404 Media

2025-08-15 18:00:09

A New Discovery Might Have Just Rewritten Human History

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For more than a million years, early humans crafted stone tools as part of the Oldowan tradition, which is the oldest sustained tool-making industry in the archaeological record. Now, scientists have discovered that Oldowan tool-makers who lived in Kenya at least 2.6 million years ago transported high-quality raw materials for tools across more than seven miles to processing sites.

The find pushes the recorded timeline of this unique behavior back half-a-million years, at minimum, and reveals that hominins possessed complex cognitive capacities, like forward planning and delayed rewards, earlier than previously known, according to a study published on Friday in Science.

Hominins at this site, called Nyayanga, used their tools to pound and cut foraged plants and scavenged animals, including hippos, to prepare them for consumption. Intriguingly, the identity of the tool-makers remains unknown, and while they may have been early humans, it’s also possible that they could have been close cousins of our own Homo lineage.

“I've always thought that early tool-makers must have had more capabilities than we sometimes give them credit for,” said Emma Finestone, associate curator and the Robert J. and Linnet E. Fritz Endowed Chair of Human Origins at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, who led the study, in a call with 404 Media.

“I was excited to see that at 2.6 million years ago, hominins were making use of many different resources and moving stones over large distances,” she added.

While many animals craft and transport tools, hominins are unique in their ability to identify and move special materials across long distances, which the team defines as more than three kilometers (or 1.86 miles). This innovation reveals a capacity for forward planning, complex mental maps, and delayed payoff of food consumption.

“What's unique is the amount of effort put into moving resources around a landscape,” said Finestone. “There's several steps involved, and there's also time in between these efforts and the reward. Although you see that to some extent in other animals, humans really separate themselves, especially as we get further and further in evolutionary time, in terms of the complexities of our foraging system."
Nyayanga amphitheater in July 2025. Image: T.W. Plummer, Homa Peninsula Paleoanthropology Project
Previously, the earliest record of this behavior in hominins came from a site called Kanjera South, which is about two million years old. Both sites are on the Homa peninsula, a region dominated by soft rocks that are not durable as tools; this may have prompted early hominins to search elsewhere for high-quality resources, such as quartz, chert, and granite.

Given that long-distance material transport was present at Kanjera South, the discovery of similar behavior at Nyayanga was not completely unexpected—though Finestone and her colleagues were still surprised by the scope and variety of materials these hominins gathered.

“Often, when you're dealing with these really old archeological assemblages, it's dominated by one type of raw material that's coming from a single source, or a few sources that are really nearby,” said Finestone. “Nyayanga has a lot of different raw materials, and they're using a variety of different sources, so that was surprising and exciting to us.”

Finestone and her colleagues have made many discoveries during their decade-long excavation at Nyayanga. The team previously reported that the tool-makers butchered hippopotamus carcasses which were probably scavenged rather than hunted, providing the earliest evidence of hominin consumption of large animals, according to a 2023 study led by Thomas Plummer, a professor of anthropology at Queens College, City University of New York.

That study also reported fossils from Paranthropus, a close hominin cousin of our own Homo genus, which went extinct more than a million years ago. So far, these are the only hominin remains recovered from Nyayanga, raising the possibility that the Oldowan tool-making industry was not limited to our own human lineage.

“It is interesting because Paranthropus is not traditionally thought to be a tool-user,” Finestone said. “There's debate over whether Paranthropus made tools or whether it was only genus Homo that was making Oldowan tools. I don't think that evidence at Nyayanga is definitive that Paranthropus was the tool maker. It's still an open question. But because we found Paranthropus remains at Nyayanga, and we haven't found anything from genus Homo—at least yet—there's definitely reason to consider that Paranthropus might have been manufacturing these tools.”

With luck, the team may uncover more fossils from these ancient hominins that could shed light on their place in the family. Finestone and her colleagues are also working on constraining the age of the Nyayanga artifacts, which could be anywhere from 2.6 million to three million years old.

But for now, the study marks a new milestone in the evolution of Oldowan tools and their makers, which eventually dispersed across Africa and into Europe and Asia before they were succeeded by new traditions (like the one from our story last week about yet another group of ancient tool-makers with an unknown identity).

The stones once used to butcher hippos and pound tubers offer a window into the minds of bygone hominins that pioneered technologies that ultimately made humans who we are today.

“What's really interesting about humans and their ancestors is we're a technologically dependent species,” Finestone said. “We rely on tools. We're obligate tool users. We don't do it opportunistically or occasionally the way that a lot of other animals use tools. It's really become ingrained in our way of life, in our survival, and our foraging strategies across all people and all cultures.”

“What was exciting about this study is that you see this investment in tool technology, and you see tools becoming ingrained in the landscape-scale behaviors of hominins 2.6 million years ago,” she concluded. “We might be seeing the roots of this importance that technology plays in our foraging behaviors and also just the daily rhythms of our life.”

