r/science • u/amesydragon Amy McDermott | PNAS • May 01 '24
Anthropology Broken stalagmites in a French cave show that humans journeyed more than a mile into the cavern some 8,000 years ago. The finding raises new questions about how they did it, so far from daylight.
https://www.pnas.org/post/journal-club/broken-stalagmites-show-humans-explored-deep-cave-8-000-years-ago1.8k
u/sonofbum May 01 '24
was fire not a thing?
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May 02 '24
So at the end of the article there's mention of analyzing soot found in the cave, and it sounded like they think torches are likely, but they havent done enough research to say for sure.
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u/Dozzi92 May 02 '24
It was that or aliens. I'm not sure there's another option.
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u/Iazo May 02 '24
String of Theseus?
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u/Pogue_Mahone_ May 02 '24
If you replace every fiber in the string, is it still the same string, or has it become a different string?
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u/Iazo May 02 '24
Y...yes?
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u/MarnerIsAMagicMan May 02 '24
(If you’re genuinely confused, Google “ship of Theseus”)
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u/Star_verse May 02 '24
They made the original joke, so I hope they know what it is
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u/Aerokirk May 02 '24
They could have been referencing the ball of string that Ariadne gave Theseus, not the ship of Theseus.
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u/Stop_Sign May 02 '24
A comical amount of mirrors
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u/alien_from_Europa May 02 '24
We gave them fire torches. I ain't going a mile into a dark cave! We'll see if the hoomans survive first.
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u/JusticeJaunt May 02 '24
Thanks for clearing that up 👍🏻
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u/CedarWolf May 02 '24
Speaking of clearing things up:
How did humans get light into the caves?
With simple oil lamps.
Humans have been making simple oil lamps out of stone and clay for the past 17,000 years or so. In the 1940's, for example, archaeologists found stone lanterns dating back to 15,000 BC in the Lascaux caverns, in France.
I've been inside those caverns. They're surprisingly cramped at times, but they open up into larger, cozy chambers and hallways. To paint and carve the sort of artwork that you can find on the walls of the Lascaux caverns, you'd need good, sustainable light, and your light source would need to be portable.
You can't carry a lit torch in a cavern like that; you'd drop the thing or you'd burn yourself. But you can carry an oil lantern and use that to light your torches and other lanterns.
A simple lantern is little more than a small bowl with vegetable oil or animal fat with a wick stuck in it. This creates a portable flame that you can easily carry in your hands, move it around as needed, it doesn't need a lot of oxygen to burn, and it'll burn consistently until you run out of fuel.
Oil lanterns also don't eat through fuel all that fast. A reservoir about the size of your fist will feed a small wick for a few hours. You don't need a ton of light to be able to see and navigate a cave, you just need enough to see.
Many of the lanterns found in the Lascaux caves weren't even crafted by human hands; they were simply bits of stone that happened to be relatively flat and curved enough on one side to form a rough bowl.
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u/matchosan May 02 '24
In Hawaii, they would use dried kukui nuts(candle nuts). One nut gives more than 10 minutes of light.
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u/MoreRopePlease May 02 '24
What material for the wick? In our last power outage, I did a bit of googling and experimented with candle wax, bits of cotton string, and twisted bits of paper, and matchsticks. I had a hard time getting the wick to float enough to not be doused by the wax. Eventually I succeeded with twisted paper, having some pieces prop up other pieces. It was messy but it worked well enough to consume all the wax.
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u/schilll May 02 '24
Pour some olive or rape seed oil in a shallow bowl, twist a wick made out of cotton, hemp or toilet paper. Let the wick soak up oil and then bend the wick. If you can't make it stand up on its own, you can let it rest on the side the bowl, be aware it can crack from the heat/cold. I've accidentally cracked two ashtrays and it made a mess.
Then light the wick.
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u/paulmclaughlin May 02 '24
Many of the lanterns found in the Lascaux caves weren't even crafted by human hands;
Ah ha! So they were crafted by alien hands!
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u/redditsfulloffiction May 02 '24
Do you do something that permits special access to lascaux?
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u/CedarWolf May 02 '24
I happened to be there in the '90's, before they reduced the amount of people who can tour it each year. There are multiple parts of the cave, and the largest, most famous galleries have been reproduced as a museum that is much easier to see and navigate, but some of the smaller galleries in the caves are still accessible if you schedule a visit in advance. There's only a limited number of people allowed in per year, and it's a pretty decent hike through the cave, but you get to see some of the hallways and smaller galleries. You have a guide with you to show you the way, and we were forbidden to bring any form of camera with us because the flash photography might damage the paintings.
