A collection of 27 1.5-million-year-old bone tools discovered in Tanzania shows early humans had an ability to systematically make tools about a million years earlier than scientists thought.
The hominin culture was likely undergoing one of the first-ever technological transitions.
The bone tools were created the same way tools were made from stone.
Scientists may not have been giving early human ancestors enough intellectual credit, as evidenced by a new find in Tanzania. Researchers discovered 27 now-fossilized bones that were shaped into hand tools an estimated 1.5 million years ago by hominins. The sheer scope of the find shows that the group of early humans that made the tools employed a factory-like production of them, literally one million years before scholars thought this was happening.
“The tools show evidence that their creators carefully worked the bones, chipping off flakes to create useful shapes,” Renata Peters, University College London archaeologist, said in a statement. “We were excited to find these bone tools from such an early timeframe. It means that human ancestors were capable of transferring skills from stone to bone, a level of complex cognition that we haven’t seen elsewhere for another million years.”
The researchers from UCL and the Spanish National Research Council published the findings in Nature, highlighting the earliest substantial collection of tools made from bone ever found.
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While hominins—human ancestors able to walk upright—had been making tools out of stone for at least a million years, the authors wrote, there was little evidence of widespread toolmaking using bones before about 500,000 years ago. The process for the bone tools seems to be similar to how they crafted stone tools, a process dubbed “knapping,” as workers chipped small flakes away to form sharp edges.
The markings on the collection of bones discovered in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania had been attributed to carnivore activity, but the authors instead showed purposeful creation. The researchers believe the transfer of tool-making techniques from one medium to another—stone to bone—shows an advanced understanding of toolmaking and the ability to adapt to different materials, calling it a “significant intellectual leap” that shows a greater level of cognitive skills and brain development than scientists had given them credit for.
“This discovery leads us to assume that early humans significantly expanded their technological options, which until then were limited to the production of stone tools and now allowed new raw materials to be incorporated into the repertoire of potential artifacts,” Ignacio de la Torre, lead author and paleolithic archaeologist at the Centre for Human and Social Sciences of the Spanish National Research Council, said in a statement. “At the same time, this expansion of technological potential indicates advances in the cognitive abilities and mental structures of these hominins, who knew how to incorporate technical innovations by adapting their knowledge of stonework to the manipulation of bone remains.”
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The bones were mostly from elephants and hippopotamuses, although there were also two from cow-like species. Workers made the long tools—ranging from 8.6 to 15 inches for the elephant bones and seven to 11.8 inches for the hippo—from limb bones, used for density and strength.
The researchers wrote that techniques used on stone tools from the Oldowan age carried over into a time the human ancestors were entering the Acheulean age. Bones shaped into tools had only ever been found in isolated instances and never in such a quantity, which suggests a systematic production of the tools, likely used to process animal carcasses for food.
“By producing technologically and morphologically standardized bone tools,” the authors wrote, “early Acheulean toolmakers unraveled technological repertoires that were previously thought to have appeared routinely more than one million years later.”
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Tim Newcomb is a journalist based in the Pacific Northwest. He covers stadiums, sneakers, gear, infrastructure, and more for a variety of publications, including Popular Mechanics. His favorite interviews have included sit-downs with Roger Federer in Switzerland, Kobe Bryant in Los Angeles, and Tinker Hatfield in Portland.