I’m sitting here in the pre-dawn hours on Christmas Day, having had some trouble getting back to sleep.  So, naturally, I start reading science articles.  If you’ve been in my classes, you know that I really enjoy reading popular science stuff.  There’s just something about the writing style that makes me laugh – especially when the articles deal with “early man.”

Now, this particular article deals with the inhabitants of an 800,000 year-old campsite.  Already I’m impressed.  I had no idea that camping had been discovered at such an early date.  I suspect that many of the inhabitants of my own sub-division (my “neighbors” as I call them) have never even been camping.

Oddly enough, however, camping isn’t the primary focus of the article.  The real focus is on the fact that these inhabitants used different parts of their rectangular living spaces to perform different activities.  I suddenly feel this almost inexplicable sense of bonding with these folks (or hominids, or whatever they were).  You see, we do exactly the same thing in my own home!  So little has changed over the last 800,000 years.

The article says as much, too, noting that hunter-gatherers today also use different parts of their living spaces for different purposes.  No doubt.  Though, I should add that, when my hunting and gathering are done for the day, I sometimes eat and watch TV in the same rectangular living space.  (My wife would actually prefer that I not do that, of course, but that’s another story.)

Some of the observations surprised me.  In one rectangular living space, they were preparing fish and producing flint-tools.  I didn’t expect that.  Normally, I do my flint-tool type work in a different area – especially if my wife is preparing fish.  Then, in a separate area, they find evidence of eating-type behaviors (fish bones, crab stuff  – though not stuffed crab, as far as we can tell – and nut shells) plus debris associated with tool resharpening.

This I don’t quite get.  I mean, I can see preparing the fish in one rectangular living space (let’s call it the kitchen) and eating it in another rectangular living space (say, the dining room) – but what’s with the tool making and sharpening all over the house?  Did they not have garages?

I read on.  There is the mandatory use of words like implement and fashion.  They have a nice, early-man sort of feel, don’t they?  I was in a Japanese restaurant the other day, trying to fashion a couple of smooth wooden sticks into an eating implement – but I finally just used my fork.

Ah!  The nuts were apparently roasted and there is a somewhat lengthy explanation of why they would roast them.  It quite possibly has something to do with convenience and taste.  Interesting.  It triggers a thought: Remember to buy some more roasted peanuts during the next grocery store visit (where I do most of my hunting and gathering these days).  Oh, and buy a roast.  I love roast as much as the next hunter-gatherer.

Moving on, I read that the use of separate rectangular living spaces suggests advanced cognitive abilities.  Cool.  Because we’re doing that in my house.  Of course, it’s largely my wife’s idea.  I’m okay with just a great room.  Maybe she’s the one with the advanced cognitive abilities.  Yeah. It starts to fit the pattern I’ve seen over the years.

Well, this is quite a discovery (I mean, about the advanced cognitive abilities of these campers – not of my wife).  It looks like researchers thought that such abilities didn’t show up until about 100,000 years ago.  But, 800,000 years ago!  Wow!  I mean, that’s getting pretty close to being off by an order of magnitude.  Maybe somebody’s advanced cognitive abilities might benefit from a little sharpening of their own.  But enough said about that.  Anyone who reads science articles regularly knows that there is a continuous revision of “what we know.”

Not to bore you further, I’ll mention one last thing.  It appears that our ancient friends used hammers and anvils to crack open almonds.  Is it just me, or does that seem like a bit of an overkill?  I mean, that’s like my driving my car over them.  Just use a nutcracker.  No wonder they have to keep repairing their tools.

Oh, and it looks like they had two campfires with some people sitting around one and other people sitting around another.  How we know they were sitting beats me.  That sounds more like speculation than empirical science, but that’s fine.  I won’t tell them how to do science if they won’t tell me how to hunt and gather.  Besides, we do something similar in my home, but it’s not around campfires, it’s around TVs.