Before Weapons: Unearthing Ancient Wooden Tools and Spears | Dr Annemieke Milks

SPEAKER_01 0:00 Prehistoric wooden tools are nearly impossible for archaeologists to find. But if you look carefully, in the right places, under very specific conditions, sometimes something spectacular is uncovered. That's what happened when a team unearthed evidence of the earliest known wooden hand tools used by humans ever. I'm Ollie, and this is What We Did Before, the podcast that charts the history of everyday life. Dr. Anamika Milks is a Paleolithic archaeologist. Her research has involved looking at the ancient hunting weapons humans used in the deep past, which we'll get onto in a moment. But she's also recently been involved in this discovery of wooden tools that are around 430,000 years old, 40,000 years older than any hand tools we've seen before. So I just had to speak to her about this finding and the incredible ways ancient humans hunted for food. Enjoy. Dr. Anamika Milks, it is an absolute pleasure having you on what we did before. Thank you very much for joining me.

SPEAKER_00 1:04 It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_01 1:07 Can you tell me about this incredible discovery?

SPEAKER_00 1:09 I can, actually. So I didn't unearth them myself. Um, the team in uh Greece, led by Katarina Harvati, did some excavations over a number of years at a site called Maratouza in Greece. And they had, amongst other things, they had a butchered elephant at this paleo lake at an old lake shore from marine isotope stage 12. So this was a very cold glacial period. And during that glacial period, they think that this particular region in Greece was what's called a refugium, where lots of different animals and probably also plants and humans at the time would have kind of almost congregated in this space. And species that might have gone extinct elsewhere because it was so cold would have continued to survive and thrive in this refugium. So they discovered this butchered elephant and um some very small stone tools and some bone tools as well.

SPEAKER_01 2:15 So refugium being a refuge for those. Yeah. Okay. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 2:20 So a kind of a warmer, a warmer location in a very, very period. Yeah. And these were really important actually throughout the Paleolithic, throughout the old stone age, when humans were going through massive climate shifts, very cold, very warm periods, and sometimes shifting quite quickly, and lots of species would go extinct. Um, and and then andor would then kind of change in in order to adapt to these changing environments. So places like that, these kind of refuges were really important as sort of source um populations for for repopulating different parts of the continent when things warmed up again. So they had also they they had wood preserved and lots of kind of plant remains preserved too. And Katarina and the team were very had a lot of foresight to um sample some of that wood. So it was impossible to collect everything at the excavation because there was just a lot of it. And it doesn't, so when you when you find archaeological wood, you have to keep it in water and you have to keep it cold. It's big, it's sort of, you know, it's complicated. So a lot of times people in the past would have just kind of got rid of the wood remains and thought that's nothing, that's just wood from the lake shore. But she had the, yeah, anyway, she had a good idea to sample some of it. And then some years later, she and I got to talking. And because I specialize in early wood tools, I sort of said I'd come to Athens to the lab and have a look. And so I spent about a week in Athens looking through the samples. Um, and there was one for sure, we found it on, I think the last day, second to last day, of course, in the lab, which um had clear tool marks on it. And it's it's quite a simple um stick of some sort where they the hominins took the branches off of this um small elder tree trunk. And based on some wear at one end and maybe a handle at the other, I think that they were sort of using this as some sort of a digging tool to dig in the mud, maybe for food, maybe for like underground roots and things like that, or other other resources in the mud, or possibly had something to do with processing that butchered elephant. So we're not completely sure. But yeah, so it's the earliest now, it's the earliest known handheld wooden tool that we have in the archaeological record.

SPEAKER_01 4:56 Yeah. We often talk about the stone age, but you know, is there sort of a richer wood age that predates it or or like that we just that we just will never unearth because all of that wood is rotted down?