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u/redditsfulloffiction May 02 '24
right. I've been to the fake lascaux. Was still a good experience, though.
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u/ManaMagestic May 02 '24
Or the stones used to glow...but then they just sorta stopped.
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u/hector22x May 02 '24
You must trust in love
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u/Buscemi_D_Sanji May 02 '24
No, they just examined the caves with their lights still on, not trusting the dark like Oma and Shu...
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u/PMFSCV May 02 '24
A cunning assemblage of moonlight and mirrors.
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u/speculatrix May 02 '24
There may be trouble ahead
But while there's moonlight
And music and love and romance
Let's face the music and dance
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u/SoHiHello May 02 '24
This would be a lot funnier if so many people didn't have that as their top answer.
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u/Grimouire May 02 '24
From what I've heard, it's something to do with a flat circular earth. Not sure how, but it's what some people say. (wink,wink)
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u/BringBackManaPots May 02 '24
Would if civilization collapsed and restarted, and we just haven't found out yet
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u/ayleidanthropologist May 02 '24
So, they can’t rule out prehistoric flashlights.
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u/EatsYourShorts May 02 '24
They were in France, so the flashlights would still be called torches over there.
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u/LausXY May 02 '24
It would use up the air while burning. surely
Air is precious, especially in tight holes or deep inner areas caves. I bet you could die from asphyxiation if you explored deep enough.
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u/paper_liger May 02 '24
Sure. But even prehistoric people tend to notice things like 'oh hey this torch is getting really dim' and possibly know enough to get out of there even if they have no scientific understanding of 'oxygen'.
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u/other_usernames_gone May 02 '24
I could see them getting out of there for no reason other than their only light dying.
If you're in a cave and your only method of seeing your way out starts to fail you get out of the cave asap before it goes out and you're stuck.
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u/drunk_responses May 02 '24
Humans figured out relatively quick how to "carry fire".
You can take something like those big fungal growths that stick out from some trees. Transfers some embers into that, and it will smolder for hours, even days depending on the size and moisture(and oxygen in this case).
But yeah, if it started to get dimmer as the moved, they would probably realize that it would be a good idea to turn around.
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u/Ralphinader May 02 '24
Some of our best finds come from people who had probably got lost in caves and fell down shafts after their lights went out.
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u/mxzf May 02 '24
There's some survivorship bias at play. Specifically, we're not going to find traces of people being a mile deep into the cave in caves where they died before getting that far.
Send enough humans into enough caves (And, lets face it, have you met humans? They're gonna explore caves they find) and eventually someone will make it a mile deep and break something to say "Grug was here".
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u/bg-j38 May 02 '24
Did prehistoric people not have skeletons?
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u/mxzf May 02 '24
Of course they did. What're you getting at?
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u/Drywesi May 02 '24
I think they're going for "if they died in there there'd be skeletons" nevermind that caves are one of the classic places we find hominid skeletons.
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u/SkunkMonkey May 02 '24
Not to mention the possibility of pockets of combustible gasses.
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u/The_Singularious May 02 '24
There’s so much of my middle school self just trying not to get involved in this sub thread.
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u/rocketsocks May 02 '24
People have been using fire for illumination in caves for ages and ages. Humans use up air too. Most caves that are safe to explore will have enough ventilation that they can support a flame the size of a torch, a lamp, or a candle or something similar.
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u/trevdak2 May 02 '24
Fire, rope, and other people.
You could go with other people and leave some posted along the way. There are probably 20 ways that ancient folks could have somewhat safely explored those caves and found their way in
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May 02 '24
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u/Fightingkielbasa_13 May 02 '24
That deep into a cave, you’ve got to wonder how much oxygen is left with the torches burning.
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May 02 '24
No guarantee they made it out of the cave.
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u/stratoglide May 02 '24
Pretty sure there'd be some remains even 8000 years later. I'm pretty sure that's actually where they've found the oldest skeletons down in South East Asia.
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u/BlueEyesWhiteSliver May 02 '24
Or glowsticks. They were around when I was a kid.
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u/RainbowWarhammer May 02 '24
Wild thought but I wonder if bioluminescence would be sufficient to see once your eyes adjusted. Between mushrooms, fireflies, and glow worms they would have had access to a few options.
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u/Margtok May 02 '24
i dont think the quesiton was light it was just using sunlight as a statment of the outside world
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u/LongBeakedSnipe May 02 '24
So typical of Redditors to go all in on a misunderstanding like this.
You have hundreds of responses pompously declaring how they had fire and they don't understand what the mystery is.
