Lost cities / archaeology / ancient history

Yes! This is brilliant. It's so unlikely for wooden artifacts to be preserved from so long ago. I've long speculated that people must have lived in non-stone-built structures for far longer than the standard caricature of ancient people as cave-dwellers makes most modern commentators believe. It's just that wood and leather and other materials that people would have used rots away so quickly that if you're going with the available evidence, they're usually not easy or impossible to detect. Human culture and sophistication goes back far, far longer than is generally assumed.

This article is a good example of how tentative thinking about this can be:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/sep/19/justice-for-neanderthals-what-the-debate-about-our-long-dead-cousins-reveals-about-us

What I always say when people basically doubt the humanity of 'Neanderthals'=ancient Europeans is that the familiar image of them was established in the 19th century for undoubtedly racist reasons. They were cultured, they had names, they spoke languages, and they were most definitely not a different species to 'modern humans', and neither were the other 'species' listed in the article. They didn't 'go extinct', and the reason why they aren't very prominent in the Paabo genome analysis is simply that there were far fewer of them than later migrants from North Africa and Asia. Europe was a harsh environment for much of the time of human occupation, with plentiful predators, and later arrivals simply outnumbered them. There was undoubtedly conflict, as we're talking about humans, but also plenty of assimilation and close, friendly contact.

Very good find. I hope there will be more, although they're probably as rare as hen's teeth.