SPEAKER_00 5:09 Yeah. Such an interesting question. So some people have started talking about a wood age now, which I think is cool. We call it the Stone Age because that's almost everything that we have preserved, um, especially before the the Neolithic or the later Stone Age, right? When farmers started farming. Um, then we have a bit more. We have things like their monuments and stuff like that. But really, all we have from the Paleolithic, most of what we have from the old stone age is stone tools, sometimes bone tools or other bone remains that when the bone preserves too, because bone preserves much more often than wood. We can get from, you know, from the later Paleolithic, from Homo sapiens, we get things like cave art and stuff like that, but almost all of it is stone tools. And we have so the earliest stone tools are something like 3.3 million years ago from Africa. We definitely don't have wood preserved that old. Um, the earliest preserved wood that we have at all comes from Africa too. It's from a site called Colambo Falls in Zambia. And they published on that a few years ago where they discovered um the humans there were modifying big pieces of wood and have like found they found two interlocking logs in a sort of riverine type site. Um, so humans were doing things with wood probably a long time ago, but probably as long ago as they were doing things with stone tools, but we just don't we just don't see it. We just don't have that preservation. And we maybe we don't know where to look and what we're looking for as well.

SPEAKER_01 6:44 Yeah, there's two um parts of that really, and not knowing where to look or what we're looking for. What one is like the conditions to keep archaeological wood intact must be very specific, right? What what's required to make to keep that uh you know in a condition that you can actually observe?

SPEAKER_00 7:02 Yeah, so there's a few different conditions that wood preserves. One, the main one where we usually find wood as old as the stuff that I study is in wet conditions, so probably under the water table, in what we call a sort of anaerobic water log condition. So not a lot of bacteria eating away at the wood. So often they've been found in sort of um, so Maratusa and this other site in Germany called Schönningen, for example. Both are found when people start mining for coal. And you have these like, you know, 10, 20 sort of set meters of sediments on top of what was this old lake shore. And then they start mining for the coal, and then they find the Pleistocene um sediments with the archaeological material in it. So, but yeah, so waterlogged without much bacteria. You can also get wood preserved in really, really dry conditions, so very, very dry cave-like conditions, um, sometimes in ice. So that tends to be later because people were up in the Arctic much, much later than the period that I study. But if they dropped an arrow on a glacier and it froze over, so sometimes now when the ice is melting, people are finding archaeological wood melting out of the ice. And then one really weird one that I didn't know about until recently, which is salt, can sometimes preserve wood. But yeah, that would be like in a salt cave or a salt context. But yeah, almost all of what we find is either very wet or very dry.

SPEAKER_01 8:37 And you mentioned Katerina had this incredible foresight to see these pieces of wood, um, which to many people might just look like pieces of wood, and distinguish them from just random remains to actually something that could have been had some sort of human intervention. How can you tell at a glance, at least, that maybe something had gone into shaping these pieces and that they weren't just you know torn off a tree in a in a gale or something?

SPEAKER_00 9:06 Yeah, that's a that's a really good question, too. So I'll just skip to the other site for a moment, which is that I've worked on um as part of a postdoc as well, which is this site Schoeningen in Germany, which is later, it's probably 300,000-year-old site, so still really old, um, where they discovered lots of weapons, right? So long spears um that were shaped on both ends to be pointed on both ends, and what we call throwing sticks as well, which are also which are shorter, but were also shaped to be pointed on both ends. So when you discover those, it's much more obvious that there's a tool because they have this kind of deliberate shaping. You can see they've taken the knots off and shaped the points really beautifully. So then they have you know the a shape that show that tells us quite quickly that they are a tool. So because they found so many, I think, at Shiningin, and then we started working on identifying more specifics, like things like tool marks, which are often really small, quite microscopic, um, then you can start looking at more difficult material, like what Katerina and their team in Greece sampled out of the ground. You can start looking with an expert eye. So because I had that chance to work on the material in Germany and learn what the tool marks look like and what their strategies might have been for working um wood, then I can start to look at the material from Greece and say, okay, well, I know that's a tool mark and not just something natural or a beaver chewing the ends, which they also have beaver at the site. So I had to be sure that they weren't um that they weren't beaver nod. So because so I went to a beaver reserve and collected some wood from the beaver chewed up, you know, because that these are all important things to think about, right? Like is it because to to tell that it's humanly modified is something that is hard on, especially on on what might otherwise be natural material. So just to give you an idea, I think I looked through 144 ID numbers, of which were some of which had lots of peak were in lots of pieces from the site of Maratusa, and we found two tools. Um and the first tool I've told you about already, the digging stick. Um, and the second is a very small piece that Katerina actually identified in the field as being possibly being something because it had an unusual kind of shaping to it. So it looks it, and we're not quite sure what that one is because we haven't seen any parallels with anything else. So we're not sure what that tool might have been. Um, but we do think it was a tool. It has some marks on it that suggest it was shaped. So it's a combination of different things, and it's sort of trying to piece together those kinds of micro microscopic signatures of tool marks and working and and other things. Yeah, but it's hard.

