For a long time, archaeologists and anthropologists maintained that the separation between human and animal was in the manufacture of tools. And so the myth spread homo faberan idea that went very deep.
However, a Butcher shop from 2.9 million years ago (Ma) found in a Kenyan site puts back on the table who made the first stone tools, for example, to kill hippos and crush plant material.
In search of the first craftsman: the Nutcracker
Louis Leakey began to dig in the deposits of Oldupai Gorge (Tanzania) in 1931. He found fossils of extinct animals associated with ancient stone artifacts, and he focused all his energies on finding the artisan, the person responsible for making those prehistoric stone tools. But he did not appear until, in 1959, the archaeologist Mary Leakey identified the remains of a archaic hominin.
Despite its clearly simian anatomy, the Leakeys determined that if it had been capable of making tools, it could only be something very human-like. They baptized him as Zinjanthropus boiseithe “human of Zinj” (boisei alluded to the surname of the patron who financed the work). He received the nickname of Nutcracker, and was dated at 1,600,000 years. That meant the earliest stone tools were over a million and a half years old.
The arrival of Homo habilis
In 1960, and a short distance from the Zinj site, the Leakeys discovered another contemporary hominin. After reconstructing it, they came to the conclusion that it was a more graceful individual –less robust– than the Zinjanthropus, also endowed with a significantly greater brain capacity. As it appeared associated with stone tools, for the first time in the history of paleontology a cultural parameter was taken into account when defining a new biological species. Indeed, it received the taxonomic classification of Homo habilis: the “skilled human”.
With this new species, the Leakeys rectified: the first artisan of Oldupai –and of the entire planet– had not been the robust ape-like Nutcracker, but the first representative of the human race, Homo habilis. He Zinjanthropus came to be called Australopithecus boisei (today Paranthropus boisei). And it was considered that the first material culture, the Olduvayense, coincided with the appearance of Homo.
The dogma of homo faber survived: we still believe that the tool marked the separation between humans and animals.
The chimpanzee’s vegetable tools
That was until a self-taught naturalist, Jordi Sabater Piand a young primatologist also self-taught called jane goodall they overturned the established order. Sabater did it from Guinea, Goodall from the Tanzanian forests of Gombe. In the same decade of the sixties they demonstrated that chimpanzees were capable of making tools. Although not of stone, but of a vegetable nature.
Jordi Sabater Pi, who would end up being a professor of Primatology at the University of Barcelona, went much further by stating that the instruments made by the chimpanzee were cultural traditions.
On the other hand, over the years, stone tools with a wide range of dates were exhumed in various locations in Ethiopia and Kenya: between 2.5 and 3.3 Ma. The proof that, before Homoand as with our closest living cousins – chimpanzees – there must have been hominins capable of carving stone: australopithecines.
Bones to drill termite mounds
The reaction of the majority of specialists pro-Homo at the news he was not very enthusiastic. Nor did they react well to a revolutionary discovery: the identification, in Ethiopia, of a new species of hominin. It was called Australopithecus garhi and was associated with cut-marked faunal bones, evidence that an australopithecine, 2.5 Ma ago, made cutting stone tools to dismember their animal prey.
Meanwhile, in deposits of Paranthropus robustus South Africans, not only lithic tools were found but also traces of bone artifacts to drill termite mounds.
A team led by Camilo Jose Cela Conde (University of the Balearic Islands) and the signer of these lines (HOMINID Group of Human Origins, University of Barcelona / Universitat Oberta de Catalunya) we traveled to the Tugen Hills (Lake Baringo, Kenya) to work in the paleontological sites where Brigitte Senut and martin pickfordfrom the Institute of Human Paleontology in Paris, had found the remains of the Ororin tugenensis (6 Ma old). The objective: to try to locate Unmodified stone utensils (anvils and hammers) employed, in the same way as between chimpanzees and current humans, by the first representatives of our evolutionary line.
The Nutcracker regains its honor
Now, new news also coming from Kenya serves to finally restore the honor taken from Oldupai’s Nutcracker.
In the town of Nyayanga, in Kenya, a team involving Rick Potts and thomas plummer ha found stone tools of Olduvayense typology (or Mode 1) together with fossil remains of Paranthropus boisei.
The date is 2.9 Ma, which means that it is clearly prior to the genesis of the genus. Homo. Among the material there would be lithic artifacts probably used to butcher hippopotamus carcasses – bones with cut marks appear – and unmodified stones used to crush vegetables.
It is perfectly clear that humans were not the first to make tools.
Jordi Serrallonga AtsetAssociate Professor of Prehistory, Anthropology and Human Evolution, UOC – Open University of Catalonia
This article was originally published on The Conversation. read the original.
