Stone Age humans were picky about which rocks they used for making tools, study finds

Washington – The first human ancestors of the age of old stone were more picky on the rocks they used to make tools that before, according to research published on Friday.

Not only did these first people made tools, but they had a mental image of the location of appropriate raw materials and planned in advance to use them, traveling over long distances.

About 2.6 million years ago, the first humans had developed a method of hammer hammering to lace the sharp flakes that could be used as blades to massacre meat.

This allowed them to feast on large animals like hippopotams that gathered near a spring of fresh water on the archaeological site of Nyayanga in Kenya.

“But Hippo’s skin is really difficult” – and not all rocks were suitable for the creation of blades that are sharp enough to unravel Hippo Skin, said co -author Thomas Plummer, paleoanthropologist at Queens College of the City University of New York.

The Cleveland Museum of Natural History Emma-author Emma, “When we think of stone tools, all rocks are not equal in terms of tool quality.”

On the Nyayanga site, the researchers found lasting blades in quartzite, a rocky material which they traced in rivers and other places at around 8 miles (13 kilometers). The new research appears in the journal Science Advances.

“This suggests that they have a mental card of distributing various resources in the landscape,” said co-author Rick Potts of the Human Origins program of Smithsonian.

Previously, the researchers supposed that the stones may have been found only one mile from the freshwater spring site.

The new study shows that “these first humans thought in the future. This is probably the first time that we have had an indication of this behavior in the archaeological file, “said Eric Delson, paleoanthropologist of the American Museum of Natural History, who was not involved in research.

The oldest example known to the first human ancestors carrying raw materials for the manufacture of tools was around 600,000 years later than the Nyayanga site.

The researchers said that it is not clear who were these first tool manufacturers – whether members of the genus Homo or a branch linked but extinguished from the family tree, like Paranthropus.

Homo sapiens did not occur until much later, about 300,000 years ago.

But the talent for looking for the best raw materials so that simple technology dates back almost 3 million years. “We are today a species that still depends on technology – using tools to spread around the world and adapt to different environments,” said Finestone.

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