I would honestly be shocked if there were no Homo Erectus cities and large scale societies. They existed for far longer than us, and were almost if not just as smart as us.
I understand that science needs evidence, but I'm surprised at how surprised they sound when they manage to prove things people on YouTube have been adamant about for a long time.
Sad facts! But you get what I mean. The idea that this isn't the first civilization and that things were much more advanced than we've assumed isn't a new idea and there's more and more evidence to support it.
So they should just stop looking for evidence because of graham hancock-like theories on YouTube? Nah.
They don't even sound that surprised. If you listen to archaeologists, they frequently talk about how different "oldest" dates are expected to be pushed back as new finds are made.
So they talk about this as if it were a new innovation at the time—but could it be that this kind of woodworking was more widespread and this was just the only example to survive? Could it have been a standard part of the Acheulian toolkit?
That's probably the assumption they're working with, because historians do it all the time. Document survival for the pre-modern period is so poor that it doesn't take very many examples to demonstrate (for all intents and purposes) that something was widespread.