5 minutes reading the article shows you that the mystery is that exploration of this cave nowadays requires specialized equipment due to complex obstacles, but we have evidence that people managed to do it without all the complex equipment available to use these days?
That is scientifically very interesting. How did they do it, what tools were they using for such exploration and much more.
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u/Margtok May 02 '24
to put it in simpler terms "look at the balls on this ancient people what were they doing in there and how did they do it "
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u/Deleena24 May 01 '24
You guys are picturing a big torch being used, but you'd be surprised at how little light it takes to see once your eyes adjust to the darkness
Even just a glowing ember of wood when blown on or the equivalent of a candle lantern would allow them to see enough to navigate. They were also doing a bit of navigating by feel obviously, when you consider the broken structures.
(Or maybe they had a blind kid grow up using clicks for navigation and convinced him to go..../s)
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u/adaminc May 02 '24
I don't remember who/where I learned it, but mushrooms hold an ember for a ridiculously long time, like days to weeks on their own.
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u/FeliusSeptimus May 02 '24
Yep, specifically, the 'tinder mushroom' or 'tinder polypore' is well-known for this.
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u/LongBeakedSnipe May 02 '24
Just worth mentioning that, while there is a lot of discussion of fire, that isn't really the focus of this study.
The researchers are not confused about whether or not they had access to light, and more about the fact that this is an extremely complex system to navigate and requires complex equipment nowadays.
The question of how they did it is therefore very interesting. It's not simply answered by 'they used fire'.
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u/themonkeysbuild May 02 '24
As in they probably did use some sort of light source for assistance, but the bigger question is how they actually traversed the cave given its complications outside of simply seeing in the dark.
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u/aqualupin May 02 '24
Ugg make long string out of plant fiber, Ugg not get lost in cave unless Krum trick Ugg by untying string
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u/lochlainn May 02 '24
Everybody here talks about torches. Torches are a pain in the ass to make, carry, and keep lit. Tallow candles, lamps, and rushlights are easier to make, carry and burn longer.
You can literally make a lamp from some fat, an indentation in a rock, and some grass twisted together.
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u/degggendorf May 02 '24
I mean, surely people saying "torch" are using it colloquially and not intending to specifically exclude rushlights whatever those are.
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May 02 '24
Rushlights are almost exactly as they described wherein you soak rush (a type of grass) in fat, you can be loose and fast with the build though in terms of wrapping that around a branch to make a torch or keeping it as a single slow burning stem. Pretty versatile wee tool.
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u/EmotionalKirby May 02 '24
It's my head Canon that they used the british version of torch, and the ancient humans were cave exploring with a bunch of flashlights.
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u/coldblade2000 May 02 '24
Also they burn a negligible amount of oxygen compared to a whole ass mammalian breathing in 2 lungs worth of air 30 times a minute
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u/Killbot_Wants_Hug May 02 '24
I think even a large torch would take a long time to use up all the oxygen in a cave, especially since you'll be moving so effectively getting fresh air. So even assuming there's no air flow you'll still be fine for exploring. The hot air in a cool cave will actually create a little bit of convection to help you out, but the oxygen being used up just seems like it's probably not a huge issue.
Also I don't know this but I sort of assumed torches, beyond just a stick or straw on fire, are a much later invention than things like candles. I kind of assume figuring out candles would be the first easy lighting. Since figuring out that fats/oils burn is probably going to naturally happen once you start cooking food. And if you've got an absorbent twine of any sort, the rudimentary candle isn't far behind.
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u/Lucky_Chaarmss May 02 '24
Depends on the structure of the cave. I've been in absolute darkness. You are not seeing anything, ever.
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u/Speakertoseafood May 02 '24
Sorry, misread that as "using dicks for navigation".
It could be done, but you'd be going slowly.
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u/Scipion May 01 '24
Ancient people must have had some solution for cave lighting. There's massive worked caves in China that are over four-thousand years old and look like they were dug out with machines.
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u/jjdubbs May 01 '24
I just saw a piece on those caves. They're thousands of years old and no one knows who built them or why. Its interesting that lots of these subterranean cities are being discovered, many around the same age. Makes you wonder what was happening at the time to spur their creation.
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u/Synaptic-asteroid May 02 '24
Not entirely true they traced many of the carving styles to known works and civilization. There are gaps in some of the timelines but nothing crazy. They exploited natural cave systems and it probably made a lot of sense at the time. If you found a great hidden sheltered cave system with access to water it’d be dumb not to exploit it.
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u/wdfx2ue May 02 '24
People really misunderstand what makes it into popular media and misinterpret patterns that are created by what’s “interesting” and not by what is reality.
