These are the World's OLDEST (Known) Manmade Objects 

The shoes found are the oldest in Europe, but there were shoes discovered in Oregon, USA that date back approximately 9,000 years in Fort Rock Cave. The shoes were woven from sagebrush bark and they were found with winnowing baskets. They have been able to pretty definitively date the artifacts by several methods. The artifacts were also below a level of ash from Mt. Mazama eruption (present day Crater Lake) that erupted around 7,700 years ago. In another nearby cave called Paisley Cave they have even found human feces that has given archeologists huge insights into their diet and lifestyles. Further East near Burns, Oregon there is a current excavation going on that is dating back between 16,000 and 18,000 years old. Might make for an interesting topic. Thank you and keep up the great work! I love your videos!

I wonder how many ancient items go unrecognized and end up destroyed every year? Probably a lot.

0:35 - Chapter 1 - The lomekwi tools 4:50 - Chapter 2 - The kanjera tool 7:55 - Chapter 3 - The oldest shoe 11:30 - Chapter 4 - The oldest musical instrument 14:20 - Chapter 5 - The oldest prosthetic

Bit of a nitpick: The image of a "footprint" shown at 11:18 isn't a footprint at all. It's an ironstone concretion found in Fisher Canyon in the US. It's been falsely identified (and used as "evidence" of young Earth creationism) by creationists as a footprint, but it's a common geologic feature that occurs all the time.

I would love to see a part 2 (and 3…) of this video! It’s so fascinating how far back our “everyday” objects have been in use

The grass in the shoe is used by many cultures. It is specific grass species that are used. They serve as a softener towards the ground. They were used when I was a kid in Greenland and I believe in Northern Norway as well.

What if the flute was created when someone used one with hyena holes to make funny noises and then they just developed it over time to make one that actually played notes they wanted to play?

The flute as the oldest instrument amazes me! But I still think that drums would be played before as they are more simple to understand, produce and play.

These are the types of videos from this channel that I live for. More please!

You know that musical instrument looks like my kids elementary school recorder after I stepped on it in the hallway in the middle of the night.

You should have mentioned the Denisovan Bracelet. That, along with the shoe, also feels surprisingly familiar and modern. Even our human ancestors had monkey brain for shiny rocks and wanted to make a fashion statement. That bracelet really does look like a bangle you'd see being sold in a crystal shop.

I appreciate the discovery of pre human tools being found. I only took a first year archaeology course in uni (loved it). From my understanding there is an open question as to "why bipedalism" & "why tools." It makes sense to me that if tools were early enough, both questions get answered. "Why tools" is as simple as pointing to all primates, and intelligent birds, who use tools. And "why bipedalism" is "because they were using tools." Obviously an oversimplification, but I can't imagine it being contentious.

"The Cairo Toe was unearthed almost 2 decades ago, in the year 2000." Simon, I have bad news for you.

There are still people who think humanity is like 2k years old😭

PART 2 PLEASE this was a really good episode

"The crafters of these tools remain identified" 1:06 I, for one, am glad they get such ongoing recognition.

Cairo Toe's first two albums are freakin' classics.

Oldest wooden structure was also recently confirmed. Something like 200k+ years old. This was probably filmed just a few weeks before the discovery was made.

Seems like not having a vessi ad while talking about oldest shoes was a missed opportunity lol

Sober me: Yay Simon! Drunk me: Yay Simon!

Anthropology with a jazzy piano backing...surprisingly soothing.

As a 68 year old man, I'm starting to have trouble cutting my toenails. So how the hell did they do it 3 million years ago? Or even 3,000 years ago?

Most stressful part of the vid was when Simon reminded us all that 2000 was over 2 decades ago. Damn

Are the sandals found near Fort Rock, Oregon not considered shoes? They are around 9000 years old.

Those tools you show at .58 are Zhou Dynasty( 1046 BC - 256 BC) artifacts from China NOT 3million year old stone tools from Africa. Then at 2:52 you are showing what appears to be Early-Archaic (8000 -6000 BC stone tools from the Mississippi/Missouri river watersheds of America. Unforgivable errors. Edit this video fast!

Simon Whistler deserves the lifetime achievement award for educational youtube content

Dear editor, can you please take the background music down a notch or three. Especially when it has a lot of bass. It overpowers Simon's voice.

OMG friday night special! We have no idea how old humanity is. Imagine a giant wooden city built 500,000 years ago. Nothing would have survived to today.

Simon was positively poetic today. More like this please! 😁👍❤

I think of the saying “the more we learn, the less we know” watching this video. So much knowledge sitting on this planet just waiting to be discovered

Holy shit, I had no idea tool-making hominids were over three million years old! I love this channel

It’s insane that tools may have been handed to us by another genus and we just got lucky enough to evolve and use them more efficiently.