SPEAKER_01 12:16 Yeah, absolutely. In a bit, actually, I want to discuss this topic um in a bit more detail because I know you specialize also in sort of children's archaeology as well. Um, but just on the note of that small piece, you know, could it be a could it be a toy? Because I as I understand it from a previous conversation, actually a lot of archaeological things that we find which are unusual could be children's toys, because children are always crafting, especially I if I know my daughter, she's sort of turning anything she can into something, you know. And I'd imagine prehistoric children did the same thing.

SPEAKER_00 12:51 It's true. And I think in this case, I hadn't really thought about that as a kid's toy or tool. Um, partly because I don't really, again, yeah, I really don't know what it is, but it's really important that we keep our minds open to the fact that there would have been children and teenagers around doing things in the archaeological record. I think we think that kids probably made up about half of Paleolithic populations. So they were around and doing stuff. So it's always good to keep it in mind, um, the possibility. Um, and again, think about the other site that I talked about with the weapons, Schoningen. Um, you know, some people, including myself, have played around with the idea that some of the smaller weapons could have been objects that that kids were learning to hunt with. The question of toys is a really hard one because when we're talking about pre our own species, so we're talking about probably homohedal brigensis, or you know, we're not quite sure what species is around in Greece at that time, but probably homohedal brigensis. Um, you know, what did their childhood even look like? Did they have toys? I don't know. You know, we don't even know that. So there's so there's so much we don't know yet.

SPEAKER_01 14:10 Because this the these wooden tools in particular are 430,000 years old. So this predates Homo sapiens. So we are looking at some other type of human. Um tell me, you you've mentioned a few times uh Scherningen and this weaponry um that you've researched as well. So, you know, this is some of the earliest wooden weapons that human used. Can you tell me a little bit about you know what what what was uncovered there?

SPEAKER_00 15:37 I actually did my PhD on these and the earliest wooden spears. That was my the focus of my doctoral research. Um the earliest wooden spear is actually a broken one, and it comes from Britain, comes from Clacton on sea. And it was discovered in 1911. You can see it in the Natural History Museum in London. For a long time, it was sort of debated what it was, whether it was a spear or not. Um, some people still do, because it's broken. Then in 1948, they discovered another wooden spear. This one was complete from a site in Germany called Laringen. And that was really badly excavated at the time for various reasons. Um, but they discovered it with a butchered elephant. And it turns out that spear is much later. So the Clacton spear is probably 400,000 years old from an interglacial period. Laringen is much later, 125,000 or so. So definitely Neanderthal by then. So there was a sort of, these two objects sort of sat there in the archaeological record. We knew that there were very ancient spears. And then in the 1990s, an archaeologist, Hartmut Tima, discovered this site in Germany again and this open open cast coal mine. Um it was a rescue excavation at first. And now it's one of the most extraordinary sites we have for the whole of the lower Paleolithic record, lower to middle Paleolithic record. And they've discovered in the ensuing excavations over many decades as many as 10 wooden spears, complete wooden, most of them complete, or at least some of them complete, um, some of them broken. And I think it's six, six or seven um of these shorter throwing sticks, too. And again, this was a lakeshore site where hominins were coming down to the lake shore hunting horse. So they very specifically were hunting horse. There's over 50 butchered horses, horse remains from the site. A few other animals too that they butchered, but mostly horse, using their weapons, leaving them there, probably some of them at least broken, maybe some of them lost. Um, and then it all gets buried over after a few, I we're not quite sure how long they'd have used that site, but for a number of years. It wasn't just like a single mass kill like they originally thought.