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404 Media

2025-08-15 17:03:43

Behind the Blog: Exercises in OSINT and Storage Pains

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss OSINT for chat groups, Russell Crowe films, and storage problems.

JOSEPH: On Wednesday we recorded a subscribers podcast about the second anniversary of 404 Media. That should hit your feeds next week or so. Towards the end of recording, I went silent for a bit. I said on air sorry about that, a source just sent me an insane tip, or something like that.

That tip led to ICE Adds Random Person to Group Chat, Exposes Details of Manhunt in Real-Time. Definitely read the piece if you haven’t already. It presented an interesting verification challenge. Essentially I was given these screenshots which included phone numbers but I didn’t know exactly who was behind each one. I didn’t know their names, nor their agencies. It sure looked like a conversation involving ICE though, because it included a “Field Operations Worksheet” covered in ICE branding. But I needed to know who was involved. I didn’t think DHS or ICE would help because they are taking multiple days to reply to media requests if they do at all at the moment. So I had to do something else.

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Behind the Blog: Exercises in OSINT and Storage Pains

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-08-15 14:09:27

Pentagon Funded Experiment Develops Robots that Change by ‘Consuming’ Other Robots

A team of researchers at Columbia University, funded in part by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, have developed “machines that can grow by consuming other machines.”

Video of the experiment shows tubular robots that move by extending their shafts to inch along the ground. As the tubes gather, they connect and form into more complex shapes like triangles and tetrahedrons. With each piece consumed, the whole moves faster and with more elegance.

“AI systems need bodies to move beyond current limitations. Physical embodiment brings the AI into the messy, constraint-rich real world—and that’s where true generalization has to happen,” Phillipe Martin Wyder, lead researcher on the project, told 404 Media.

The researchers said the experiment was done with a view towards developing a “body” for AI. The idea is to give artificial intelligence a form that can grow, heal, and change similar to a biological body. They published their research in Science Advances under the title “Robot metabolism: Toward machines that can grow by consuming other machines.”

For the experiment, the researchers designed what they called truss links: “a simple, expandable, and contractible, bar-shaped robot module with two free-form magnetic connectors on each end.” Each truss link is almost a foot long when fully contracted and weighs more than half a pound. When the Links move individually they look like plastic worms inching across the ground, but their motion becomes more fluid and interesting as they gather to each other, forming complex shapes that allow them to move faster.
youtube.com/embed/UDYLUnniysU?…
Right now, the truss links are controlled by a human on a keyboard and not artificial intelligence. “It’s not AI-controlled yet, but that’s partially the point: this architecture is a step towards future AI-controlled self-assembling physical systems,” Wyder said.

Wyder and his team controlled the truss links remotely and ran the robots through several obstacle courses. Some of the motions of the machines were preprogrammed with specially designed loops with names like “ratchet crawl” and “tetrahedron topple” that the researchers could activate with the push of a button. “There’s no autonomous AI running in the loop yet, but that’s the direction we’re heading,” he said.
Image via Columbia University.
Wyder said that giving AI a body was in its very early stages. “Miniaturization is also on the table—more links, smaller size, finer resolution,” he said. “But I don’t believe a single platform will suit every task. Deep-sea robots, Mars colony builders, assistive home systems—they’ll need different form factors. The deeper idea here is the metabolic principle, not just the physical design.”

Human consciousness happens at the point where the mind and body interact. A person is not just the thoughts in their head, but also how they react to their environment with their body. All that stimuli shapes our thoughts. Wyder and his team are seeking to, eventually, recreate this phenomenon for AI. The research is exciting, but it’s also very new and there’s no way to know how it’ll play out in the long term.

This need not be a world where AIs are stuck in human-like bodies. He pointed to previous research out of Sweden that used a swarm of robots to form furniture on demand. If such a system were to break, we should not expect the average person to be able to replace the part. But what if the system could order a replacement part and repair itself?

“For this vision to become a reality, we must build robot systems that are intelligent in a way that allows them to keep track of their changing morphology,” Wyder said. “When the idea of modular robots first surfaced in the late 80s this was unthinkable, but I believe that our recent progress in machine learning could allow for intelligent, modular self-assembling machines.”

He also acknowledged there are dangers here. “With our current robots, the worst-case risk is probably a pinched finger. But yes, autonomy plus embodiment demands careful consideration of all the risks. Most robots today still struggle with navigation and manipulation. They’re far from being autonomous agents in the wild, but rather need our care,” he said.

Wyder also said that he doesn’t consider the ethics of this work as an optional part of the research. “Malicious use of robotics is a broader concern and not unique to this platform. Like any powerful technology—nuclear, biotech, AI—governance matters,” he said. “I don’t think this class of robot poses near-term risks, but that doesn’t mean ethical foresight is optional. We have to think about it so we can get it right.”

The researchers will build on this work and that one direction is teaching robots how to exploit environmental factors. “Imagine a climber choosing which rocks to grab—robots need that same affordance awareness,” he said. “We’re working on how robots can reason about their environment and use it to drive reconfiguration or mobility.”

