Precisely the same is true of bows, spears, stone axes, needles, boomerangs and any other neolithic and quite a lot of paleaolithic technology. People living in South America, Australia, New Guinea and southern Africa were still using palaeolithic technology until 50 years ago at least.
And of course any of that technology predates the shadoof by tens of thousands of years, since the shadoof wasn’t used at all until after the agricultural revolution of ~10, 000 years ago.
Seriously I think the answer is going to have to be the walking stick. There We can reasonably assume people were using walking sticks identical to those in use today ever since our species evolved. Given the choice betweeen a walking stick carved by someone 100, 00 years ago and one produced today most people would just as readily use the stone age version.
If we need a more concrete example then we might nominate the digeridoo. Most players prefer traditionally crafted instruments and given a choice between one of today’s instruments and one from 40, 000 years ago would always choose the older instrument.
I’m not sure walking sticks count as “designed.” You’re walking in the woods, you see a stick, you pick it up. You pick up one that already looks right for you, and then make certain modifications to it to your taste–shorter, narrower, whatever. That doesn’t seem designed to me.
I’d go with the didgeridoo, if we’re going to disallow the bowl. (And I think bowls were designed.)
Coming to the defense of the Shillelagh/walking stick: It’s not just any ol’ modifications that make it what it is: It has to be the right length, which varies from individual to individual, and it needs to be cleaned up, often by a considerable amount, to serve as a tool/weapon.
Failing that, I’d move to the cudgel - a more fully modified shillelagh - one cut down 'til it becomes a very specific single-purpose tool, rather than a multipurpose one like the shillelagh. In either case, they go all the way back to the first sapient that wanted to hit someone with something other than their hand, and they’re still in use, unmodified, today. In fact, non-human primates sometimes use branches in just such a manner now, minus the cleaning up and modification - you can actually see how it started.
Could you give a cite for the first part of this statement? The second part is right if you don’t count Homo erectus or Homo habilis as human, but I’ve never heard of a chimp or gorilla doing flint knapping.
I wonder if the OP meant manufactured items - that is, the sorts of things that people make more than one of and sell or distribute them for others to use (or to put it another way, items that people would buy or acquire, rather than make for themselves).
It’s the only way I can make sense of the bobby pin thing.
A couple of researchers taught a bonobo crude flintknapping and use of the resulting flake “knives” as part of several experiments, but this behavior has not been observed in the wild.
There are wild chimpanzees that have been observed to use rocks and hammer/anvils to crack open nuts, and they will reuse the same stones near a nut tree over and over.
In the case of manufactured items, we’re still with paleolithic people. Venus figurines and other portable art like beads and fetishes were traded over long distances. Finished stone tools and flint blanks were used in trade also.
In The Barbarians Speak—which I unfortunately do not have with me to cite a specific page or quote from—the author points out that there was a site that specialized in making pottery of a standard type. Trade goods found there show that things from hundreds or even thousands of miles away were traded for their pottery. I don’t remember offhand how old the site was, but I remember being surprised at how long ago it was, so probably mesolithic or at least pre-Bronze Age since standardized pottery was pretty common by the Bronze or Iron Ages. (I’m cursing myself now for trading that book in for store credit.)
This thread has not gone in the direction I intended though I still find it very interesting.
I was thinking that *manufactured * might be the right but that word can be interpretted in many ways as well.
Maybe machine made or mechanically made is what I was looking for. That would eliminate all the hand made stuff.
I still think a spoon, cup or bowl is going to come out near the top of the list even if we restrict it to manufactured items.
Our ancestors really weren’t all that different from us; take for example this house - it had beds, shelf units, even a primitive flush toilet - and it was in use something like five thousand years ago. Bone needles and combs, plus pottery bowls and other items were found there.
Well, if you’re going that far back, how about the siwak or m’swaki stick? The original toothbrush, made by mashing the end of a still-green stck with a rock and using the masjed end to scrub the teeth. Still used today.
I’ll bet it’s older than the walking stick.
>Could you give a cite for the first part of this statement?
Maybe not. I thought this was well established in the scientific community but now I’m not so sure. However I do find some somewhat uncertain references, for example:
“The paper, ‘The Emergence of Knapping and Vocal Expression Embedded in a Pan/Homo Culture,’ presents a case of the emergence of tool use, specifically flint knapping, among Bonobos embedded in a language-rich environment or, more generally, a ‘Pan/Homo’ culture.” - http://asweb.artsci.uc.edu/philosophy/faculty/skipper_b&p_2004.pdf
>I’ve never heard of a chimp or gorilla doing flint knapping.
Well, it seems pretty clear that researchers have trained chimps or bonobos to knapp flint, for example “Kanzi”. See Flintknapping Chimpanzee or google “flintknapping chimp” to see others.
BUT somebody today training a nonhuman primate to do this is certainly not the same as them having figured it out themselves in prehuman times, which I thought was well established. Now that it looks uncertain I have to retract what I said and apologize!
I’m thinking that the OP may mean the oldest exact, specific model of a product in continuous production and sale from the time it was first manufactured, rather than the oldest product itself. If that’s the case, my vote would go for a generic square nail manufactured to penny-size standards. In this case, the oldest designed object still in use today was designed in the early 1600s.
For a non-generic, branded object … maybe some cast-iron fireplace or hand-cranked grain or juice miller, or a Ball jar.
That sounds a little like a version of the either the Beaker People or the Linear Pottery culture, only I don’t think either of those had one center. BUt those are both pre-BA
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