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The Megalithic Portal and Megalith Map : Index >>
Stones Forum >> Evidence for Earliest Stone Tools on Bone
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Evidence for Earliest Stone Tools on Bone |
bat400
Joined:
10-04-2006
Messages: 1334
from South Central Indiana, US
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|  Posted 03-11-2010 at 02:38
Submitted by coldrum --
Stone tools have been a hallmark of humanity since our beginnings in Africa. The oldest-known stone tools date to about 2.6 million years ago and are presumed to be the work of the oldest member of our genus - Homo habilis. New discoveries in Ethiopia, however, suggest that some early human ancestor was using stone tools to butcher animals more than 800,000 years earlier.
Shannon McPherron, with the Department of Human Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, and numerous colleagues reported these discoveries in the Aug. 12 issue of the journal Nature.
Significantly, McPherron and her team did not recover any actual stone tools. Instead, they found fragments of two animal bones, one from a cow-size mammal and one from a goat-size mammal, with markings that they interpret as cut and hammer marks.
The team examined the marks on the bones using electron microscopy. The researchers expressed confidence that the marks represent traces of butchery with stone tools followed by breakage of the bone in order to extract the nutritious marrow.
McPherron and her co-authors concluded that these bones are "the earliest evidence for meat and marrow consumption" by human ancestors and shed light on the origins of stone-tool technology.
These discoveries are provocative and important, but it might be too soon to accept them at face value. The observation that some marks more closely resemble known cut marks than known trampling marks does not necessarily prove that they could not be the result of some other unimagined natural process.
I encountered a similar problem in the interpretation of marks on several bones of the Burning Tree mastodon discovered in 1989 in Licking County. My colleague, Daniel Fisher at the University of Michigan's Museum of Paleontology, examined the marks using electron microscopy and concluded they closely matched stone-tool cut marks, yet we had found no stone tools associated with the bones.
In this case, however, we had other evidence that corroborated the hypothesis of human butchery. The bones had been stacked in three neat piles, which we eventually interpreted as the remains of an Ice Age meat locker.
The ancient Ethiopian bone fragments were found in association with deposits from a slow-moving river. As a result, we have no information on the original context of these bones.
Making a convincing argument that stone-tool technology and big-game hunting had such an extreme antiquity ultimately will require more evidence than two nicked and battered bones from an uncertain context.
Bradley T. Lepper is curator of archaeology at the Ohio Historical Society.
For more see http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/science/stories/2010/09/05/dating-oldest-use-of-stone-tools-no-easy-task.html?sid=101.
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