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Tool Use By Humans Pushed Back By 800,000 Years
gpronger writes "The journal Nature reports that newly discovered tool marks on bones indicates that we were using tools at minimum 800,000 years earlier than previously thought. This places the start of tool use at 3.4 million years ago or earlier. The most likely ancestor in this time frame would be Australopithecus afarensis. The researchers, led by palaeoanthropologist Zeresenay Alemseged of the California Academy of Science, San Francisco,and Shannon McPherron, (an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany) state that cut marks on the bones of an impala-sized creature and another closer in size to a buffalo, indicate butchering of the animals by our distant ancestors. However, they do not believe that they were in fact hunters, more likely scavenging the remains left behind by large predators."
How many early humans were tools ...
Oh, wait... wrong Tool.
(I hate babysitting databases... makes the brain go all squiggly at 2 in the morning. At least now I can stop wondering if they found a fossilized CD player next to the bones...)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Turns out we're not the only animal that uses tools so there's no reason why it would have appeared recently in human evolution. What's more impressive is our ability to design tools to attain a certain objective by using only our imagination (abstract thought) rather than the ability to pick up a rock from the vicinity to carve up a carcass. That's likely much more recent.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
How long until we learn to use them properly, i.e. mindfully and responsibly?
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How tool are you today?
...then we've been using tool even before earth, the sky and whatnot were created! What a mind blowing revelation.
Nearly three and a half million years of humans using tools, and I can't even put up a shelf. If you want evidence that evolution isn't all it's cracked up to be, there it is.
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I think we all agree here that this is "just a theory". Despite all that MumboJumbo you call "Science".
It's only a theory. Like gravity and maths.
+6 flamebate on other sites, this sort of talk is you know...
You may be correct, but you have not the slightest evidence to back up that claim. There are many, many other issues to consider, such as environmental pressure or the lack thereof, and the difficulty of abstract thought before there were any abstractions - the bootstrap problem. Our present ability to think of new tools in an environment surrounded by them is not, perhaps, that impressive. The first person to think of trimming a sharp rock for better performance was a genuine innovator.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
It should be noted that while human imagination is alright, its in fact failing us most of the time when it comes to technology (as statistics on patents and businesses show). It can be thought of as mutation in the process of cultural evolution.
People try stuff out and see what works, often discovering a very different application then originally intended or finding the thing useless. This is selection.
It is the accurate transmission (or in evolution terms reproduction) of complex multi-step tool production methods that allows for cumulative cultural evolution. This kind of thing is hard to prove for animals- but there are chimpanzee troops with multi-step tool production.
The recombination of such behaviors/tools/ideas is accelerating the process even further, which is why technological evolution is accelerating while genetically we haven't changed that much (conjecture!). In fact we have not so distant relatives (so called Boskop man) that had larger average cranial volume.
we were using tools at minimum 800,000 years earlier than we previously had evidence for.
Pedantry aside, friggin wow... not just 3.4 million years of tool use, but being able to figure that out. The scientific concept of "prehistory" isn't even two hundred years old.
I have read that paleoanthropologists sometimes use the word "human" for a variety genera including Australopithecus, Paranthropus, Homo, et cetera.. While these are all hominids, what the average person would call "human" are referred to as "anatomically modern humans" or Homo sapiens sapiens by paleoanthropologists. I hope this nomenclature helps clear up any confusion.
That's lunacy! I can offer alternate descriptions of every one of those articles which is just as ingenious as yours.
they do not believe that they were in fact hunters, more likely scavenging the remains left behind by large predators
Is it just me or is this a bit depressing. Before it was look at all we've accomplished in the past 2.5 million years, now it has become: it's taken 3.4 million years to get to where we are?
A number of animals are capable of taking an everyday object (e.g a stone, stick or bone) lying around and using it to achieve an objective.
The real questions are:
a) how many animals are capable of taking an everyday object, improving it for the purpose they have in mind and then using it to achieve an objective?
b) at what point did our ancestors pick up this ability?
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Even non-hominids use implements like rocks and sticks. Tools are specifically fabricated or altered: what's important about tools is not that they are used but that they are made. Unless we find the rocks they used and see whether they were flaked by the hominids or just found already sharp, we can't call these "tools".
All's true that is mistrusted
I was under the impression that we were maybe 300,000-400,000 years old as a species. How do they go back 800,000 to millions of years?
We wouldn't have so many people who don't believe in evolution. When they try to group all these different human like species together, it makes evolution seem completely unscientific. Homosapiens are the only human species. Those other species are different species just like there are different species of fish, cats, and just like humans aren't rodents even though we share something like 95% of our genes with them.