SPEAKER_01 18:08 I was gonna ask actually whether there was any sense that they were building some sort of armory of these weapons. And that's why so many were uncovered or uh or whether they were less precious, because obviously fashioning them they would have taken some time, but it wouldn't have been sort of the depths of time that you would m take to create a metal sword, for instance.

SPEAKER_00 18:28 No, yeah. So I think I think um we still need to do some experimental work, but people who've recreated wooden spears with stone tools, it's something like five to six hours of work um for a spear, maybe more. So that's actually quite a lot of time. It is actually quite a lot of time. So one of the questions about the site has been why did they leave their spears behind, right? Um so when Tima discovered the spears, it really changed. So at the time, people were sort of like, oh, well, you know, humans at the time probably weren't very good hunters, even though we had these other spears already, you know, we knew about Clacton and Laringan. But when they discovered these wooden spears and all the butchered horses, it really shifted archaeological opinion, you know, archaeologists' opinions about what the humans at the time were capable of. So suddenly everybody's like, okay, they probably were hunting. And then the debate became something around, you know, were they throwing them, were they thrusting them, you know, how far could they throw them if they were throwing them? Um, so that was part of my my PhD research, was trying to pick apart how these weapons might have been used and how they how humans might have hunted with them. And then eventually I was lucky enough to be part of a postdoc on a project led by Thomas Terberger in Germany, who finally got the funding in the last um five, five, six years. Um, we've done this project as a whole big team of people to really analyze the wood tools, the whole wood assemblage in detail. And that's where we've understood how they're making them, you know, the sophistication of the design. Um, and again, looking at all the natural background wood too. So I think just to give you an idea, again, like with Maratusa, I think it was well over 700 different pieces of finds from wood from the excavation, and um 187, I hope I got that right, tool actual tools. So we've got the spears, the throwing sticks, and now also, you know, my colleagues have discovered other types of wood tools too. So they're splitting wood, which until now we didn't think they were doing until the Mesolithic, until much, much, much later. So they seem to be splitting broken spears and making them into smaller tools that they're doing other things with at the lake shore. We're not sure what. So maybe next steps, right? So experimental archaeology and things like that will help us understand. So it's a it's been a journey, I think, of trying to understand. You know, there's so much we don't know. And there was so much that that, you know, you can look at it and be like, okay, that's a spear, but how was it used? How effective was it? How did they make it? So those are the kinds of things that people have been trying, you know, the teams have been trying to piece together.

SPEAKER_01 21:17 Yeah, given all of this and sort of the leaps of abstraction that they would have had to have made to sort of understand what a a a broken tool could be repurposed to turn into. And, you know, they sound a lot more like us than than you know, maybe we ever imagined in the past. And it links back to another conversation I had about whether, you know, there there is a version of history where Homo sapiens aren't the ones which ended up sort of taking over the planet and another species of humans did. And it sounds to me like there were all the ingredients for any one of the homogenus to eventually sort of, you know, make it, if if that's what you can call what we've done.

SPEAKER_00 21:55 Yeah. It's really it's a really interesting question. And I think, you know, one of the things I try and remind myself when we talk about how successful we are is a couple things. Um so um for one thing, the Neanderthals. Yeah, exactly. For one thing, we're destroying the planet um pretty quickly, right? So is that success? I'm not sure. For another, we interbred with the Neanderthals, right? So they are us and we are them. Um so we can other the Neanderthals as much as we like, but actually, you know, most people alive have Neanderthal DNA. So they're they continue to, in some senses at least, continue to exist.

SPEAKER_01 22:41 Um and the Denise Vins as well.

SPEAKER_00 22:44 Right. Like, you know, it's not it's not all one thing. Um and also finally, it's important to remember that you know, the Neanderthals were around for longer than we have been so far. So how you measure success, you know, yes. We have, and you know, I think, but not to be glib about it, right? Like we have inhabited every part of the planet. We've been to outer space, you know, we've done amazing things. We've been down to the deep sea. You know, we have humans have done technologically, artistically, cognitively extraordinary things. But um, yeah, how do we measure success? And I think, yeah, so they're not the same, right? And it's important to keep reminding ourselves of that. But yeah, what what would it be? What would have been if we hadn't um if the Neanderthals hadn't gone extinct? And you feel, and there's some people who, you know, people who do like pal um paleolithic um population studies who say like Homo sapiens probably came really close to extinction, like many times. It wasn't, do you know what I mean? Like it probably was it probably was touch and go.

