Michael Button

Yeah.

I would say it's a massive monkey wrench because not only does it kind of really dispute this idea that we didn't settle down until, you know, 12,000 years ago with the Neolithic Revolution.

Because, I mean, it's a structure.

I mean, and it's just because it's so unlikely, it's so unbelievable that this would have survived.

But that kind of suggests that it's not the only one.

Right.

There could have been loads of these, like structures everywhere.

But as you said...

Yeah, and obviously people may be saying, well, look, clearly things survive.

But this is an extreme edge case scenario where it's like so unbelievably unlikely that this wooden structure would kind of sink into a bog and then that bog be, you know...

solidified over and then it would stay in that preserve like it's a and that they would find it and then they would they would find it exactly because you know 476,000 years in the sediment yeah exactly because we don't dig that far and look for anything sophisticated because we think you know nothing happened back then and then you find this and it really suggests that humans were living in much more complex societies and they were I mean they the fact that they had the cognitive capacity to

to plan, structurally engineer, and build a structure completely flies in the face of what we've always thought about ancient humans.

Because we've always had this idea that... There's been this very popular idea in mainstream historical thought that...

humans only got smart around 50 to 60,000 years ago.

And that's just Homo sapiens.

We've always thought that other human species never got smart, never achieved what we call behavioral modernity.

And this has always been the kind of idea that we went through this cognitive revolution around 50 to 60,000 years ago.

And the most obvious proponent of how entrenched this is in kind of academic thought is, have you ever read the book Sapiens?

Yeah, by Yuval Noah Harari.

It's an extremely popular book.