Two huge early man tech announcements

[hardaker]

Cowabunga News Service:

Earliest Tool-making and meat-eating - 3.5 million years ago
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-10938453

Researchers have found evidence that hominins - early human ancestors - used stone tools to cleave meat from animal bones more than 3.2 million years ago.
That pushes back the earliest known tool use and meat-eating in such hominins by more than 800,000 years.
Bones found in Ethiopia show cuts from stone and indications that the bones were forcibly broken to remove marrow.
Previously the oldest-known use of stone tools came from the nearby Gona region of Ethiopia, dating back to about 2.5 million years ago. That suggests that it was our more direct ancestors, members of our own genus Homo, that were the first to use tools.
A battery of tests showed that the cuts, scrapes and scratches were made before the bones fossilised, and detailed analysis even showed that there were bits of stone lodged in one of the cuts.


Earliest Hand-axes
http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/ ... iest-tech/

A team of paleontologist recently discovered a set of stone axes that are believed to be the oldest complex tools ever found. At 1.76 million years old, they are some of the oldest examples of human-engineered tech known to exist.The real shocker is that the type of ax found by the team led by Christopher Lepre of Columbia had previously only been dated to around 1.5 million years ago. That coincides with the rise of Homo erectus (a.k.a. us), who paleoanthropologists believed used the new tech to out-compete other hominins. The newly discovered axes predates the rise of Homo erectus by at least of a quarter of a million years, and were used at the same time as an earlier generation of stone tool tech that’s a million years older.

[hardaker]

UPDATE --
The 3.5my date was based on surface finds. Oops. May be a case of Hypothesis by Headline. Only excavated material is acceptable for such a paradigm shifting discovery as this. Looks like Gona is still no. 1. Sorry about that. jumped the gun.

[Farpoint]

Early Human Evolution in the Western Palaearctic
José S. Carrión , James Rose , Chris Stringer

This paper reviews Old World discoveries in the light of current knowledge and is important for the references contained within.

The map on pdf page 11 (1291) is enlightening.

[Ernie L]

"the lion-sized hyaena Pachycrocuta brevirostris and the big
felids Homotherium and Megantereon." ....good lord...with monsters like these roaming around how on earth did or ancestors survive at all...thin skinned,no fangs or claws..tiss a wonder

[Farpoint]

Plus all the other things that will stab, cut, and suck your blood.

Culiseta longiareolata

Chrysops callidus

[Ernie L]

Chrysops callidus

... ah yes living in a rural area I'm familiar with that particular plague. Also known by the more common name "sons-ah-bitc##"

[hardaker]

Thanks for the paper, Farpoint.
Great stuff !!!!

[E.P. Grondine]

"Taphonomical research provides an empirical basis for
evaluating the significance and meaning of the palaeontological
data, but taphonomic interpretations are themselves open to
debate."

Oh yeah - you would not believe the amount of crap I took for the use of "Heidelbergensis", even when the topic was coverd in a footnote. Originally I had planned to stream the footnotes at the bottom of each page, but my stroke prevented that.
Oh well.

Someday these folks are going to lea45rn about impact events, and that will likely move the whole field forward.
As it is, the opening of Asia to excavation and the new Asian hard data is forcing a rethink.