To eat and be eaten. Lifestyles of early tool-makers.

The earliest tools archaeologists have found date back to around 2.5 million

years ago, and they are made of stone (How Humans Evolved). The most ancient

ones were found in Ethiopia, but all of these fossils are referred to as the “Oldowan

Industry”, because of the large amount found at the Olduvai Gorge site, in northern

Tanzania (How Humans evolved). Whoever made and used these tools is almost

certainly an ancestor of Homo Sapiens, the modern human. Unfortunately the fossils

aren’t very decisive, and there are various hominan lineages (i.e. lineages on the

evolutionary branch that led to modern humans, after the split from the ancestors of

modern Chimpanzees) that coexisted in the right places and at the right time to be

possible candidates (How Humans Evolved). Whoever it may have been that used

these tools, the fossils tell us quite a lot about how they used them, giving us

precious insight into the lifestyles of those early hominans and their strategies for

survival.

The emergence of flaked-stone technology is dated in the Plio-Pleistocene,

between 2.5 and 1.5 million years ago (making silent tools speak), but it is probable

that these weren’t the first tools made by the early hominans, and almost certainly

they weren’t the first tools used by them. The Oldowan Industry stone tools consist

of stones modified in either one of four different ways: the hard-hammer percussion

technique, the most common and simple one, which “consists of hitting a rock with

another” (making), the bipolar technique, which also “entails hitting the core (i.e. the

stone you want to modify) with the hammer, but in this case the core is first rested

or braced upon another rock, an anvil” (making), the anvil technique, in which “the

core plays the active part, as it is held in one or both hands and swung down

forcefully against a stationary, usually fairly large anvil” (making) and the throwing
technique, which consists in “throwing the core or cobble against a stone anvil in

order to initiate a fracture” (making). Although initially it was thought that the

modified cores were the tools hominans used, thanks to Shick’s and Toth’s

experimental work it was discovered, and it is now widely accepted, that it was

actually the flakes that were broken off the cores that were employed most

efficiently (making). These flakes could be used for a variety of tasks which included

cutting through the hide of dead animals to get to the meat (hide as thick as that of

an elephant), cutting the meat, working the hide, or even hollowing out wood to

make containers (making). Since the tools found, although the oldest we currently

have, represent a degree of skilfulness quite advanced, it is probable that other,

more primitive tools preceded them (older than the). These might have been made

out of less resistant material, for example bones or wood, and this might be the

reason why no such fossils have been found. By observing modern primates

scientists have reached the conclusion that before actually creating tools early

hominans almost certainly used components of their environment as tools (be it

sticks, rocks or bones), but unfortunately it is impossible to recognize unmodified

objects as tools (older than).

Observing a Bonobo (a Pygmy Chimpanzee, or Pan paniscus) Shick and Toth

discovered that it learned very quickly to use already made flakes and “within about

a month […] was striking his first flakes off cores by hard-hammer percussion”

(making). It also “developed the innovation of throwing his stones on a hard tile floor

to fracture them and produce cutting edges” (making). The brain size of the modern

Chimp is roughly equal to that of the Australopithecines (how humans evolved), thus

suggesting that already those early ancestors of men could have initiated the stone-

tool technology. But the Bonobo’s “level of expertise is significantly below that seen

in Oldowan hominids [sic]” (making) so Shick and Toth arrived at the conclusion that
“these (Oldowan) hominids probably had surpassed modern apes and probably their

australopithecine ancestors in their ability to modify stones” (making). They then

identify two major lineages as those which could be responsible for the first tools:

the robust australopithecines, “smallish brained hominids with massive jaws and

huge molar teeth for grinding food” (making) which lived from about 2.6 million

years ago and which had various forms called A. aethiopicus, A. boisei and a similar

form called Paranthropus robustus; the early Homo, which includes Homo habilis,

who appeared around 2 million years ago but was probably present earlier and

whose brain was about 600 to 750 cc (around 200 cc larger than the A. robustus’s)

(making). Others, though, more recently, add A. garhi as a very probable candidate,

and A. rudolfensis, Kenyanthropus platyops, and Homo ergaster as other possibilities

(how humans). H. ergaster, moreover, they identify as “the oldest member of our

own genus” (how), downgrading H. habilis to a member of the australopithecines.

But what is important is what these hominans did with these tools, because they

opened up new possibilities that transformed “a bipedal ape to a creature much more

like modern humans” (how).

Modern apes depend primarily on collected food, like fruit and leaves, and

less on extracted food, like tubers, and although Chimps also occasionally hunt they

“do not come close to human expertise in foraging” (how). Foraging skills are

obviously more complex than collecting or even processing extracted food, and the

stone tools made this evolution in diet possible. Microwear analysis on the fossil

animal bones found at the various sites and on the stone tools themselves has been

fundamental in proving that the tools had actually been used on the bones. This kind

of analysis is based on the fact that “after a stone tool has been used for a significant

amount of time, it retains microscopic traces on its edge” (making). These

alterations can be damage to the edge, such as chipping; striations, which also
indicate how the tool was used (“striations parallel to the edge of a tool show cutting

or sawing activities, those perpendicular to the edge show scraping, planing or

chopping” (how)); polish, i.e. microscopic alteration of the stone surface (making).

