Stone-Age Shelves: The Solution That Saved Lives

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1:33There's no safe like SimpliSafe. From Entrepreneur Media, this is Problem Solvers, a show in which entrepreneurs do what entrepreneurs do best, solve unexpected problems in their business. We were completely wrong. And I'm just like, it's not selling. It was like, we have to start from scratch. I'm Jason Pfeiffer, the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine.

2:21is built into our bones. All right, let me step back and explain this one. About a month or two ago, my wife and I had a weekend without children in New Orleans. It was glorious. Thank you to my parents for watching our kids. We were walking around and saw this gallery in the French Quarter and decided to pop in. It looked like a museum. We learned that it was a retail gallery, which is basically a museum where you can buy everything. Like there's a price tag next to every object, which is pretty cool, actually. We're looking at these Renaissance paintings that go for hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.

3:01This marble bust of Napoleon that Napoleon himself had owned, which you can get right up close to. And if you have a couple spare million dollars, you can buy. And then we got to the antiques and whatever. I don't really care about any of this stuff. But then, then I saw an object that transfixed me. It's a rock. It's about a foot tall. And it's almost like a loaf shape, somewhere between a loaf of bread and a giant arrowhead. It looks like you might have used it to smash things. It's got these ridges running down it and like somebody carved into it. It's got this handwritten inscription on it.

3:43and the sign behind it said it is a Neolithic flint core. Now, I knew what Neolithic meant, Neolithic late Stone Age, the dawn of agriculture when humans were just starting to stop being hunter-gatherers and settle down in one area, build civilization as we came to know it. What is a flint core? Flint is flint rock, very hard rock. And the core refers to that this was a chunk of rock that a person from the Neolithic era would have used to chisel out tools. This is the source material for arrowheads, knives, and other things that required precision stone making. They would take this chunk of rock and then in this very precise way, they would carve out these slices from it, which then they would use for the basic tools of hunting and trade.

4:44I became fascinated by this because I'm a guy who's interested in business and technology and building things. And I also love history. And here I felt like I was looking at the very basic source material for everything that we have. Everything that you build, everything that you own started in some way with a rock like this. 6 ,000 years ago, our ancestors just starting to build the civilization as we know it and finding the very first source material for tools and trade and survival. And from that, we built what we have today. And I just became obsessed with it. It was expensive, but I could afford it.

5:35I sat on it for two days. I kept worrying that someone else was going to buy it. My wife was like, don't worry, nobody else cares about this but you. I bought it. And now I love it. It's in my living room and I look at it all the time and I research Neolithic tool making. People come over and I hand it to them. I can because I own it now. The inscription was from the French archaeologist or the archaeologist in France who found this in the 1960s, who described it as a pound of butter because they didn't know what it was and it kind of looks like a pound of butter. That's what they wrote on it.

6:06Okay, so now I'm obsessed with this thing and I am looking at it and I'm researching it. And I thought it would be awesome to talk to someone who really knows this thing, who can look at this thing and tell me not just what it is, but what it represents and what creating things 6 ,000 years ago even meant. And that's what led me to this guy. I'm John Shea. I'm a professor of anthropology at Stonebrook University in New York. I'm a paleoanthropologist who studies ancient and extinct forms of humans. And I use the archaeological record, more specifically the stone tool evidence, to try to answer questions about human evolution.

6:49When I emailed John asking if he would talk with me, he said, sure. And also, funny coincidence for a guy who has a podcast called Problem Solving, the title of the book he is currently working on is Survivor's Story, How Prehistoric Problem Solving Made Us Human. So, yeah, John, I wanted to talk. Karl Popper, the philosopher, is a wonderful quote. He said, all of life is problem solving. Indeed it is. Now, John and I started by talking about my rock. The first problem I wanted to solve actually was that my wife has been somewhat convinced ever since I purchased this thing that I was getting ripped off.

