Two huge early man tech announcements
Posted: Sun Sep 16, 2012 10:48 am
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.
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.