Finding out when the earliest human species developed and using stone tools is an important task for anthropologists, as it was such an important evolutionary step. Surprisingly, the projected date of early stone technology has just been pushed back by tens of thousands of years.
Using a recently introduced type of statistical analysis, researchers estimated the proportion of stone tools that could lie undetected based on what was excavated to so far. At the same time, this gives us information about the age of the remains of tools that we do not yet know about.
These calculations suggest that ancient hominins may have been using Oldowan’s original machinery 2.617-2.644 million years ago (up to 63,000 years earlier than previous results suggest) , and the slightly more sophisticated Acheulean instruments may have been used 1.815-1.823 million years ago (at least 55,000 years earlier than previously thought).
“Our research provides the best possible estimates for understanding when hominins first invented these types of stone tools,” says paleolithic archaeologist Alastair Key of the University of Kent in the UK.
“This is important for a number of reasons, but for me at least, it’s very interesting because it shows that a lot of the artifact record seems to be waiting to be discovered.”
The best series sequential statistical analysis (OLE) applied here has already been used to judge the longevity of species that survived before extinction, based on the most recent fossils. found. The process has been shown to be reasonably correct, and in this study it has been used against it.
The oldest stone tools excavated by archaeologists to date are probably the oldest ever used – experts believe that many are lost forever, and it is difficult to find any. going around the finds – but OLE offers a way away from the existing products. .
While OLE is still an emerging approach in archeology, the researchers behind the new study hope it will be more widely accepted. While the best reference points are still real conclusions in the field, these physical discoveries do not tell the full story of what was going on millions of years ago.
“The best sequential predictive modeling method has been developed by myself and a colleague to date,” says conservation scientist David Roberts, from the University of Kent.
“It has been a reliable way of finding time to disappear and is based on the times of the last scenes, so it was an interesting practice for the first sight of antiquities.”
The ability of hominins to carve away at stones and use them for specific purposes opened a new perspective for these early humans: in terms of what they could hunt, what they could pick up, how to they could work with food and supplies, and so on. It is called the “important threshold” in human evolution.
To give you an idea of how far back we are talking, it is said that the first use of prefabricated stone tools on the development of toes against hominins: we were breaking rocks before we could get a proper grip on anything.
The oldest stone tools ever found date back 3.3 million years, found at the Lomekwi site in Kenya. Although this site does not have enough materials to run an OLE study, the researchers believe that the use of stone tools could go back even further – although they also admit that their estimates likely to change as more cemeteries and finds are made.
“Identifying when hominins developed Lomekwian, Oldowan, and Acheulean technologies is crucial for a multifaceted study of human origins,” the researchers wrote in their published paper.
The research was published in the Journal of human evolution.