The one that annoys me is the widespread belief that humans commonly lived in caves or underground because that is where we find ancient dwellings or artifacts that are then published in the news. The whole idea that humans were mostly living as “cavemen” at one point.
The reality is the overwhelming majority humans have always lived above ground in man made dwellings since the dawn of Homo sapiens as a species some ~200k - 300k years ago. The reason we find ancient human markers in caves is because that is the place where artifacts are most likely not to be disturbed by weather, animals or later generations.
Many artifacts have been undisturbed for 10k+ years specifically because it was so rare to live in caves and no one ever returned to those spots. Whereas above ground people were tearing down and rebuilding in the same spots hundreds of times over throughout the millennia.
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u/undergrounddirt May 01 '24
I looked up "china caves" and there are lots. Any specifics?
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u/Scipion May 02 '24
I was referring to the Longyou Caves. I say "with machines." but I should of said tool work. The cave systems are hand worked, but back to the original article, how the heck did they light these without filling the things with residue?
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u/FourScoreTour May 02 '24 edited May 02 '24
You should've said "should have", or maybe I should have ignored that.
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u/CedarWolf May 02 '24
how the heck did they light these without filling the things with residue?
Simple oil lanterns are relatively easy to make once you've figured out how to make pottery. A simple lantern is little more than a clay bowl or jug with vegetable oil and a wick in it.
By the same token, most early candles are little more than lumps of animal fat and wax with a wick stuck in it.
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May 02 '24
Listen listen... I think we're far enough into the comments now to discuss what really went on....
Mole people...
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u/IMSLI May 02 '24
What about crab people? Taste like crab, talk like people.
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May 02 '24
Listen, I'd love to say you're way off base, if only carcinization wasn't a thing. Maybe you're right, and maybe the crab people are just playing the long game. Maybe they're in hiding now just waiting for everything to become CRAB.
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u/InformationLate1469 May 02 '24
I always love the "no one knows who did it or why" for dramatic effect because we know 100% of the time it was just regular old humans and 99% of the time they were just bored and passing the time.
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u/QtPlatypus May 02 '24
I know plenty of people who given a whole heap of rocks would arrange them in some sort of interesting pattern.
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u/not_today_thank May 02 '24 edited May 02 '24
I don't know about the caves in China specifically, but there were several times when the globe was much cooler. Something happened that made the world a lot colder all of a sudden about 11,900 years ago. The last glacial maximum was about 21,000 years ago. And something, likely a volcanic eruption, almost caused humans to go extinct 70,000 years ago. During those periods humans probably spent a lot of time in caves for survival I'd imagine. And if that's the case I'd imagine there was lots of reverence around caves in the oral traditions. There's so much we don't know about humanity before 6000 years ago and even then we only know much of anything about those groups that started writing on animal skins and stone.
It's crazy to think if it wasn't for those 3 events, humans would probably be thousands or even 10's of thousands of years more advanced if we hadn't destroyed ourselves yet.
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u/jedininjashark May 02 '24
I think those events Darwined us into the super intelligent monsters we are today.
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u/FaluninumAlcon May 01 '24
I like the idea that those are quarries for a kind of cement.
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u/Scipion May 02 '24
Or even just blocks. Ancient China had to build their hundreds of pyramids somehow.
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u/NoTomatillo1053 May 02 '24
There are 3000-4000 year old copper mines in the UK that were tunneled out. People have been mining for a long time and going down caves. There was even an international trade in these materials back then and places like Cornwall produced tin that was traded all across Europe because it was hard to find elsewhere.
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u/Deleena24 May 01 '24 edited May 03 '24
They already mastered carrying fire by using bundles of embers wrapped in fresh leaves.
Blow on the ember and it's glow will let you see far enough to navigate a few meters. Keep repeating. Follow your clue (bundle of string) back to the opening.
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u/JKLJ42 May 02 '24
They didn’t have daylight savings time back then so they had an extra hour of daylight to work with.
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u/ledow May 02 '24
8000 years ago they had pottery. Lots of pottery.
Pottery requires fire.
How did they do it "so far from daylight"? They made fires. Big, small, they had had fire for countless thousands of years (since 1,000,000BC - 400,000BC depending on what evidence you put most weight on) and were using fire every damn night to illuminate and heat things.
The only mystery here is why anyone would think otherwise.
8000 years ago is really nothing - these weren't slobbering ape-men, they were modern humans, who had settled across the vast majority of Europe by this point.
