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The researchers don’t know which ancient human species made the structure and the tools, but it’s unlikely to have been Homo sapiens. The earliest fossils of Homo sapiens found so far date from around 300,000 years ago and were found in Israel, Dull told CNN. He believes the people who made the structure were cognitively sophisticated and it would be very exciting to figure out who constructed this.

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[-] blargerer@kbin.social 18 points 1 year ago

Or C this thing was dated incorrectly (which still would be my guess tbh).

[-] thallamabond@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago

Dating wood can get really specific, sometimes narrowing down the year structures were built.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrochronology

Unfortunately this structure is too old for this method

[-] chaogomu@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago

While radiocarbon dating is limited to about 50k years, there are other methods that work quite well. Potassium–argon dating can be used to date clay layers, but in more accurate for lava flows...

Other than that, you look for soil layers and look for global (or known local) events, then figure a date for those.

There can still be error, but less than you'd think. Tens of thousands of years at this scale, not hundreds.

[-] Fondots@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Certainly an option, and that crossed my mind as well. But in the context of this part of thread, it kind of seemed like we were taking it for granted that the structure was as old as they claim for the sake of argument.

this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
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