be carbon dated so you can only rely on where it was found. and honestly if something can be made it can also be buried so in the case of those stone tools, the 200k years age could actually be much much younger. if they find evidence of humans in the same layer, like remnants of a campfire, they may be able to carbon date that and use it as evidence to back up the age of the artifact. long story short without being able to carbon date the artifact itself its almost always an educated guess and nothing more.
@@knotsure913 interesting! Thank you for the detailed answer...that totally makes sense. 😁
Carbon 14
@@tomhenry897how carbon dating works is, carbon is in the air in the form of carbon dioxide. A known amount of it is the radioactive carbon 14. It is ingested by all living things, trees, people, etc. when you die you stop ingesting carbon 14, and measuring the amount left in the dead and calculating with the half life (the time it takes for half of it to decay) gives a pretty good idea when that thing died. But it only works for once-living items. I’ve never seen a rock breathe.
@@nbarnes6225yeah, the reason they were able to date those old stone tools is because they were found insitu (underground in their original place) if they were on the surface we wouldn’t have been able to date them.
0:05 what's that?
The kailasa temple
Here is a thought, what if the "flute" was not a musical instrument at all, but used as a long range signal. Different tones to signal different messages such as danger, water or even as a signal to indicate that prey was located in a hunting group. In essence a primitive telephone.
That’s not a bad thought at all 💯
Well thats a nice idea. Imagine a group of hunters trying to surround prey animals and they want to give the singnal to attack, but every sound of their voice would let the prey start to flee. Not if they used the flute signal that imitated bird singing sounds.
Thank y'all for this excellent video.....
Old Flying Shoe🇺🇸
If there's ever a part 2 of this video the phone in your profile pic will be in it 😂
Thanks, Sideprojects.
can just imagine ancient Neanderthals with that flute object putting together their own rendition of Hey Jude or Beat It
I had a pair of Tommy Hilfiger gym shoes last for 11 years...and I thought that was good.