Moreover “flaked stone tools have microscopic serrations on the edges and make

very fine parallel grooves when they are used to scrape meat away from bones”

(how), and with instruments such as high-powered optical light microscopes it is

easy to tell the difference between bite marks and tool marks, and even in bones

broken to get to the marrow (a highly prized source of nutrients) it is possible to

distinguish whether they have been smashed with a stone or chewed through with

teeth (making). Needless to say, “many of the animal bones found at Olduvai show

signs of stone tool use” (how). This does not automatically imply, however, that

early tool-makers were hunters or that it was they who accumulated the animal

bones at these sites.

It has been argued that “Oldowan hominids could not have captured large

mammals (such as those that were found at the sites) because they were too small,

too poorly armed, and too poorly encephalized” (how), so, it is concluded, they must

have been scavengers. Again, microwear analysis can help us solve this dilemma.

Scavengers are usually left with second-rate parts of the carcass, so if early

hominans scavenged the animals from which we have found the fossils, we would

expect the cut marks to be on bones such as the vertebrae, while if the hominans

had hunted these animals we would find them mainly on the limb bones (how). In

fact, at the Olduvai site, “cut marks appear on all kinds of bones” and “some bones

show cut marks on top of carnivore tooth marks, and other bones show tooth marks

on top of cut marks” (how). It would seem, then, that early tool-makers both hunted

and scavenged, and sometimes they stole other carnivore’s kill, sometimes they

were robbed of theirs. Many aereas where the concentration of stones and bones
was exceptionally high were initially considered home-aereas, where the hominans

brought their quarry, or pieces of it, to be slaughtered. Recent discoveries, though,

and especially a more accurate observation of the fossils, have shown that many of

the bones found at these sites present not only tool marks, but also bite marks, and

there are the remains of a lot of nonhominid carnivores which might have been

“killed (and eaten) when attempting to scavenge homind kills or when hominids

attempted to scavenge their kills”. It seems highly unlikely that hominans actually

lived in these sites, but rather that these were either butchery sites, where they

would leave their heavy, burdensome tools and where they would cut the meat up,

or places where other carnivores left their kills which could then be easily scavenged

(making). Or maybe both: at the Zhoukoudian site near Beijing a later relative,

Homo erectus Pekinensis (which lived more or less 600.000 to 300.000 years ago)

“shared” a den with the Gyan Hyena (Pachycrocuta brevirostris). In fact, “the cave

may have served a variety of occupants or at times have been configured as several

separate, smaller shelters” or, “in a form of time-sharing, early humans ventured

partway into the cave during the day to scavenge on the hyenas had not eaten and

to find temporary shelter” (scave). The presence of quite a few hominan skeletons in

the cave suggests sometimes our ancestors managed to keep the hyenas at bay

while slicing the meat off the carcasses, and sometimes they didn’t. The findings at

the Zhoukoudian site also fuelled another on-going debate: did our ancestors

practice cannibalism? In the cave there were hominan skulls, perhaps trophies,

which appeared to have been broken so as to get to the brain, and which also

presented “signs of trauma, including scars and fresh injuries from attacks with both

blunt and sharp instruments, such as clubs and stone tools” (scave). But taphonomy,

which is “the study of how, after death, animal and plant remains become modified,

moved, buried, and fossilizied” (scave), showed that all the damage to the bones,

skulls included, could have been done by the hyenas, and there wasn’t any
substantial evidence of cannibalism. Nonetheless, genetic studies of prion diseases,

which are transmitted through the practice of cannibalism, show that this behaviour

was probably quite widespread until as little as 500.000 years ago (widespread), so

maybe Dart’s view of our ancestors as “world-wide scalping, head-hunting, body

mutilating and necrophilic” (making), although perhaps a bit dramatized, might not

be that off the mark.

We can conclude, then, that the use of tools allowed our ancestors to increase

enormously the amount of meat in their diet, and gave them the instruments

necessary to be able to compete with the claws and teeth of other carnivores. They

could thus expand into new ecological niches and become more versatile and

adaptable to changes in their environment, qualities essential for survival. The

increase in protein and energy intake, the complexity of tool-making and the risks

and the planning involved in hunting and scavenging all contributed towards the

expansion of these hominans’ brains. As tools and complex foraging techniques

became more and more invaluable for our ancestors the selection would have been

very strong for intelligence and bigger brains which would be able to build better

tools and plan elaborated strategies. A virtuous cycle was put in motion that would

continue until Homo sapiens, and perhaps even further.