I refuse to believe it until they find the ancient canning facilities.

Were the hooks dolphin safe?

What came first? Beer or fishing?

I expect that many technologies are far older than we know.

Among them would be fishing, sewing, knitting, yarn-making, string-work, wood-work, shoe-making (cobbling), etc. These don't leave durable traces and it takes special preservation to preserve the tools or the products.

For example, I saw an article on the web about small roudish stone objects that were sort of triangular with a hole in the middle. You might think decorative beads, but my research found that they resembled primitive spindles--weights that were used to make yarn (I've done that myself at a historical recreation village).

The "spindles" in this case were over 10,000 years old though, much older than recognized evidence of yarn-making.

It stands to reason though, that humans had the intelligence to gather wool long before they could make needles and awls. Wool is scrapped off by molting sheep, goats, mammoths, etc., in the Spring. You only have to collect it from bushes and maybe wash it if it is really filthy to use it for simple things like padding and felt. I am sure that ancient mammoth-hunters used the wool of the wooly mammoth and other animals and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to twist it into yarn by hand. This is something that most people would do naturally if you give them a bit of wool or cotton.

My suspicion that Siberian wool-gatherers were making yarn tens of thousands of years ago has not be confirmed by science yet, but I don't doubt it. Humans were probably making yarn thousands of years before they made cloth, and made cloth thousands of years before any surviving piece was made.

We know that humans reached Australia and the Americas tens of thousands of years ago. In the case of Australia, it was probably around 65,000 years ago, and they must have crossed open water because the trench between Australia and Papua New Guinea and East Timor is too deep to be uncovered by sea-level change.

So when the scientists manage to press back the beginning of these technologies even further, don't be surprised. It's not News. It's Fark. And remember me. I want to say "I told you so".

Sometimes I think scientists are just floundering about. Perched there atop their sole-less ivory towers.

There just like to fark with us for the halibut.

Smeggy Smurf: Who hasn't dangled their worm in the search for tuna?

I prefer sword fish.

Mister Peejay: What metal could they have used for the road-building that was

- portably melted (for any reasonable value of "portable")
- Durable enough to last a dozen millenia of exposure to the elements

and

- not precious enough to be stolen over the ages?

Lead, possibly. Or maybe it didn't survive weathering, and only concluded it was metal by testing any oxidized residue left behind

/didn't know that Pancoaifo
//just tossing out possibilities.

TheOther: Mike Rowe is already developing the series: Ice Age Anglers.

Deadliest Ice Age Anglers. You were so close.

moralpanic: Mister Peejay: What metal could they have used for the road-building that was

- portably melted (for any reasonable value of "portable")
- Durable enough to last a dozen millenia of exposure to the elements

and

- not precious enough to be stolen over the ages?

Add to the fact that they hadn't invented the wheel either.

See I never understood that they knew what a circle was. Granted they might not know of the axle but the wheel? And since they had no domesticated animals bigger than a Llama they wouldn't build large wagons but wheelbarrows and such,well I just never understood it.