7:29So, well, let's ask the expert. I paid$8 ,000 for this thing. Did I get ripped off? That's what makes you happy. Yeah, that's exactly how I feel about it. That's the happiness. It makes me very happy. The thing that I keep thinking is, I can hold this thing, and someone 6 ,000 or so years ago held this thing. And that is the closest physical contact I can ever have to them, and that is remarkable. So tell me if I'm drawing the right kind of emotional attachment to this. What am I holding here? and what does it really represent for our early days as creators and builders and protectors? What you have there is that's a chunk of rock from which people about 7 ,000, 6 ,000 years ago would strike another rock and detach these long, narrow, thin pieces of stone called blades.

8:20This core here is from an important inflection point in human evolution and in the evolution of technology. If you went back to about 7 ,000 years ago, you'd recognize things. You say, all right, this is an axe for cutting down trees. This is a knife for shearing sheep, pointed bit of stone for carving a bone or decorating ceramics or what have you. If you went back 70 ,000 years, you'd be in a different world. And so begins our journey into the long, long history of problem solving. We'll talk about what we would have been making 70 ,000 years ago, how that's different from what we made 7 ,000 years ago, and how that all tees us up for what we make today.

8:59My favorite part of this conversation gets into the most relatable thing that Neolithic people had in their homes. It was a mind blower for me. And what John says about the problem solving strategy that led them to create it. You're going to love that. I will be thinking about it for a long time. It's all coming up after the break. All right, we're back. I am talking with anthropologist John Shea, starting about my rock and then getting really deep into the history of problem solving in the stone age. We're going to pick up on this thing that he was saying about the difference between life 7 ,000 years ago and 70 ,000 years ago.

9:39So the first thing that you'll hear is him talking about life 7 ,000 years ago, which is to say the people who made my Neolithic flint core that's sitting in my living room right now. The people who made that core were farmers and herders. So you'd recognize, oh, those are farms, and this is, you know, the gruel that's wearing for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. They're making clothing out of wool. They live in this little village. They've been living there for hundreds of years. The elders are buried in the cemetery, and it'd be familiar with life. It would have a daily rhythm, get up, attend the blocks, attend the farms, craft work in the afternoon, have dinner, go to sleep, repeat for thousands of years.

10:14If you went back 70 ,000 years ago, you'd be in a different world. At first glance, you couldn't figure out what the tools were used for. Your farmer ancestors, these guys who made the Corps, I'm going to call them the farmers from here on. Sure. These guys solved their problem by working harder to stay in the same place. They couldn't just plant the wheat and barley, and they go run off somewhere else chasing deer for six months and come back and expect wheat. They have to weed the fields, irrigate, keep the wolves from kicking out the sheep. 70 ,000 years ago, your ancestors solved all their problems by moving.

10:44Oh, there's no deer here anymore because we killed them all. Let's move. The river just flooded. We're moving. There's no water at the water hole. Time to move. What they would do is they would devise tools that solve many problems adequately, not perfectly. Your former ancestors devised specialized tools for specialized purposes, like that core. It's there to produce these big, long pieces of flint and nothing else. Your ancestors, 70 or even 700 ,000 years ago, they make little tools like this thing. Describe what you're holding up there. It's a teardrop-shaped piece of stone. It's about the size of my hand.

11:19It's sharp all the way around here with a little blunt edge at the back that you can hold on to. We think they're using cutting motion like this or piercing motion. The point is, it's an easily carried piece of stone from which you can detach small pieces from more fine cutting, but it has a sturdy enough edge to do heavy-duty cutting. You wouldn't want to knock down a tree with this, but you could butcher a bison with it. Here's how we know this is a tool intended for carrying. In large numbers, these hand axes, this is the term we archaeologists have for them. In large numbers, they're within millimeters of a smartphone.

