The paper, published in Nature, describes a collection of 27 now-fossilised bones that had been shaped into hand tools 1.5 million years ago by human ancestors.
The tools were discovered in Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, a site renowned for its long history of important archaeological discoveries revealing the origins of humans. It is the earliest substantial collection of tools made from bone ever found, revealing that they were being systematically produced one million years earlier than archaeologists once thought.
Hominins (early human ancestors who could walk upright) had been making tools out of stone in some capacity for at least a million years, but there has been scant evidence of widespread toolmaking out of bones before about 500,000 years ago. The hominins who shaped the recently-discovered bone tools did so in a manner similar to how they made tools out of stone, by ‘knapping’ - chipping away small flakes to create sharp edges.
This transfer of techniques from one medium to another shows that the hominins who made the bone tools had an advanced understanding of toolmaking, and that they could adapt their techniques to different materials, a significant intellectual leap. It could indicate that human ancestors at that time possessed a greater level of cognitive skills and brain development than scientists thought.
Significance of the study
According to Renata Peters:
The tools show evidence that their creators carefully worked the bones, chipping off flakes to create useful shapes. We were excited to find these bone tools from such an early timeframe. It means that human ancestors were capable of transferring skills from stone to bone, a level of complex cognition that we haven’t seen elsewhere for another million years.”
Ignacio de la Torre said:
This discovery leads us to assume that early humans significantly expanded their technological options, which until then were limited to the production of stone tools and now allowed new raw materials to be incorporated into the repertoire of potential artifacts."
The very earliest stone tools come from the “Oldowan” age which stretched from about 2.7 million years ago to 1.5 million years ago. The bone tools reported in this study were from the time that the ancient human ancestors were progressing into the “Acheulean” age which began as far back as about 1.7 million years ago.
It is unclear which species of human ancestor crafted the tools. No hominin remains were found alongside the collection of bone artefacts, though it’s known that, at the time, our human ancestor Homo erectus and another hominin species known as Paranthropus boisei were inhabitants of the region.
Because these tools were such an unexpected discovery, the researchers hope that their findings will prompt archaeologists to re-examine bone discoveries around the world in case other evidence of bone tools has been missed.
This research was supported by the European Research Council (ERC).
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Image credit: CSIC
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