Ask Helen, she was there.
Posted on 08/12/2010 1:47:05 AM PDT by bruinbirdman
Scientists have pushed back the history of human tools by almost 1m years, with the discovery in Ethiopia of animal bones that were butchered 3.4m years ago with sharp stones.
An international team found tool marks on two bones, excavated at Dikika only 200 metres from where the celebrated child’s skeleton dubbed “Lucy’s baby” was excavated 10 years ago. The study is published in the journal Nature.
The researchers, led by Zeresenay Alemseged of the California Academy of Sciences, believe that tools were used by the hominid species Australopithecus afarensis, to which Lucy’s daughter and the original Lucy (discovered in 1974 at nearby Hadar) belong.
“This discovery dramatically shifts the known timeframe of a game-changing behaviour for our ancestors,” said Mr Alemseged, an Ethiopian anthropologist. “Tool use fundamentally altered the way our early ancestors interacted with nature, allowing them to eat new types of food and exploit new territories.”
Previously, the oldest evidence for such tools came from other Ethiopian sites, where anthropologists have found stone implements and cut-marked bones dating back 2.5m years.
“Now, when we imagine Lucy walking around the east African landscape looking for food, we can for the first time imagine her with a stone tool in hand and looking for meat,” said Shannon McPherron, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.
“With stone tools in hand to quickly pull off flesh and break open bones, animal carcasses would have become a more attractive source of food,” Mr McPherron added. “This type of behaviour sent us down a path that later would lead to two of the defining features of our species – carnivory and tool manufacture and use.”
Both the 3.4m-year-old cut-marked bones from Dikika came from hoofed mammals: one is a cow-sized rib and the other a goat-sized femur. They have a variety of cut, scrape and percussion marks, made when the hominids scraped off flesh and extracted bone marrow.
No stone tools – or materials for making them – have yet been found at the Dikika site. Mr McPherron suggested their users carried the tools with them from somewhere else that provided raw materials.
“One of our goals is to go back and see if we can find these locations, and look for evidence that at this early date they were actually making, not just using, stone tools,” he said.
The discovery of systematic tool use more than 3m years ago will surprise many people working on human origins, said David Braun of the archaeology department at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.
Mr Alemseged believes it will help scientists understand the selective forces shaping human evolution. “Once our ancestors started using stone tools to help them scavenge from large carcasses, they opened themselves up to risky competition with other carnivores, which would likely have required them to engage in an unprecedented level of teamwork,” he said.
This sounds like something that a smart (but now extinct) ape, or a dead end line of hominids, might be able to do. This might not even be anywhere in the history of Homo sapiens.
Behavior doesn’t have to be instinctual; it can be copied or learned. This is a single event, and caution would be the better exemplar.
There is so little fossil evidence of early hominids that it is difficult to infer much from their remains. When something like this arises, most anthropologists seem to be reaching for explanations in the dark when silence would be more appropriate.
Must have been done during a ceremony of profound religious significance...(/channeling cultural anthropologist)
Ping
Ask Helen, she was there.
These rubbish collectors of the past are hilarious! First they leap to a conclusion. Then it starts to sink. Quickly they leap off onto a different one Then THAT starts to sink.
It’s like watching frogs on lily pads - only the frogs do a lot better.
Agree rubbish collectors roll the dice.
I need to see them using Duct Tape before any pronouncement of intelligence or civilization
This evolutionary rubbish! They want us to believe that we swung out of trees 200 million years ago. Noah built the ark with precise saws and planes and showed that ancient man was as brilliant or more brilliant that the degenerates today.
And WD-40.
How doe she know they were "scavenging"? They could have killed it with a club, spear, knife or an AK-47 for all he knows...............
You may enjoy the chapter Professors and Prehistoric Men, from G.K. Chesterton's Everlasting Man.
Not likely since the earth is only THOUSANDS of years old.
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Thanks Smokin' Joe.butchered 3.4m years ago with sharp stonesAustralopithecus afarensis ping. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list. |
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