On the origins of the Oldowan tool kit: An ancient relative of humans from Paranthropus may not have made a tool
Prior to this new study, published in the journal Science on Thursday, the earliest known appearance of this style of tools was in the Afar Triangle of Ethiopia around 2.6 million years ago. After artifacts in this style were first found, the Oldowan tool kit was a technological breakthrough and humans carried it with them across Africa and into Asia lasting for around 1 million years.
Stone tools and animal bones are the things that came out of the site. As a thunderstorm rolled in on the last day of the field season in 2017, the researchers also stumbled on a tooth that belonged to an ancient relative of humans from a genus called Paranthropus. Its presence near the hippo carcasses — along with another Paranthropus tooth also found at the site — raises the possibility that it might have been members of Paranthropus, rather than of the modern-human genus Homo, that used some of the stone tools at the site to butcher the animals.
Humans are unique in being dependent on technology for survival. But the evolutionary origins of this reliance on technology for survival is shrouded in mystery,” said Tom Plummer, a professor of anthropology at Queens College, City University of New York, and coauthor of the research.
It isn’t shocking that other hominin lineages may have made tools since the first known tools were pre-dating the emergence of Homo. But others are more sceptical. A scientist at the National Research Centre on Human Evolution in Spain does not believe that Paranthropus made Oldowan tools. He says that the hominin’s anatomy suggests that it was well adapted to eating coarse foods and might not have needed to master tool use.
The tool kit was described as the first simple food-processor by a study co-author.
“The sharp-edged flakes could cut as effectively than a lion’s set of teeth, and the hammerstones could crush as effectively as an elephant’s molars — and thus all of possible foods of the savanna woodlands/grasslands were opened up to processing with this new set of teeth outside of the body,” he said via email.
From Oldowan to Nyayanga: The Discovery of Early Hominin Toolkits and the Implications for Ancient History
The differences are not the same as how the device changed how we use phones. I believe it is more similar to how writing changed communication, said Potts in an email.
The presence of the Paranthropus molars suggests that members of the Homo genera weren’t the only primates who harnessed this technological advancement.
The emergence of the Oldowan tool kit was largely related to the large teeth and giant jaws of Paranthropus, which were much larger than those of Homo habilis.
“When our team determined the age of the Nyayanga evidence, the perpetrator of the tools became a ‘whodunnit’ in my mind. There are several possibilities, and except for fossilized hand bones wrapped around a stone tool, the originator of the early Oldowan may be an unknown for a long time,” Potts said.
A number of hominins that walked on two feet were found in Ethiopia,Kenya and Chad about 3.5 and 2.5 million years ago. These early hominins include Australopithecus afarensis, to which the famous Lucy fossil belongs, as well as Paranthropus and Homo habilis.
“This discovery means precision flaking techniques existed a lot earlier than we thought. It has implications for both cognitive and social learning. These are the techniques you have to acquire from other people.
The food would have been eaten raw. Perhaps meat would be pounded into something akin to a hippo tartare to make it easier to chew. It took less than 1 million years for using fire to cook to be included in the archaeological record.
The remains of butchered hippos are the earliest evidence that human ancestors were able to process and eat large animals. It is likely that the hippos were not actively hunted.
There is no evidence to suggest a technology that could have brought down a very large animal from the Oldowan site. It appears that the hominin toolmakers processed carcasses that they found. The advantage of such an activity would have been access to large packages of protein and fat — a real survival advantage,” Potts said via email.
Harmand’s Dream Site: Artefacts from an Oldowan Stone Tool at the Deepsite of an Ancestral Hippo
The site is now one of a few that have given tools dating back to the early days 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.”
The crew started excavating at the new site in 2015. Over several field seasons, they unearthed 330 artefacts, including 42 Oldowan stone tools scattered around the bones of an ancestral hippo. Some of the bones of the Hippo and other animals were cut with stone tools at the site.