These two bones from Dikika, which have been dated to roughly 3.4 million years ago, provide the oldest known evidence of stone tool use among human ancestors.
Credit: Dikika Research Project
SYDNEY: Scientists have discovered the oldest evidence of stone tool use and meat-eating among human ancestors in Ethiopia – shifting the date back 800,000 years, long before anatomically modern human emerged.
This is the first evidence that stone tools were used to butcher meat by hominins (humans and human ancestors) during the time of Australopithecus afarensis, the pre-human species of which ‘Lucy’ is the most famous example.
“This find will definitely force us to revise our textbooks on human evolution, since it pushes the evidence for tool use and meat eating in our family back by nearly a million years. These developments had a huge impact on the story of humanity,” said lead researcher Zeresenay Alemseged from the California Academy of Science in a statement released to the press yesterday.
From stone axes to iPhones
Previous evidence of stone tool use was dated at approximately 2.5 million years ago, around the time of the later Australopithecine species, Australopithecus africanus.
“Tool use fundamentally altered the way our early ancestors interacted with nature, allowing them to eat new types of food and exploit new territories,” said Alemseged. “It also led to tool making – a critical step in our evolutionary path that eventually enabled such advanced technologies as airplanes, MRI machines and iPhones.”
The location and age of the evidence clearly indicates that the A. afarensis species were the tool users, since no other hominin lived in this part of Africa at that time. These fossils provide the first direct evidence that this species used stone tools.
Lucy used tools
While working in the Afar Region of Ethiopia, Alemseged’s ‘Dikika Research Project’ team found fossilised bones bearing unambiguous evidence of stone tool use – cut marks inflicted while carving meat off the bone and percussion marks created while breaking the bones open to extract marrow. The bones date to roughly 3.4 million years ago.
“Most of the marks have features that indicate without doubt that they were inflicted by stone tools,” said Curtis Marean from the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University.
“The range of actions that created the marks includes cutting and scraping for the removal of flesh, and percussion on the femur for breaking it to access marrow.”