11:50An artifact specifically designed to be easily held. So you're holding up this hand axe, which is a teardrop shape, fairly thin. It looks like it's kind of sharp-ish on the sides, and it's got a point at the top. So it could be used for all sorts of things, but clearly it's a weapon. It's used for hunting. Probably not for an offensive weapon, probably more for after butchering the animal. If you want to describe it to your listeners, if you put all your hands together and make your thumb parallel, it's about that shape. So easily carried. And then you just held up your smartphone. And it's basically the same thing.

12:23It's the same size. It's not exactly the same shape, but it fits in our hands just perfectly. There's an important difference. The hand axe is a solution to problems. The smartphone is the source of problems. Well, but there's another way of saying it, which is that the hand axe was a platform and the phone is a platform that 70 ,000 years ago, people were walking around with these very simple multi -use tools. And what we have circled back around to now is a more complex, but at its core, basic multi-use tool. You've got it. I mean, the cell phone has a flashlight. It has GPS. You know, so you don't need to know how to make fire.

13:03You don't need to know how to read maps. Here's the anecdote that I heard. And this is designed to speak to the question of whether or not our modern technologies cause us to lose skills that we used to have. Chimpanzees and bonobos are very closely genetically related to each other. But what scientists found was chimpanzees use tools in the wild to get food, sticks into termite holes, and bonobos don't use the tools. And the question was, well, why, if they're so genetically related, does one animal know how to use tools and the other one doesn't? And so studies were done. And the conclusion of those studies is this.

13:48There is not actually a difference between whether or not these animals can use the tools. Rather, there's a difference of whether they need to use the tools. The chimpanzees are in an environment where tools are necessary to get the food. And the bonobos are in an environment where tools are simply not necessary. And so they didn't learn how to do it or they didn't develop the skill because they didn't need to. But they could very easily learn it. You can teach bonobos. They're smart. Scientists have taught them how to make stone tools. efforts to chimpanzees to do this are pointless. It's important to understand how divergent chimpanzees are from these bonobos.

14:22We don't know which of these is most close to their common ancestor, but, you know, chimpanzees use tools to get at food. It's nothing really remarkable. Many animals confronted with a concealed food source will adopt tool use. I mean, ravens, crows, dolphins. The interesting thing is, how long have they been doing it? It is an assumption that if chimps do this and humans do this, then the last common ancestor must have. The oldest known chimpanzee nut cracking site, which is to say site stones damaged similar ways to the way chimpanzees damaged rocks from the cracking nuts, it's only about 4 ,500 years old.

14:55That's not a trivial date. 4 ,500 years ago is when humans practicing agriculture swept across Africa. And what do farmers do? Farmers cut down trees. Farmers turn woodlands, places where apes live, into farmland. So what might have happened, the chimpanzee might have adopted this myth of cracking nuts because the fruits and soft nuts they formerly ate were now ashes. And humans had excluded them from environments where they could get by without using tools. And necessity being the mother of invention, they started using stones to crack nuts. For how long back in antiquity they were going after termites with sticks, we'll probably never know.

15:33This idea that chimpanzees and humans' last common ancestor was a stone tool using a creature, not necessarily correct. Okay, that's fascinating. But there's another way to jump what you just said there over to humans, which is that our problem solving is in some way the result of forcing functions. That when change comes to us, we go into problem solving mode. And when we do that, we develop new tools, whether they are simple like hand axes or complex like smartphones, in response. Does that track with the course of human history? I mean, when you look back at early Stone Age problem solving and what our Neolithic ancestors were doing, what are you seeing that we can learn from today?

16:22Different challenges develop different kinds of solutions. humans we're the most broadly distributed species on the planet the only things that are as broadly distributed as us are our pets are food sources of cattle the cheap goat and the small number of animals cockroaches and mice and rats that follow along with us yeah being broadly distributed means we have a wider range of potential problems the thing your ancestors confronted and may have had to solve in africa not overheating is a very different sort of problem than your and my ancestors would bump into in Europe during the Ice Age. They're probably not freezing to death.

