HomeWorldRare glimpse of oldest stone tools of early humans and their relatives

Rare glimpse of oldest stone tools of early humans and their relatives

Some of the oldest stone tools ever found have offered a rare glimpse into the lives of early humans and their relatives. Archaeological digs on the shores of Lake Victoria in Kenya have uncovered hundreds of stone tools and fossils dating back three million years.

 These tools—found alongside teeth from human relatives and the butchered remains of ancient hippo-like creatures—provide some of the first direct evidence that early hominins used stone tools to feed large animals. A study describing them was published February 9 in Science1.

This site now joins a handful of others that have provided tools dating back to the earliest adoption of stone technology. “This is a dream site,” says Sonia Harmand, an archaeologist at Stony Brook University in New York. “It’s so remarkable it’s almost too good to be true.”

Stone Age Technology

Gaps in the archaeological record have made studying tool making among our earliest ancestors difficult. Hominins the group of primates that includes Homo sapiens and its relatives first began using tools at least 3.3 million years ago. Scientists know this because of stone tools discovered at a single site in northern Kenya.

But the next known set of stone tools called Oldowan tools would not appear in the archaeological record for another 700,000 years. This type of instrument eventually spread throughout Africa and into Asia. But the lack of artifacts between the two early sites means that figuring out how the tools were made and used during this period of nearly one million years is a challenge.

The website in Kenya now offers new insights. In the early 2000s, a worker at a dig near Lake Victoria told researchers he saw stone tools and animal fossils popping out of the ground near his home.

The crew began excavations at the new site in 2015. Over several field seasons, they uncovered 330 artifacts, including 42 Oldowan stone tools scattered around the bones of the hippo’s ancestors. Some of the hippopotamus bones, like other animal remains at the site, bore signs of cutting and scraping with stone tools.

Dating methods have placed the remains between 2.6 million and 3 million years old, making the associated artifacts a contender for the oldest cache of Oldowan tools ever found. It also pushes back the known start of large hominin carnage by at least 600,000 years. Microanalysis of some of the tools indicated that some were used to crush plant material, possibly hard roots or tubers.

These findings suggest that stone tools were essential for access to hard-to-find foods, says co-author Thomas Plummer, a paleoanthropologist at Queens College, City University of New York in Flushing. Early hominins would have been limited by what they could pluck with their hands and teeth, he says. Stone tools “allowed them to process food outside the mouth”.

“The boy is like a giant leather sack,” he adds. “It’s full of things you could eat, but you can’t get to it without stone tools.

Who killed the hippos?

Stone tools and petrified animal bones were not the only remains to emerge from the site. When a thunderstorm rolled in on the last day of the field season in 2017, researchers also stumbled upon a tooth that belonged to an ancient human relative of the genus Paranthropus. Its presence near hippo carcasses—along with another Paranthropus tooth also found at the site—raises the possibility that it could be members of Paranthropus rather than members of the modern human genus Homo, who used some of the stone tools at the site. kill animals.

It’s not that surprising that other hominin lineages could have made tools, given that the first known tools predated Homo, Harmand says. But others are more skeptical. “Personally, I don’t believe that Paranthropus made Oldowan tools,” says Mohamed Sahnouni, a paleolithic archaeologist at the National Research Center for Human Evolution in Burgos, Spain. He says the hominin’s anatomy suggests it was well adapted to eating roughage and didn’t need to learn to use tools.

However, Sahnouni adds that the finds are still a “major breakthrough” that “illuminates the behavior of the earliest Oldowan toolmakers.”

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