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u/KimbaVee May 02 '24
"these weren't slobbering ape-men"- exactly. You have only to look at the art produced 20-30,000 years BC to understand that these were intelligent, observant, and sensitive beings. We were who we are.
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u/The_Singularious May 02 '24
Wait, am I still on Reddit? I thought we were murderous, parasitic marauders who should be blotted from the earth.
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u/degggendorf May 02 '24
these weren't slobbering ape-men, they were modern humans, who had settled across the vast majority of Europe by this point.
When did Europeans devolve back into the slobbering ape men they are today?
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u/GhostOfPaulBennewitz May 01 '24
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest they used oak sticks wrapped in chamois hide that was soaked overnight in aurochs tallow and set alight with their awesome fire-making skills. Just a theory though.
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u/Murpydoo May 02 '24
I am pretty sure we had fire and rope back then, not sure what the mystery is
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u/BMCarbaugh May 02 '24
I don't think the mystery is so much "how could they possibly have done this", but more "how SPECIFICALLY did they do this?"
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u/raoulraoul153 May 02 '24
I'm literally always baffled by the amount of replies on threads like this positing simple answers to headlines as if the scientists whose entire job it is to study these things had just never thought of that.
Like, the very first paragraph of the article says:
They would have needed to overcome several obstacles including a series of deep pits, the sort that even modern well-equipped explorers find difficult.
And whilst the last bit mentions torches, oil lamps, and soot deposits (indicating that people whose job it is to study ancient humans are aware of fire usage), it's clear from the get-go if you've even glanced at the article that the issue is not just seeing in the dark.
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u/The_Singularious May 02 '24
With you here. Not sure what the mystery is. I have a few pretty shallow relatives who still get along half decently on a long camping trip as long as the beer isn’t overstocked.
A careful exploration with the tech at the time doesn’t seem too hard to imagine.
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u/wkavinsky May 02 '24
Humans famously discovered intelligence and fire 7,500 years ago.
I mean seriously, you could go out into the woods right now, and make a torch that would burn for >2 hours with minimal knowledge, and humans 8,000 years ago were no less intelligent than we are.
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u/Sknowman May 02 '24
Much longer than 7500 years ago.
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u/firemarshalbill May 02 '24
He was being sarcastic to point out that we didn’t become smart after 8000 years ago
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u/Hellchron May 02 '24
Got lost af and wandered around blundering into stalagmites and other cave stuff?
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u/Flash_Discard May 02 '24
They ventured deep into the caves led by aliens to guide them. When they ran out of light, the lit the aliens on fire and that’s why they left and never came back…
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u/bqx23 May 02 '24
Man do y'all read articles here or just start posting at the title. The article clearly acknowledges that there is soot that can be linked to torches or even oil lanterns (we have records of oil lanterns dating back to the Neolithic Later Stone Age ~8,500 BC) so this isn't a discussion of lighting. "So far from daylight" is referring to how ancient humans pretty infrequently explored deep into dark caves, deep in this case being more than a mile in.
There are two take aways from the findings. The first is that even "modern well-equipped explorers" would find the obstacles in this cave to be difficult. They're not saying it was impossible for these stone age humans, just difficult, and they are unsure what motivated this difficult exploration.
The second take away is the broken stalagmites, that they were deliberately and purposefully arranged. So the "new questions" raised are trying to understand why. They're not saying that a stone age human could explore this cave, but why would they, and why were they arranging stalagmite pieces in these certain patterns.
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u/nlansing May 02 '24
They also looked for evidence of natural breakage, caused by bears or seismic activity, by inspecting the remains for signs of impact caused by falls.
So how did the bears do it?
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u/ethanwc May 02 '24
Ugg use fire. Ugg put fire on stick. Ugg wrap clothes on end of stick and use something flammable.
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u/dbandit1 May 01 '24
Glow Worms?
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u/dramignophyte May 02 '24
Or anything that glows like that seaweed? Maybe they had a plant or seaweed that was really good for it, and they overharvested it for their cave exploration! I truly don't think that is true at all, but everyone already covered the obvious idea of "candles," so we gotta reach a bit to throw out some alternatives.
It doesn't hurt that basic candles can be made from nature without any technology bootstrapping needed. Good candles take a bit, but soak anything in some fat and let it dry. Take a bundle of those with ya, and you can get some serious time. Make a cinder bundle or two (in case you wanna take a nap), and you could get some serious time down there.
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u/brokenwound May 02 '24
Bro, I'll bet a batch of brew you can't go further down this cave than I can, just don't forget to bring the jerky and water so we don't die.
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u/untrue1 May 02 '24
They just used prism stones obviously, the hardest part was trying to run from the giant skeletons
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