SPEAKER_01 23:49 So if we just go back to the uh weapons discovered at Schöningen, um these spears and you know, do we tend to see amongst these earliest weapons that there are common traits um that you know were were sort of designed within the making of these tools or tasks that they were sort of specifically designed to carry out?

SPEAKER_00 24:08 Yeah. So one of the great things about Scheningen is because we have several examples of spears, for example, we can start to look for shared characteristics. And long before I was involved in researching the spears, people had already recognized, the researchers had already recognized that all the front points of the spears are made from the base of the tree, which is really interesting because this may be harder wood in the base of the tree, the trunk. They're all made from trunks and not branches, the spears. They are all made from spruce, except for one, which is made of pine. And that spruce was not growing at the site. So the pot there's no pollen from the site. So all the spruce that is there was brought to the site probably by the humans. So they probably made their spears somewhere else. They found the the specific type of wood that they wanted elsewhere, made the spears and then brought them to the site. We're not sure how how far. The front points and and back points are designed a bit differently, and they seem to have at least some in some cases of the spears, maybe not all of them, they seem to be balanced in such a way so they have enough mass in the front half of the spears so that they are capable of flying. So this is one of the things that I I did with my PhD was made a replica of spear two. And other people had done this a little bit as well, but tested whether or not they would fly if people who know how to throw were throwing them. And then asked that question of how far would they fly. Um, so they do fly, but you have to know how to throw them. And even the athletes that I worked with had to kind of adjust their throwing technique and work out how to throw these in a way that they would then fly. So then once they work that out, they were, you know, we've realized they they can fly and hit a target about up to 15 to 20 meters distance. So up until that point, there were lots of people, and maybe there's still, I don't, I don't know, but there were lots of people who were skeptical that these were throwing weapons at all, and said, you know, these are only close distance contact thrusting spears. So part of the research that we that I did as part of my PhD was to test whether or not that they were capable of flying. So, you know, that multifunctional design and the ability for those weapons to fly is also something that I think is really, really interesting. And then we see kind of some shared characteristics with the throwing sticks too. Like they're all all have two points on both ends. So why would they do that? Um, if it's just a short stabbing weapon, why wouldn't they just point one the front end, right? So that's why we think they're they're they were meant to be thrones, because both points um create a sort of an a a very early kind of aerodynamic weapon that mean that when they so the throwing sticks we think they throw rotationally rather like rather than over hand, they throw them like a boomerang, like a very kind of simple boomerang. Um and they and the double points maybe help them spin better in flight, but it's just a hypothesis. So there are lots of kind of design characteristics that seem to be shared with the weapons at Shiningen. And then but there are variations too, right? Like some of the spears are massive. Spear six is really, really huge and very heavy, and probably was not a throwing spear, um, whereas other ones are really fine and and shorter. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:50 You talk about um in one of the blogs that you've written on on your website, uh I've found it really interesting. You were just discussing there the difference between thrusting spears and throwing spears. You know, what what different weapon types did um exist among prehistoric weapons? And did do you think ancient people would have cared about the classifications that we sort of give them these days?

SPEAKER_00 28:12 Yeah, good question. So once we get to our own species, to Homo sapiens in the Paleolithic, in the upper Paleolithic, there seem to be lots of different sorts of weaponry innovations that come in. So we see something called an adelatal or a spear thrower, where they launch a lightweight dart using a sort of hook. They innovate the bow and arrow technology, probably other types of weapons too. But earlier in time, so Neanderthals and pre-Neanderthals, we think they probably just had spears. And the question is how they how they used them throwing or thrusting. But we also have these throwing sticks from Schoningen, which are unique pretty much in this deep time record. Um, so the question of how they were using them was again something that has been debated. As I said, you know, like quite a lot of people thought they might have just been thrusting, you know, thrusting, stabbing animals. And the reason that matters is because it suggests that they had to get right up close to the animal. That would have been really hard to do. That would have been dangerous as well. Like even if you can add 15 meters distance to, you know, I mean, some of the animals they were hunting in in deep time are were massive, you know, uhyx and, you know, really maybe quite frightening animals. The horses were also really large.