16:57Yours and my ancestors living in Europe and Africa and mainland Asia, they wouldn't probably position themselves very far from drinking water. On the other hand, some of our friends' Polynesian ancestors sailed hundreds of kilometers in double hull canoes and had to take their water with them. So if we inhabit a wide range of habitats, then we encounter a wide range of new problems. And collectively, because we can talk and write and share this information, what somebody learns out on a raft off of Samoa eventually becomes part of the storehouse of human knowledge. That's a really fascinating observation.

17:32And I want to state it back to you in the way in which it went through my brain. I think a lot about entrepreneurs as problem solvers and people who create modern day solutions. And what you just pointed out was that humans naturally do two things that other animals don't. Number one is that we intentionally distribute ourselves. And then number two is that when we develop problem-solving techniques, we communicate them with other humans. And therefore, as a result, the advantage that we have both across time as humans is that we can put versions of ourselves, the same problem-solving human brain into completely different situations where we will then apply that human problem-solving ingenuity and learn something from the collective solutions that we all come to that we can then become stronger and more versatile than any one individual human or localized group of humans ever could.

18:41I have colleagues who tried to teach a bonobo how to make stone tools. It took him two years. Some of this might have to be with the way they're trying to teach them. But when I teach college students how to make stone tools, it takes them 20 minutes with bonobos. There's a little bit of teaching, a little bit of learning, but it's not very well developed. They have a low threshold for frustration. It's difficult to get them to focus. Learning there is more guided imitation. They don't refer to abstract principles of learning because they can't talk. So learning is, You take the combination of the ability to learn, a broad range of experiences, and speaking, as we do now, an effective means of transmitting information between individuals.

19:23That's an unbeatable combination. I mean, in the last book, The Unstoppable Human Species, I argued we are essentially immune to any but the most biosphere-level extinction threats. So basically, a dinosaur killer-level meteor impact or large-scale volcanism, those things, we have nothing to worry about. That is a beautifully optimistic take. Let me tell you, John, the thing that has struck me the most, and it's a simple, stupid thing that my wife now makes fun of me for finding fascinating, but I have a feeling I'll find common ground with you here. Ever since I bought this Neolithic flint core, I now spend a lot of my time laying in bed Googling around for news about Neolithic discoveries.

20:06And I found a lot of photos of Neolithic houses, especially in the Orkney Islands. The thing that has struck me the most, the thing that was the craziest aha moment was that they, Neolithic people, Neolithic farmers, had shelves. In their home, they had shelves. I love that because before this, if you had said, close your eyes and picture a Neolithic person, I would have pictured a caveman. That's the popular imagination of Stone Age. And okay, they built homes for themselves. Of course they did. But that they built shelves. And we have shelves. And their shelves don't really look any different from our shelves, except they were made of stone.

20:52is such a humanizing detail to me. And of course, it's a humanizing because they're humans and they're not genetically or evolutionarily any different from us. They were just in their time and we're in our time. And I think if they had shelves and they had stuff to put on the shelves, I have stuff to put on the shelves. In fact, I put their rock now on my shelf. So two things to that. Number one is it reminds me of how consistent many of our solutions are. We're still building and selling shelves just as they were. But then number two is it makes me wonder, everything has a starting point. I know you're not a shelf historian, but what would the origin of a basic solution like a shelf have been?

21:42and what can we learn from that about how basic solutions come about? Imagine, turn around, imagine you're a hunter-gatherer who moves their house on a seasonal basis and this kind of thing. Now, they will occasionally hang things from the roof or the rafters of their huts to keep them off the ground, keep insects out of them. But if a hunter-gatherer walked into your office or my office and it's like, shelves, what are these? Shelves? You've got too much stuff. You have to build something to put your things on? How do you carry all this crap around with you when you move? So shelves are a function of sedentism, with people living in one place.

