A million and a half years ago, a group of human ancestors who lived in the area of the Olduvai throatin the current Tanzania, used the bones of elephants and hippos to manufacture large portable and multipurpose knives with which they cut the meat. The material was resistant, lighter than the stone and could be carved In situ or transport from other places. A change that occurred long before we believed and that was part of the technological and cognitive revolution that helped prosper the first humans.
The finding is published this Wednesday in an article of the magazine Nature in which Ignacio de la Torre And his team of the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) describes 27 tools made from long bones, mainly femurs and humers of large mammals, which make up a collection of cutting instruments, sharp and resistant, up to 38 cm long. Although there are no human remains associated with tools, scientists believe that, due to age and stratification, they were manufactured by our ancestor Homo erectus And that accumulated for a relatively short period of time, perhaps a few decades.
“What I have here is one of the oldest bone tools of humanity,” explains De la Torre. “He has a million and a half years, when the referents we had for the carved bone were much more recent.” For the researcher, the most relevant thing is that until now we believed that at that time the humans were not able to do this type of work and only the stone were working. “Now we know that, in a systematic way, the bone were also working,” he says. “They were multi -purpose tools, such as Swiss razor of the Paleolithic”
The pond of the hippos
The discovery not only changes what we knew about the human past, but also shows one of the greatness of science, its reaction capacity when the tests are imposed on preconceived ideas. The story goes back to 2015, when a member of the team who worked at the Olduvai site found a bone that seemed to have been carved.
Elephant bones worked elsewhere and visited the pond of the hippos with those tools
Ignacio de la Torre
– CCSH researcher of the CSIC and main author of the article
“My answer was to say: neither joke,” he acknowledges from the tower. Scientists did not expect to find a bone worked in this context, because the first tools of this material were found in southern Europe and have an age of 500,000 years. “But in 2018, four campaigns later, we found this other bone, which is very clearly worked, because it has extractions throughout the edge and the broken tip. And we started reviewing all the material. ”
The place where bone knives have been found was once the surroundings of a pond in which the gazelles and hippos bodies accumulated that humans consumed. “We believe they were using Hippo Bones themselves to process the meat,” says De la Torre. As in the area there are no remains of elephants, and many of the tools are of this hardest material, scientists think they were manufactured in another area and transported them there. “Elephant bones worked elsewhere and visited the pond of hippos with those tools.”
A cognitive revolution
One of the most interesting aspects of the finding is that it temporarily coincides with a transition moment in object -manufacturing technology. “What we see is that these bone tools appeared in the transition of Olduvayense to the Achalense”, Explains De la Torre. The first is a culture based on obtaining small lacquers and very simple cutting instruments, while the Achalese is a more sophisticated stone ax technology, which started about 1.7 million years ago and lasted until about 150,000 years ago.
“The one who suddenly finds tools that are made in another raw material is already indicating an adaptability and flexibility capacity that we did not have before,” says the principal researcher. It is also significant, he points out that all these tools are made on the same type of bone, which are those of the legs. “This indicates that they had anatomical knowledge of animals.”
That suddenly there are tools that are made in another raw material, it is already indicating an adaptability and flexibility capacity that we did not have before
Ignacio de la Torre
– CCSH researcher of the CSIC and main author of the article
On the other hand, all the tools are made in the same way, which indicates that its creators had a mental pattern on how they should be worked. In other words, they routinely selected specific bones to shape them using standardized production patterns. “This is a cognitive leap,” he insists on the tower.
Comparing with current bones
If these first Homo erectuswhich then left Africa in different waves, used this bone work technology, why hasn’t it been found in other later deposits? Scientists believe that an important factor is the difficulty that organic elements are preserved (Olduvai’s deposit is exceptional in this regard) and suspect that, if there are evidence in the registry, they may have gone unnoticed, as almost happens to them.
The authors of the article also rule out that these cutting tools were used to hunt, since they required to get too close to very large animals with very hard skin. To make sure that carving brands are not the product of a fortuitous or accidental bone fracture, the team obtained recent bones (the Barcelona Zoo gave them the remains of the famous Elefanta Yoyo, who died in December) and found that the material that they see in the “knives” of Olduvai does not appear when leaving the material.
His intention is to continue working with these bones in the Pleistocene archeology laboratory (LAP)of the CSIC History Institute, to try to reproduce these carved ones by percutorial stones and test how these tools were manufactured.
An example of brain plasticity
For the Spanish paleoanthropologist José María Bermúdez de Castroit is a fascinating job that sheds light on our evolutionary history. “The tools presented by the authors are incredible,” he says to eldiario.es. “Surely its creators had sufficient cognitive capacity to carve the bone of large animals in the absence of other raw materials,” he adds. “If so, it is evidence of cerebral plasticity and planning, improvisation capacity, now we must continue investigating whether the manufacture of bone tools has been overlooked in other places where that technology was not expected to find.”
“The evolution of the human psyche leads us to run ways to solve problems, and tools and technology are the clearest expression in that way to make our lives easier,” he says María Martinóndirector of the National Center for Research on Human Evolution (CENIEH). “Two million years ago, with the genre Homoa stone ceased to be just a stone and became a potential tool. This study shows us how a million years later, a bone ceased to be a rest of the food to also become a utensil. ”
The evolution of the human psyche leads us to run ways to solve problems, and tools and technology are the clearest expression
María Martinón
– Director of the National Center for Research on Human Evolution (Cenieh)
Antonio Rosasresearcher at the National Museum of Natural Sciences (MNCN-CSIC), believes that the finding tells us that the cognitive abilities of these human ancestors are broader than we thought. “These bone tools are very long and probably allowed a series of manipulations different from which they can simply carve stone,” he emphasizes. In his opinion, the discovery puts a date with a surprising age to an important milestone in our evolutionary history. “And, as the authors point out, it shows the moment when meat consumption puts hominins in the chain of carnivores, which is an ecological niche change,” he says.
To the paleoanthropologist Juan Luis Arsuaga The finding also seems very interesting. “It is a very old industry, the authors say that it is the first systematic size. That is, not occasional, but with a purpose of obtaining these tools, ”he says. In his opinion, the discovery would have special interest if it allows us to better know what the ecological niche or the feeding of these first was Homo erectus Africans “If confirmed, I would show that they had a greater capacity for planning, when using new materials, but to these first humans I already attributed a lot of cognitive capacity. If the Australopithecus It would be much more surprising. ”
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