SPEAKER_01 29:41 Were they larger than modern horses?

SPEAKER_00 29:43 Yeah, in some cases, uh the Pleistocene horses were really were were larger because a lot of Pleistesian animals were mammals in particular, ungulates were quite were different, right? So and they had straight tusked elephants, and there's debates about whether or not they were hunting those elephants, but male straight tusked tusked elephants, which are extinct now, were absolutely huge, you know. I mean, absolutely enormous animals. And you can imagine a male bull elephant on its own, you know, it's a scary pro prospect. So I think it does matter if we think that humans were able to throw or or not throw at that at that time. But having said that, I also think we get kind of hung up on that. So if we look at hunting societies that hunt today with spears, for example, they don't necessarily, you know, it depends on the society, but they might use the same spear to do lots of different things or the same weapon to do lots of different things. So there's so the Bayaka who I've worked with in Republic of the Congo, hunt with spears today. They hunt with iron-tipped spears, and they use the same spears for throwing. In their case, they throw quite short distance because they're hunting in the rainforest, but they also use those same spears to then um thrust the ant thrust. It just depends on the sort of hunting scenario. So we get a bit hung up on categories, right? Like we want to say it's this or it's that, when maybe actually I've always sort of said, well, probably they're multifunctional, right? That they're doing there's some cool examples too of I think it's in Amazonia where um hunters have um very large strong bows and they will unstring the bow and use the bow as a stabbing spear too. So there's like you do what I mean, like people or use the arrow to butcher. You know, people will do they use tools in lots of different ways. There's not just like a single function necessarily.

SPEAKER_01 31:41 I wonder you you mentioned that sort of ancient humans were using spears, and then at some point you start to see like bows for bow and arrows and things like that. Do you get an understanding of the cognitive shifts that are happening amongst ancient humans by looking at how the weaponry and the tools change over the many thousands of years?

SPEAKER_00 32:04 It's a really interesting question, and it's something I think about all the time. And there's quite a lot of us who have thought about weaponry from that perspective. What does it tell us about intelligence or cognition? Uh and I go back and forth on it myself. Like, on the one hand, it does seem quite clever that Homo sapiens innovated all these kinds of mechanically projected, what we call mechanically projected weapons. They were doing something different and adapting, and maybe they were innovating those technologies multiple times in different places independently. So that's one of the sort of hypotheses, too, with say in the Americas, for example, a colleague of mine there has been working on Clovis hunting um technologies and arguing that maybe they innovated that spear thrower or adulatal technology independently there in, you know, so we don't really know. But I think one of the things I would argue about the so-called simple weapons that I work on, in a lot of ways, they are simple. Um, they're one piece, right? They don't have that hafted stone tips even yet. That comes in a bit later, 200,000 or so. So they're just one piece wooden spears. They look really simple. And we therefore think that that is less clever. And I guess for me, sort of doing the research that we've done now shows that they there's actually quite a lot of design already inherent in the spears in the throwing sticks, that double-pointed aspect, you know, the balancing maybe so that they will fly, the multifunctional aspect, the choice of wood, the way that they're woodworking in very specific and quite often quite beautiful ways, shows me that they are really attending to what it is that they're making. They're, you know, they they have a real attention to design already. And that itself is, to me, like it's a hidden complexity, right? That we we don't necessarily appreciate until we start to really look in detail at what it was that they were doing. One of my theories that I've played around with a bit is that the tools that are simpler in design are harder to learn to use. So maybe the innovation of spear throwers and bow and arrow technologies make hunting easier. So the tool itself is more cognitively demanding, but learning how to use it might be less. Um, and so some people have done some nice experiments with spears versus um spear thrower and adolettals, where they've shown that maybe the spear thrower is a kind of equalizer, so it makes it easier for people with smaller bodies to learn how to use it. So women or children. Throwing a spear, learning how to throw a spear at distance is hard, right? It's a difficult thing to do. And maybe it takes a long time to be accurate with it. So that doesn't mean that it doesn't work, but it might mean that the investment in learning how to hunt effectively with it is greater. And so maybe there's more kind of demand on things like teaching and learning those so-called simpler technologies. So we we might not be able to see that sophistication is sort of what I'm trying to say.

