Johannes Krause / Museum of the Krapina Neanderthals
Recreation of a scene from the life of a group of Neanderthals
“Stone technology 2.0” was launched in Spain almost 1 million years ago. And he already presented “a sophisticated level of forecasting and planning”.
“The technological behavior observed in El Barranc de la Boella, Spain, demonstrates significant technological advances and anticipatory behaviors“, they write Diego Lombao and his team in the study published in August in Journal of Paleolithic Archaeology.
They refer to advances in stone tools made in a period before the evolutionary split between modern humans and Neanderthals, so these advances in stone tools were probably created and used by our common ancestors and by other now extinct human species, says .
The analysis revealed that the way the tools were cut followed a shared sequenceimplying that artisans used a common model to obtain consistent results.
These humans also produced larger tools than previously observed and adapted them for specific purposes. Together, these characteristics indicate “a sophisticated level of forecasting and planning“.
As oldest known stone tools, classified as Oldowan or Mode 1date back almost 3 million years ago.
They were produced by ancient hominids in Africa, and were made by hammering one stone against another. The resulting fragments had sharp edges that could be adjusted by further blows.
What Lombao and his colleagues discovered is the oldest evidence in Europe of more sophisticated Mode 2 techniques that create the Acheulean hand axes.
These techniques were developed based on Mode 1 processes, through further refinement, say the researchers, with theother materials such as bone and wood to help perfect the blades. The resulting tools were also more likely to be symmetrical.
Science Alert refers to these major technological advances as “stone technology 2.0”.
The humans who lived in El Barranc de la Boella during the early years created a sophisticated process that involved transporting a range of local materials to create their axes and pickaxes at different stages of their production,” writes Lombao
“O Barranc de la Boella é um Unique testimony to the technological evolution of hominids in Europeat a time when tools were not just utilitarian, but also involved sophisticated planning and a more efficient use of resources”, he concludes.
Still, this place may not have been the first place these techniques emerged. “We propose that El Barranc de la Boella could represent a Early dispersal of the Acheulean from Africaabout 1.4 million years ago”, write the researchers.
Still, they say, “this site shows us that technological innovation was not linear or a completely abrupt leapbut the result of multiple waves of population dispersion and the gradual arrival in Europe of new technological behaviors from Africa”.
