‘Handy’ stone tools discovered to date back earlier than we thought

‘Handy’ stone tools discovered to date back earlier than we thought

A new study dismantles the assumption that 'Handy Man' Homo habilis was the first to craft tools.

We already know what makes humans unique from the rest of the animal kingdom: our cognitive aptitude and our ability to use tools and manipulate materials in our environment with our hands. But what if we weren’t the first?

German researchers working in Ethiopia in 2010 found distinct markings that suggest the use of stone tools on a couple of animal bones. Usually, a discovery like this would be considered ordinary at best, but when Shannon McPherron of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany determined the age of the animal bones, he and his team found them to be older than the oldest known human tool artifacts in the fossil record.

The bones are 3.4 million years old. That means they are from 800,000 years earlier than the time in which we originally thought humans started using tools. The oldest known human artefacts in the world are surprisingly sophisticated stone tools from the Gona Region of Ethiopia, and are only about 2.5 milion years old. Most archeologists always suspected that older, less sophisticated tools would one day be found, but what may have come as more of a surprise is who was most likely using these early tools.

The area where the animal bones were found, at the time that the bones are thought to be from, was inhabited by Australopithecus afarensis, the species known for its famous “Lucy”. This discovery could mean that Lucy and her kind were in fact much more human-like than primitive. The evidence found in those animal bones suggests that early hominids were using tools intelligibly long before modern humans even evolved.

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