I could have listened to several hours of these stories. Great stuff, thx.

Great to be at work and get an upload from fact boy

I absolutely love thinking about how that instrument evolved. I like to believe it was a series of happy little accidents. You have a bone, you're digging around in it probably for sustenance reasons, before long someone blows in it to try and push matter out one end, and it makes a whistle. Before long you have people carving them, refining it finding out exactly how to produce the whistle, and one day someone gets a little too ambitious with his cavity and pierces through the surface. He blows through it, notices it doesn't make the same sound, so he plugs the puncture with his finger and now it produces TWO sounds! That becomes the fad, and before long someone punctures a second hole and now there are 3 sounds! so on, and son on. Humans are awesome.

“The shoe was filled with grass, the function of which remains the topic of debate among researchers.” **5,500 years ago in a cave by the Arpa** “Hey Agra, do you think I can throw my right shoe further than my left one if I fill it with straw?” “Probably. Just make sure it doesn’t land in the- Oh for the gods’ sake! I’m not helping you fish it out.”

I see why these would be seen as the oldest tools because they look like they came from a smashed rock then got refined by a small rock by hand.... So cool. 👍

05:58 Imagine the feeling you would get holding a tool made over 2 million years ago, before humans even existed. That would be a very special privilege indeed.

Anyone else feel like the background music was kinda loud? Sorry to nit pick but i found it distracting

Loved this episode, well done Simon & team

If an ancient civilization existed millions of years prior to us it would make sense why we have pyramids, gods, and other geological phenomena. Maybe they’re just a few million years ahead of us.

They found a prehistoric Croc that was made from an actual crocodile. I learned that from watching the documentary “The Flintstones”

The oldest footwear had been found near my home in Oregon. They are sandals estimated to be 10000 years old

I for one am glad they kept banging the rocks together.

One of the most fascinating milestones in human evolution is often overlooked. A lot of focus is on when our ancestors started to walk upright, and the host of changes seen in the skeletons of Australopithecus c. 4 million years ago which show upright adaptations - the way the knees lock, how the hip bones and pelvis work together, how the spine attaches to the skull, etc. But one seemingly minor adaption that emerged probably in Homo Erectus about 1.5 million years ago gave our ancestors the ability to make and handle tools as no other animal could, and therefore make and use far more complex items. It involves the middle finger, more specifically the long bone of the third finger that is within your palm and connects to one of the wrist bones. The surface of that bone is grooved in such a way that it allows us to "lock" our hand and wrist, making tool-making and tool use far more efficient, an adaptation that virtually no other creature has. The bone in question is the third metacarpal, with its styloid process - a pyramid-shaped protrusion that locks into the adjacent wrist bone, the capitate bone. The second and fourth metacarpal also have locking surfaces to the capitate, but the third metacarpal has the biggest attachment.

Awww man I wish I could get into this video but the jazz background music is too... chaotic, sadge!

I'm no expert, but the holes in that flute doesn't look like random holes made from some animal eating something, they are straight, even with each other, how did an animal make them that straight? Also the flute could have also been used as a way to communicate to others during hunting, from a long distance or something like that, not necessarily to make music from. Some later tribes around the world have used such items for signaling to others on a hunt or during combat, so it's possible that is what this flute was used for too.

Simon, did you do speed before filming the intro?

Its pretty cool to see people factchecking some of the pictures given here. Say a lot of good Things about the community:) maybe put te sources in the pictures

Orangutans can use many tools. They are highly intelligent.

The Cairo toe indicates an understanding that humans cannot walk without two big toes to maintain balance.

I'll watch literally as much of this as you make, Simon & co.

Welcome to Jazz and history. Settle down and enjoy some light jazz while we tell you about ancient hominids.

Weren’t there some 8000 year old shoes found in the US?

Whenever I walk my dog I think how often I might be walking over ancient artifacts

Imagine losing your shoe for 5500 years. And of course it’s just the one shoe.

Clever man invents Divje Babe flute, and comes up with the world's first instrumental tune. Clever man's producer: Hmmm.... needs more cowbell.

As for oldest footwear, the Fort Rock Sandals (and others) in Oregon take that title. Fibers from more than twenty sandals have been radiocarbon dated to a range of about 10,400 to 9,100 years old. Some 75 sandals were found at Fort Rock, in SW Oregon. Seven sites in Oregon and Nevada produced shoes of similar vintage.

8:46 Honestly I thought shoes would be older. 5,500 years ago was like just before the start of the first Egyptian Dynasty.

“I see you in your Air Jordans” says Simon in his Vessi’s!

I found the music in this video extremely distracting, I've never had that issue with your other videos.

