Wikimedia Commons
3D Reconstruction of Paranthropus Boisei, made by Moacir Elias Santos and illustrated by Cicero Moraes.
Australopithecus descendants may have transported stones to make tools 3 million years ago before Homo appears.
The first to manufacture and use stone tools will have previously planned construction, much sooner than it was thought so far by collecting raw materials in places miles away.
A new study on August 15 at Science Advances anticipates in about 600 thousand years The ability to mentally map the territory and manage resources strategically, according to.
The investigation took place in the archaeological site of Nyayanga, Kenya, where geochemically analyzed 401 lytic artifacts belonging to the call “Oldowan set”the oldest tradition of manufacturing human utensils.
The results revealed that the stones used came from locations up to 13 kilometers, significantly greater than the quality of the rocks available at the site.
“We do not link the artifacts to definitive and specific sources, so we do not have an exact distance calculated,” explained the study author, Emma Finestone“But more than 10 kilometers is the conservative way of saying, and 13 kilometers is more realistic, given what our availability of raw materials shows.”
The team estimates that artifacts have between 2.6 million and 3 million yearsan especially relevant chronology, since it may precede the appearance of the genre Homoso far associated with the development of these cognitive abilities.
In previous work, the same investigators had already pointed out to an age of 3 million years, which reinforces the hypothesis that the planned use of tools was not exclusive to the first representatives of our own genre.
The authors also speculate that the presence of fossils of the genre Paranthropus In Nyayanga, a lineage prior to Homo that also evolved from Australopithecus, may have been responsible for the creation and use of the tools found.
“The fact that we have Paranthropus and not the Homo genre in Nyayanga suggests the possibility that Paranthropus may have been the Nyayanga Set tool manufacturer,” admits the author.
“It would not surprise me if Paranthropus was able to do so, but to date there is no way to definitely know what kind of hominid was making Nyayanga’s tools and bringing the stones from 10 to 13 kilometers away,” he says.