Along with the paper, the researchers have a GitHub and Zenodo that contain the CAD and mesh files, firmware, software, and simulation code for the truss links. Anyone, if they so desired, could build their own bundle of robot-devouring-robots.

Roombot Swarm Creates On-Demand Mobile Furniture

All the furniture you’ll ever need is a swarm of modular robots

^{Evan Ackerman (IEEE Spectrum)}

404 Media

2025-08-15 13:02:29

Trump Has Dropped a Third of All Government Investigations Into Big Tech

The Trump administration has busied itself in the past six months by abandoning prosecutions and investigations into corporations at an unprecedented rate. According to a new report from Public Citizen—a nonprofit government watchdog—the Trump administration has dropped one third of all pending enforcement actions against tech companies. Those same companies collectively spent $1.2 billion on political contributions since 2024, most of it going to Republicans. Some of it went to Trump directly.

According to the report, Trump’s White House has withdrawn or halted enforcement actions against 165 different companies, a quarter of those are tech firms. The administration halted nine of the investigations outright, including a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) investigation into Meta’s alleged misuse of customer financial data. It dismissed or withdrew an additional 38 enforcement actions against big tech, including 13 charges against the crypto exchange Binance for operating as an unlicensed securities exchange.

Everyone with eyes knows that Big Tech has gotten cozy with Trump during his second administration. Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos were at his inauguration. Elon Musk spent millions to help Trump get elected and Trump rewarded him by giving him direct control of much of the government by allowing him to spearhead DOGE.

“In a way I think the cumulative picture is the most shocking thing, because it reveals a clear pattern of these corporations going to great lengths to both ingratiate themselves with and enmesh themselves within the administration, and Trump’s agencies rewarding those corporations by treating them as if the laws do not apply to them,” Rick Claypool, a research director at Public Citizen’s President’s Office and the author of the report, told 404 Media.

Musk has been one of the big winners. The Department of Labor halted an investigation into Tesla and the Department of Justice dismissed a civil rights case against SpaceX. All it cost him was an estimated $352 million in political spending.

Claypool said that corporate enforcement plummeted during the first administration, and he knew it would happen again during the second term. “But this massive retreat from enforcement and dropping categories of cases involving corporate misconduct is something I’ve never seen before,” he said. “Many of these cases being dropped now originated in the first Trump administration. They were, correctly in my view, pursuing crypto scams.”

One of the more shocking cases involved crypto billionaire Justin Sun. The Securities and Exchange Commission filed charges against Sun for manipulating the market in 2023. After Trump’s election, he purchased $75 million worth of tokens from Trump’s crypto currency company as well as $18.6 million of $TRUMP meme coins. After the inauguration, the SEC sent a letter to the Federal Judge overseeing the case asking for a stay. The Judge granted it.

For Claypool, the signal dropping enforcement against Big Tech sends to the public (and more importantly to corporations) is simple. “It’s not illegal if a tech company does it,” he said, paraphrasing President Richard Nixon’s famous off-the-cuff remark about his crimes during the Frost/ Nixon interviews.

“The big winners are instances when the industry wins policy that serves as pretext for a retreat from whole categories of enforcement,” he said. “This is crypto corporations winning the total retreat of the SEC, fintech corporations winning the near-complete shutdown of the CFPB, and—coming soon—the retreat from FTC enforcement against AI corporations signaled in the admin’s AI Action Plan.”

Claypool said that this kind of massive retreat from corporate enforcement will have long term effects on society. “It distorts the incentives. It gives companies that are willing to risk pushing the limits of the law an unfair advantage over law abiding companies,” he said. “Members of the public are so much more at risk of falling prey to a whole range of scams, privacy invasions, and manipulations. At a societal level, it puts us at much greater risk for the next corporate catastrophe.”

The years leading up to the 2008 Financial Crisis coincided with an unprecedented increase in what Claypool called “questionably legal so-called innovations” such as credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations on subprime mortgages.

We’re seeing a similar kind of innovation happen in the tech space where billionaires use crypto and AI to spin value out of thin air and curry favor with the Trump administration to avoid the consequences of hurting normal people. It’s only a matter of time before something terrible, on a grand scale, happens again.

“In many ways, what’s happening now is the culmination of years of lax enforcement against corporate lawbreakers. Democratic and Republican administrations for decades have been far too open to striking deals with corporate offenders to help them avoid the full consequences of accountability,” Claypool said. “So now we have this class of corporations and executives that believes it is entitled to escape the consequences of their misconduct. They don’t believe the laws should protect consumers and the public, and they don’t seem to mind risking widespread harms and violations if it means they might grab another billion. And the apparently corrupt way it’s going now, with dropped enforcement seeming to be a reward for insiders and donors, risks leading to a full retreat from federal authority to protect the public from corporate lawbreaking.”

Tesla discrimination probe killed as Trump axes watchdog agency

The Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs investigated companies for unfair practices — including Elon Musk's automaker.

^{Jonah Owen Lamb (The San Francisco Standard)}