Aliens made these tools, its always aliens

My bet on the flute is its an animal call.

The photo used for the ancient stone tools shows them as very sophisticated (arrow heads, shaped hammers), much more so than the later ones shown from Ethiopia. Is it a library/stock photo?

You can see how it spread around the world. The Inuit here in Canada have been making boots that could handle minus 60 Celsius, tools weapons ect from about 8000 years ago up to about 150 years ago.

The movie 2001 A Space Odyssey has an ape using a bone as a weapon signifying a huge leap in human evolution but the far bigger leap is apes using weapons to smash stones to reach the rich bone marrow.

I think that flute is a sheppards or a scouts whistle...

The oldest consistent provable human concept has to be the constellation Taurus the bull as seen in the 12,000 year old cave paintings of a bull with the Hyades around it’s head with Aldebaran and the other stars plus Pleiades above the bull and two the stars Castor and Pollux to the side. Seeing cave paintings in Lescaux cave in France Pablo Picasso left saying “we have learned nothing in 12,000 years”.

Not gonna lie Areni-1 already sounds like a model of shoes... Like: "Did you see the news? Nike is about drop the new Areni-1's this afternoon...

That second phot of finely knapped arrowheads and chisels was *not* from the prehistoric site at Lomokwi and misrepresents the video.

I love the way Simon mispronounces things

Ah that Divje Babe pronounciation was perfect

How do they know when they were made vs how old the material is? (Genuinely curious)

At 11:25 Oldest shoe.... I thought they had it wrong, until I checked the age of Otzi, the Iceman found in Northern Italy. He's only 5300 years old....I I guess that would make his footwear, (boots, cold weather hiking boots I believe), to probably be the oldest pair of boots still in existence....and probably the oldest pair.

Even 5,500 years ago people was putting tissue in their shoe not to crease it 😂😂

I found one, that was 3.4million yrs old, spinning it on a finger tip like I was a globetrotter, a heavy rock, yet, it defied gravity, do not know why people don't show love. These are rocks around us in certain sites, all over the world, its really super cool, tools!

I wish you were still doing the other channels

I gotta take a shot every time he says Cairo toe

"I see you in your Air Jordans." I love the delivery of that line! :D

Interesting, Thanks Simon. 🤙

You show random later tool images while talking about 3m y. o. stuff. Quite misleading, though probably not intentional.

I had a pair of Tommy Hilfiger gym shoes last for 11 years...and I thought that was good.

Respect for putting (known)

“Almost two decades ago in 2000” 👀 I think someone is confused about the year 🤣

I know it's still a new discovery but the woodern planks in Zambia dating back 450,000 should have been here too. I hope you do more parts in this series

Someone spent the rest of their life wondering where the hell they left their right shoe.

can just imagine ancient Neanderthals with that flute object putting together their own rendition of Hey Jude or Beat It

the grass may have been put in the shoe because it smelled really bad...

Thanks, Sideprojects.

I lost track of the ages for the last two items. If those facts were mentioned they weren't obvious enough about it.

Some dude with a bear bone 50 000 years ago: "I wonder if I can play Wonderwall on this"

The oldest prosthetic is from the Helmand culture of Iran/Afghanistan. It's an eye, made of bitumen, wrapped in gold, with a golden string to hold it in place. It's almost twice the age of the prosthetic toe, at 5,000 years old. But I don't blame you for not knowing about the Helmand Culture, even though they are REALLY cool. The city where the eye was found is a contender for oldest city in human history, rivaling Uruk. The city had ~30k residents at ~2.8k BC

Why are you showing a picture of a misidentified and debunked fossilized shoe print?

So whose idea was it to put a cool jazz score behind Simon's narration?

Using stone to smash bones, possibly to stew them near a fire in a skin... I tend to think human ingenuity is largely driven by survival in the past, but also that we give ancient people less credit because we think ourselves so much more advanced

I put the history of the region where I live back nearly a half million years by finding Early Palaeolithic tools, a Clactonian cleaver and reworked andesite flake, plus mammalian bone fragments, in my back garden. In the fields nearby I found a hammer stone bearing the marks of usage. Made 450,000 years ago, and originating from weathered post-Anglian Ice Age gravel deposits, the were made by Homo heidelbergensis (a European variation of Homo erectus). They're now in the British Museum. These objects would have been entirely overlooked by people with no understanding of stone tools. It's worth learning about.

The writing in this episode was particularly good!

Brilliant! ❤️♾️❤️

"Almost 2 decades ago, in 2000." .... Did you record this 4 years ago?

Hehe I love the idea of kids 50000 years ago annoying their parents tey8ng to learn hot cross buns in their new bone flute . So they can perform for all the cave parents at hard Rock elementary school . Hehehe.