SPEAKER_01 35:34 Yeah, and and I think we sort of um underestimate what can be classed as complex. Just the very nature of fashioning it by hand is is complex among the animal kingdom, really. Um you know, do going to those lengths and and maybe even injecting some artistry by the sounds of it, some sort of uh beautiful patterns to it or or whatever they're doing. Um that that is complexity. Uh and and you know, at a certain point in history, you've got to wonder, maybe they didn't innovate on the design for a few thousand years because it was just working, you know? I fix something that's broken, not broken.

SPEAKER_00 36:09 Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's where you know we've had some problems with the ethnographic record in the past, for example. So in the 20th century, we had various people writing about um Aboriginal Tasmanian technologies, which were so-called simple. And they only so they hunted with wooden spears, like in some ways quite similar, but in other ways different to the Pleistocene ones that I study. And there were connections there that people had made, um, sort of suggesting that there was a loss of technology, that there was some link with a lesser um cognition of the Aboriginal Tasmanians. And so the scientific racism that was kind of attached to sort of these simpler technologies has something that that carried through in our archaeological interpretations for a long time. And so I think it's been important to me to kind of try and revisit some of those narratives and try and bring out and understand more the skill and the sophistication that forager societies have with and the engagement that they have with their technologies is something we don't necessarily appreciate because we we, you know, you and I couldn't make an iPhone, could we? You know, we can't we can't make them we can't make the technologies that we use anymore. And so we're kind of distanced from them in a way. Um so we can't.

SPEAKER_01 37:35 Maybe I could make a wooden spear, to be honest with you.

SPEAKER_00 37:38 Uh well, yeah, maybe me neither, actually. We take time anyway to work out. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 37:43 And also we mentioned this a little bit earlier, but you're also interested in sort of the children's archaeology or the archaeology of children. Tell me a little bit about um what what you mean by that and what exactly you're fascinated by.

SPEAKER_00 37:55 Yeah, um, so kind of following on from the work I did on spears and learning to spear hunt both the spear, the archaeological spears, and also the ethnographic work. I've gotten interested in, you know, can we see kids doing things in the deep past? So we see kids' toys and tools from the later ice age, but we don't really know that much about childhood in Neanderthal times or Homo Hanna Brigensis. So I'm trying to sort of think about whether or not we can see evidence of kids learning how to do things. Um, some people have done some really nice studies already looking at like the stone tool record where kids make maybe learning how to make stone tools, but they're making mistakes. Um, so maybe we can see kids like that. Maybe we could start to see children's activities in small size tools. So, this is one of the questions with the shining and spears, for example. We've got lots of different sizes of weapons. So maybe some of those smaller weapons were learning tools where kids were learning how to how to hunt alongside older members of the group. So it's it's a it's a new area of research for me in the last maybe four or five years. Um, but something that I think would be really, really cool if we could um I like to do hard things. So that it's hard. But I think it would be important, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 39:12 And we don't we don't quite know how long childhood lasted for other human species. So what you're trying to figure out as well is is how long that period was and how and if that period was shortened or or longer, whatever the case might be, like how much the sort of tribes were putting an emphasis on learning those important skills early on.

SPEAKER_00 39:32 Yeah, exactly. So I think that's one of the questions that we have now is sort of when did our modern um pattern of long childhood and a long teenage years, long adolescence um evolve? Probably sometime during the period that I study, during that middle Pleistocene period, but we're not totally sure. So if we can see evidence of children learning how to do things and point to that as being kids or teenagers, then maybe we can start to kind of piece together a picture of when those when those longer childhood periods um emerge. Because I do one of the one of the points of a long childhood is a long period of time to grow up, means you have a long time to learn skills.

SPEAKER_01 40:17 And you're actually uh involved in some experiments with some young people who are learning how to nap, right?

