Alfonso Benito Calvo, a researcher at the National Center for Research on Human Evolution (CENIEH), is part of an international team of researchers led by the National Council for Scientific Research (CSIC), which published a study in Tanzania's Olduvai Gorge in Nature. This research reveals that as early as 1.5 million years ago, early humans were making bone tools in a planned and step-by-step manner.
Before the discovery in Tanzania's Olduvai Gorge, in which CENIEH was involved, researchers thought great apes only occasionally made bone tools. This finding suggests that tool making may have played a role in early humans developing more advanced cognitive patterns and establishing a range of standardized behaviors.
This discovery marks a major breakthrough in the study of human origins. Before the discovery of this set of bone tools at the Olduvai T69 complex, researchers believed that this tool-making technology was virtually unknown to our earliest ancestors.
"This discovery leads us to believe that early humans greatly expanded their technological options, which until then were limited to making stone tools," said Ignacio de la Torre, a scientist at CSIC's Institute of History and co-director of the OGAP project. , and that they were now able to incorporate new raw materials into the range of potential tools, this increase in technological potential also hints at the cognitive abilities and mental templates of these great apes - those with bipedal locomotion - who knew how to transfer technological innovations from stone flaking to bone tool making."
In eastern Africa, there is some of the earliest evidence that the earliest great ape ancestors used and produced tools. The most famous of these is the Oldowan culture, named after the stone tools first discovered in the Oldowani Gorge. The Ordovician culture, which spans between 2.6 million and 1.5 million years ago, is characterized by sharp stone flakes produced by the collision of two rocks.
This relatively simple technology led to the emergence of a new culture 1.7 million years ago, the Acherine culture, which lasted until 150,000 years ago.
"A handaxe is a large, sturdy, often pointed and almond-shaped stone tool whose production requires extraordinary technical ability," de la Torre points out. "Prior to our discovery, the technological transition from the Ordovician to the Acheuraan was limited to the study of stone tools."
For hundreds of thousands of years, early humans viewed the animals they shared with them on the African savannah as a danger, as evidence suggests that humans were often prey for cats and large birds; or as a competitor, as our ancestors competed with hyenas and vultures for carcasses hunted by big cats; or as a source of protein, as our ancestors obtained marrow primarily from the remains of prey abandoned by predators.
"Our findings show that from the Achaelian period when the T69 complex was formed, humans already had a major way to obtain meat resources - animals were no longer just dangers, competitors or just food, but also a source of raw materials for the production of tools," said delaTorre.
Our results suggest that during the transitional period between the Ordovician and early Acheuranian, East African hominins developed a primitive cultural innovation that included the transfer and adaptation of tapping skills from stone to bone.
"By producing technically and morphologically standardized bone tools, early Acheleian toolmakers unraveled a conventional technological system previously thought to have emerged more than a million years later. This innovation may have had a significant impact on the complexity of our ancestors' behavioral patterns, including improvements in cognitive and mental templates, artefact collections, and raw material sourcing."
Compiled from /scitechdaily