Talk:Eolith
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Contradictory paragraph.
editI'm a geologist and didn't have too much difficulty getting through what the author wrote, which is actually a pretty good article except for a few easily corrected shortcomings. First, there is no mention of how many years apart the periods of the Pleistocene and Pliocene are referring to. For the uninitiated, who wikipedia is intended for, that would save a lot of time, or even giving up. I have done the same thing myself with others because of who I normally work with, but I had to go look up how far apart the time periods are in years because how debatably short tool makers have been around!
To quote the article that is a separate free standing-paragraph not tied in with anything else: "Although the debate continued for about three decades, more and more evidence was discovered that suggested a purely natural origin for eoliths. This, together with the discovery of genuine early Lower Pleistocene Oldowan tools in East Africa, made support for the artifact theory difficult to sustain."
Okay, I did a double-take and and read it again. How did discovering real honest-to-goodness man-made artifact Oldowan tools prove that eoliths were not man-made artifact tools despite looking like they were man-made? At first glance that would prove the opposite. This needs to be tied in and some actual time periods in years added. I know the early Pleistocene and the Pliocene period referred to are a few hundred thousand years apart, and this needs to be explained in detail to un-confuse this blatant, to me, contradiction. Were tool-makers proven not to exist yet in the part of the Pliocene mentioned? I am not qualified on the subject to fix what I see wrong. Linstrum (talk) 04:28, 22 June 2019 (UTC)
- The opening paragraph includes the same self-contradiction: "An eolith ... is a knapped flint nodule. Eoliths ... are now believed to be geofacts ..." - I don't know enough about the subject to resolve so have flagged the section as self-contradictory instead. Chris (talk) 11:47, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
- Have now fixed the first paragraph's contradiction by indicating they only have the appearance of being knapped. and removed the self-contradiction flag. Chris (talk) 13:03, 19 March 2024 (UTC)
- I think the original writer of the bit about Oldowan tools was intending to imply that since (relatively) sophisticated knapped tools had been around for a (very) long time, these Eoliths (if they were tools) would be so crude in contrast, that they couldn't be crafted tools. That, as you say, is not a logicical conclusion. Chris (talk) 13:14, 19 March 2024 (UTC)