SPEAKER_00 40:24 Yeah, so we've done some pilot experiments. So it just means like a test to see how it goes with teaching kids how to how to flint nap.

SPEAKER_01 40:33 And so this is a sharpening uh stone tool.

SPEAKER_00 40:36 Yeah, so how to take a block of flint, for example, other they used other types of stone too, and knock it with a a hammer stone and make a f a sharp flake. So um it's harder than it sounds. So and actually, but the kids are surprised. The kids can do it. They can do it. You know, whether or not they can do more sophisticated things is a question, but they they can do it. And so one of the questions that I have with the pilots and going forward is is there any correlation between how old they are and how well they can do that? Or, you know, is it easier when they're a teen, or can the eight-year-olds do the same? Does it matter if they are not very strong or they have little hands still? So that's one way that we can try and connect it with um whether or not it would have been kids, um, or as opposed to like a grown-up learning something for the first time.

SPEAKER_01 41:24 Just on the subject of children as well, I think um you've seen some very sort of creative uses of tools among children, haven't you? Uh can you tell me about um is it hunting butterflies?

SPEAKER_00 41:36 Yeah, so as part of the research that I've done with um my colleagues um working in Republic of the Congo, so Shana Lavlave and uh Francis Kiabi Natamudila, who is Congolese. So we've worked with the Bayaka, who are a forager community in the rainforest, and trying to understand how kids learn to hunt, among other things. And so we've seen kids will use like kid-sized weapons to hunt first when they're really little, they'll hunt things like um caterpillars, butterflies, and grasshoppers with these small, they so they make spears out of so the the grownups hunt with iron tip spears. The kids make spears out of reeds. And so they'll hunt, we've seen them hunting like little grasshoppers with their spears and stabbing them, but they also practice throwing and stuff like that at like trees and things like that. And then when they're a little bit older, they'll take their spears out in peer groups and hunt for things like rats and small, so really small animals. So they hone their skills in groups with kids and hunting small animals. And then eventually when they are teenagers, they get taught to hunt by uh adults. Um, so and then the kids also um they the adults don't use crossbows anymore, but the kids have retained that technology and they make these very, these very small crossbows out of also out of breeds, I'm pretty sure, um, looking looking at the the videos. And they will use those to hunt butterflies in the village. And these really little kids are hunting. I mean, it's a it's amazing to watch the skill. And so, you know, when we talk about that kind of the the depth of time that it would take them to hone these skills, and it isn't, you know, obviously like learning to use the weapon is a thing, but there's lots of other skills too. Like they have to understand the forest, right? They have to understand animal behavior, they have to understand sounds, they have to know how to kind of so they'll lay food on trails for the rats and things like that. So they're gaining all this, you know, amazing amount of knowledge around hunting, about the forest. They have huge amounts of ecological knowledge from a really young age. And and so much of that learning is done with among the kids. You know, it's not there's no they're they're very autonomous, the kids, compared to kids in our society. Like they they have a lot of freedom and they're they don't have the kind of hierarchical relationships with adults that we do either. So they they're very free to to just play, experiment, you know, figure stuff out. And so it's really interesting to to to watch that. Like in small-scale societies, kids learn really differently, especially in the beginning. Um, and they and they just have really, you know, they they learn from each other.

SPEAKER_01 44:41 Well, it sounds like we could take a leaf out of their book in the modern age, for sure. Um, especially me as a parent who's sort of maybe overly protective as a lot of parents are these days. Um I look forward to seeing how your your research in this area progresses. I think that's fascinating. It's going to be a very difficult but an incredible um sort of decade ahead of research for you.

SPEAKER_00 45:01 Thanks. I hope so. I think it would be it's really what I want to do next, yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_01 45:06 Well, Anamika Milks, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the podcast. Thank you so much for your time.

SPEAKER_00 45:10 Thank you so much for chatting. It's been really fun.

SPEAKER_01 45:13 A massive thank you to Dr. Anamika Milks for joining me on the podcast. I'm Molly, and this is what we did before. If you're enjoying the show, please subscribe, leave a comment. It really, really helps. And I will see you next time.