During the unstoppable flooding of the rivers in the monsoon season of 2011, in Thailand the factories of various technology multinationals such as Sony or Western Digital were flooded and inaccessible. Millions of hard drives, graphics cards and external memories were lost under the mud in the catastrophe caused by torrential rains and shortages were felt in stores around the planet. More than 1.2 million years ago, the stock from another factory on a large scale it arose, and afterwards it was retained and fixed forever, under the sudden designs of nature. It is Simbiro III, an area of the Ethiopian deposit of Melka Kunture (current candidate for Unesco World Heritage), with records of up to two million years old (Olduvayense and Acheulean periods), which is being traced by an Italian-Spanish team that includes researchers from the University of Vigo Eduardo Méndez-Quintas and Andrea Serodio, with Joaquín Panera and Susana Rubio, from the Complutense University. The group led by Margherita Mussi, from the University of Sapienza (Rome), has discovered the first known serial factory in this enclave, with an uncountable stock that accumulates some 120 bifaces per square meter.
99% of the pieces are carved from the same volcanic material, obsidian, and follow a shape that seems standardized, as if all the workers wanted to reproduce a prototype, with practically the same blows. According to the archaeologists, who have published their finding in the magazine Nature Ecology & Evolution, this activity was concentrated in the place to take advantage of the accumulation of rocks from volcanic activity, dragged and deposited by the Simbiro stream, a tributary of the changing course of the Awash river. The opportunity was given, and the erectus he knew how to take advantage of it, which shows that he had “planning and anticipation capacity”, with separation of activities, much earlier than previously believed. The theory placed this “planning mentality” as a characteristic of hominids from only 500,000 years ago.
The first workshop in series of black glass cutting tools spit out by the surrounding volcanoes remained trapped since the Pleistocene in a stratum five meters deep, visible along a 15-meter-long cliff on the right bank of the Simbiro. There the lithic axes accumulate, practically the same, carved from the stones deposited after the seasonal floods, in the middle of a landscape that was probably pastures at the time, with plants typical of wetlands of the Cyperaceae family (such as rushes). or papyri) and coniferous forests.
The site, on the upper reaches of the Awash, at about 2,100 meters above sea level, was seasonally flooded. The meandering river donated obsidian boulders and hominids, according to the scientific article they “developed new techniques” with the aim of taking advantage of the qualities of the material to produce very sharp and “very standardized” tools. The half meter thick layer that reveals this organized activity corresponds to the so-called level C: in this layer, the excavation carried out by the Italian-Spanish Archaeological Mission of Melka Kunture and Balchit found a deposit of 578 accumulated tools (575 of obsidian) in only 4.8 square meters. “The same density of artifacts” appears “in plain sight” along the cliff, the archaeologists explain. The deposit exclusively treasured bifaces, tools carved on both sides, with an almond shape, and the fragments or residues torn off in their manufacture.
A ton of bifaces
There was almost no trace of animal fossils, which were in other levels —upper and lower— of the same site, and they also helped, together with the volcanic ash, to date the period in which this enclave functioned. A “specialized workshop”, as defined by Eduardo Mendez-Quintas, co-director with Margherita Mussi and Joaquín Panera of the international project. The tools show a high degree of sophistication, in what, according to the Galician specialist, appears to be the “repeated and conscious search for a specific morphology by groups of erectus who occupied the place”. As detailed in the article, the obsidian utensils measure about 11 and a half centimeters long by eight at their widest part, weigh an average of 312 grams, and each one was made with about 37 blows. Archaeologists calculate that in the cut shown by the Simbiro cliff there may be a industrial stock of a ton of bifaces.
The discovery makes Simbiro III “a unique case and the oldest recorded example in the world of this type of behaviour”, according to this researcher from the Archeology, Antiquity and Territory Studies Group of the Ourense Campus, who is also behind the discovery. the most remote dating of Galicia. That vital scene of the erectus from more than 1.2 million years ago it was “a functionally compartmentalized space, with specific places for the production of tools” and others where these manufactures were taken for their use.
The archaeological site of Melka Kunture, which covers some 70 sites in an area of 80 square kilometers (50 kilometers south of Addis Ababa), is one of the richest sites in Africa and has been investigated for 60 years, but the These findings, which gave important information about human evolution, have hardly been reflected in the scientific literature until now. The Spanish group that works periodically in the place is also linked to the Institute of Evolution in Africa in Madrid and the Human Evolution Research Center in Burgos. The discovery —in an extensive highland area far from the epicenter of the war that has devastated the Tigray region in the north of the country in the last two years— may end up being only the prologue to other discoveries that, as the team warns, would dynamit some established ideas about the hominids that inhabited that territory, just at the time when Unesco must decide whether to declare Melka Kunture a World Heritage Site.
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