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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."
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.
...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.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
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.
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
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
Homo Sapiens are around for about 500,000 years, but what they're talking about in this article are our ancestors of human-like primates, of which some species are tens of millions of years old.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
The age that humans essentially similar to ourselves walked this planet is constantly pushed back. We now discover tool use nearly a million years earlier than previously thought. Yet for some it takes real temerity to suggest that possibly significant civilizations may have existed earlier in history. The best places to look would actually be in high orbit, the Moon or the Lagrange points between the Sun and Earth. The Moon is particularly good, due to lack of weather (We saw how the dust storms affected the Mars rovers!) If we were all (99%) killed by a viral epidemic next year and civilization fell, it would be extremely hard to find significant traces of us just 30K years later. I still think that survivors, even if they fell back to 'bash things with stones' tool use might re-achieve our level of civilization. Likewise, since I'll give future humans that chance, I'd entertain that maybe we aren't the first who had a significant globe-spanning civilization and something went wrong. Either of these possibilities really makes the argument that Hawking has been espousing much stronger. If we aren't the only civilization then we are rare. If we aren't then civilizations must rise and fall fairly frequently. Either way we need to get humanity established elsewhere, and someone should be thinking hard about what to send back to earth /leave here to help the lower level of civilization re-climb the ladder.
Off Amazon, order a book called the Hidden History of the Human Race (The Condensed Edition of Forbidden Archeology)
No, please don't.
The Hidden History of the Human Race is a frustrating book. The motivation of the authors, "members of the Bhaktivedanta Institute, a branch of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness" (p. xix), is to find support in the data of paleoanthropology and archaeology for the Vedic scriptures of India. Their methods are borrowed from fundamentalist Christian creationists (whom they assiduously avoid citing). They catalog odd "facts" which appear to conflict with the modern scientific understanding of human evolution and they take statements from the work of conventional scholars and cite them out of context to support some bizarre assertion which the original author would almost certainly not have advocated. Cremo and Thompson regard their collection of dubious facts as "anomalies" that the current paradigm of paleoanthropology cannot explain. Sadly, they offer no alternative paradigm which might accommodate both the existing data and the so-called anomalies they present; although they do indicate that a second volume is planned which will relate their "extensive research results" to their "Vedic source material" (p. xix). Kuhn noted that "To reject one paradigm without simultaneously substituting another is to reject science itself" (1970, p. 79); and that is precisely what Cremo and Thompson do. They claim that "mechanistic science" is a "militant ideology, skillfully promoted by the combined effort of scientists, educators, and wealthy industrialists, with a view towards establishing worldwide intellectual dominance" (p. 196).
[ ... ]
Cremo and Thompson's claim that anatomically modern Homo sapiens sapiens have been around for hundreds of millions of years is an outrageous notion. Accepting that there is a place in science for seemingly outrageous hypotheses (cf. Davis, 1926) there is no justification for the sort of sloppy rehashing of canards, hoaxes, red herrings, half-truths and fantasies Cremo and Thompson offer in the service of a religious ideology. Readers who are interested in a more credible presentation of the overwhelming evidence for human evolution should consult Ian Tattersall's wonderful recent book The Fossil Trail: how we know what we think we know about human evolution.
E pluribus unum