Is that supposed to be our car analogy for this article?
Tool use by humans pushed back again, and by 800,000 years? I can't wait that long. I have to fix my brakes this weekend.
More music, fewer hits
This is just after the appearance of the monolith, right?
Those retard monkey fish squirrels were not so retarded after all?
monkeys have been observed learning to use tools to do thinks like crack open coconuts. it's rather trivial. saying tool use in primates has been pushed back 800,000 years is like saying jumping out of the water in dolphins has been pushed back 800,000 years.
The earliest known tool use was to carve up a tasty critter. Hopefully this puts an end to the myth that the natural diet for humans is vegetarian.
By all means make your personal choice for whatever reasons. Just don't pretend its the rest of us who are acting in a manner contrary to our nature.
I can do both - you poor Eloi are simply devolving.
The early hominoids walked and perhaps ran like moderns. But their head remained small for a couple million years until homo erectus. What stimulated increased brain size? Some people the brain acts like radiator to dissipate the heat of running in the hot savanna.
I'd probably die of starvation without grep. Awk and sed must have come along later.
Its a bit long of a post to hope for that....
Somewhat, concisely, "evolution with direction" is little more than creationism in wolfs clothing. It assumes there is a grand goal, to which evolution is the mechanism of achieving.
There's no such thing guys, the earth is 10KYears old. I was there, I saw it all.
I'd think the existence of canine and incisor teeth in humans would be enough to convince any reasonable person that were are evolved to be omnivorous.
Ah, the good old days, when calling out to somebody "You tool!" had immediate and all too physical connotations.
Now, git off my dinosaur pasture!
and many species have become extinct in the course of thousands of millennia past,
I wonder:
Is it not entirely possible that the tools the use of which evidence has been found of
were from a species that is not an ancestor of modern humans?
Actually modern Homo Sapiens are only believed to be around for about 50,000 years....there were multiple species of human like animals existing 500,000 years ago but they were all significantly different from us in terms of brain size and facial structure (think archaic looking cave man)
It's normal for *some kinds* of salad to have eyes, you know.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Since even birds do it.
Maybe bees do it, and even educated fleas do it.
Modern humans are called "Homo Sapiens Sapiens". The oldest "modern human" found are about 200,000 years old (according to Wikipedia).
The entire branch of homo sapiens however, including species no longer around today, is thought to be about 500,000 years old (also according to Wikipedia).
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
It sounds like Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) has some 'splaining to do.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
I'd think the existence of canine and incisor teeth in humans would be enough to convince any reasonable person that were are evolved to be omnivorous.
Carefully with those claws of yours, you could scratch your keyboard ;-)
My parser is a grammar nazi.
The earliest known tool use was to carve up a tasty critter. Hopefully this puts an end to the myth that the natural diet for humans is vegetarian.
It's not so easy to define 'natural' as it seems. We are talking about a 'tool' use here.
For example, some clever crows in Japan use traffic to crack hard nuts. Chimps use 'tools' to kill each other. (Not that killing each other is not natural, but does natural mean OK?)
I am sorry to bother with my vegan propaganda, but when I think about this stuff, more and more interesting ethical questions appear.
For the record, I've already fallen victim to vegan propaganda.
My parser is a grammar nazi.
"It's not so easy to define 'natural' as it seems."
Natural is pretty easy to define. Natural is anything that is not the result of human action (nothing about a human is 'natural' unless it is inborn). Chimp (and other non-human) use of tools is natural. Human activity is unnatural even if we are doing it naked and with our bare hands.
The reason humans first tools were to carve up critters is that we evolved to eat both plants and animals. Meat eating is inborn in humans and therefore is natural. Vegetarianism is not inborn and therefore is unnatural.
My complaint wasn't/isn't with vegetarianism or vegans, only with the false claim that early man was vegetarian and that vegetarian is the natural and healthy diet of the man animal. A healthy and balanced diet is fairly effortless when it includes meat since meat is a complete protein. A healthy vegetarian diet is possible but requires planning, wide access to diverse foods, and fair amount of research. It is safe to say that early humans had none of the above. Suggesting anything else IS propaganda.
That said I'm not vegan. I understand the thinking that leads down that road. I just can't bring myself to draw a line regarding what lifeforms are fair game and what are not. The life of a cow is no more sacred to me than that of an apple or the bacteria killed by using a sanitizing wipe on a shopping cart handle. For that matter my only objection to cannibalism is that I believe it would facilitate the spread of disease.
...because your post was very fun and entertaining in the middle of all this seriousness (and/or BS) :)
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