Why Did Early Humans Leave Africa Without the Latest Gadgets

[Minimalist]

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2 ... tml?ref=hp

On the northwest shoreline of Kenya's Lake Turkana, at a site known as Kokiselei, researchers previously found both Oldowan and Acheulian tool types in the same 1.76-million-year-old sediments. The tools were located in a series of gravel, sand, and mudstone beds and included picklike tools, basic hand axes, and broken pieces of stone left behind in the tool-making process. (Just who made the tools is unclear from the archaeological evidence alone, though our relative Homo erectus is identified as the likely creator of at least the Acheulian tools.) The new research pins down a new geological date for the site.

The date pushes back the origin of the Acheulian culture by almost 200,000 years, the team reports online today in Nature. And that means that advanced hand axes had already been invented when humans first started leaving Africa, says the study's lead author, geologist Christopher Lepre of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York.

[War Arrow]

This would be one of your rhetorical questions, yes?

[dannan14]

Hawks has a really good angle on this issue. http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/arc ... -2011.html

Particularly, i liked his point about the Acheulean industry itself. He thinks it may never have been a culture at all since Acheulean tools have been found many thousands of miles and many tens (or hundreds) of thousands of years apart.

[kbs2244]

Good ideas travel fast.
And 200,000 years is plenty of time for them to travel far.

And “hand axes” can be tools of opportunity even today.
In the 1970’s I was on a Snake river rafting/camping trip.
On a fishing day layover our guide and some others went up a creek in a canoe to fish.
Around noon two of them showed up wading downstream.
The canoe had gotten stuck in some driftwood and the only way to get it out would be to chop up some of the wood.
They had come back to camp to get an axe.
On their way back upstream they met the guide floating down in the canoe.
While they were gone he had been busting river rocks against each other until he got one sharp enough to chop the wood.
He just left his “hand axe” on site.
He didn’t expect to need it again.
And if he ever did need one, they were pretty easy to make.

[Minimalist]

Good ideas travel fast.

I think that's it in a nutshell. Evidence suggests that the clovis point spread very rapidly across the continent, too.

[Digit]

But a new study finds that early humans began to migrate out of the continent with more primitive tools even though better technology had been invented.

If we accept what we are told, that the emigration from Africa was conducted by a small group/s the logical answer to the question is that the latest technology hadn't reached them yet.
A more modern example would be the spear, it was still in use whereas the Bow was also in use elsewhere.
The Australian Aborigine appears to have reach Oz without the development of the Bow catching up with them.

Roy.

[Minimalist]

the latest technology hadn't reached them yet.

The Marines have a saying: There's always one poor dumb bastard who doesn't get the word.

[Digit]

Well it's the only logical answer isn't it Min? Some times the obvious has to kick the experts before they realise that it's there.

Roy.