22:21And if you live in one place, you can accumulate lots and lots of things. So the Neolithic people, the farmers, made shelves likely a function of just having more and more things. People are probably putting things on shelves they don't want near the ground, so food, things that might get attacked by mice or rats. They want some extra floor space for children. If you have children, of course, you know what, children plus pulmonary equals pulmonary fragments. So if your life depends on storing seeds for the next year, you don't put them down within reach of the three-year-old. Right. Or if you have special plants or medicines to help your womenfolk childbirth or patch up people who get injured, you don't want those, again, on the ground, you want them away from where the kids or the rodents can get at them.

23:06It's just a perspective. A hundred gatherers nowadays are in such contact with sedentary people. They say, oh yeah, it's a shelf. But imagine the reaction of the first ice age hunter gatherer and wandered into some village. You've got these things on your walls. What's the point of it? Yes. You people are crazy. But I love the way that you broke that down because what you did there is you identified the secrets to creating a great new product or solution in a marketplace. The first thing you did is you said, because you're able to stay in one place longer, you're accumulating more things and the things that you're accumulating also become more complex, like pottery.

23:39So pottery is really useful, but pottery also breaks. And what else would be in your home? Well, children would be in your home. You've got an accumulation of things. Those things are becoming more valuable and also they're more fragile. So you got to get them off the ground. Now, suddenly you need a solution for that. And what do you have? Well, you got a bunch of rocks and there's got to be some way in which you could pile these rocks in a way that turns into what now become shelves. And so what you're really doing is identifying new needs based on changing environments and then threats to those needs, which then create additional needs.

24:13There's a phrase I love, which is, is my new problem better than my old problem? And in a way, that's what this is. Basically, the cycle that you see across time, you logic your way through, there was a change in the environment, there was therefore a new problem and a new need, and out of that came this new solution. important. Environment drives some kinds of changes. It presents challenges. Sometimes the source of the challenges emerge from the solution to a previous problem. John, one of the things you were talking about earlier was about specialization. You were talking about how valuable it is to spend a lot of time with a specific problem.

24:49What that reminded me of was a podcast that I heard a while ago, and I'd love to just hear you expand upon it. the podcast was about what we know about Utsi the Iceman, which I believe is a body, right? It's nihilistic, beginning of the Copper Age. So for context, the Iceman is the world's most studied body because it was the most preserved human that we have from that time. Somebody who was walking along with some weapons and died and was frozen. We have everything. We have the food that was in his belly. The thing that struck me the most about this podcast, which is detailing all the things that we know about Utsi the Iceman, was the assessment that all the things that Utsi was carrying, different weapons, food pouches, different items of clothing, were likely made by different people.

25:35There, therefore, was a kind of specialization that took place even back then. We often think of ancient people as MacGyver, making their own stuff. But in fact, what this would suggest is that the world of Neolithic farmers was not really all that different from our world, in which we all picked a thing that we got really good at. What is there to know about that? And what can we draw from that human instinct, even back then, 6 ,000 years ago, dawn of agriculture, that we were already dividing ourselves up by specialties? That's an interesting thing. It's just the last thing you said, that we're dividing ourselves up.

26:14Kids were made by different people with different specializations. people became valuable to one another for their craft specializations, what we anthropologists would call it, or being the good knife maker, or being the good boyer, the person who makes bows and arrows, or the good weaver who makes robes or other devices. And the person who made your core lived at the end of the MacGyver era. There were probably some innovative people, some Neolithic MacGyvers, but before agriculture, when people had to live by their wits and what things they could carry, everybody was MacGyver. Someone who might say, I'm not going to hunting and gathering today for you.

26:48See, I'm going to be a special prophet, and I'm going to tell you what the invisible god who lives up on that mountain tells you. It's like, oh yeah? We can all tell what the invisible god wants. Get your bow, we're going hunting reindeer. Amongst hunter-gatherers today, if they provide any lesson for Ice Age people, the hunter-gatherers who live at very low population densities and who move around, when they bump into a stranger, which is rare, these guys live in enormous areas, and they know everybody, If I've been a stranger, the first move isn't to start throwing sticks at them. The first move is to sit down and say, all right, how are we related?