Unlike most other animals, humans are skilled at creating tools.
Our apelike ancestors most likely used sticks to catch termites or crushed nuts six million years ago. Hominins started utilizing stone flakes about 3.3 million years ago, maybe to slice vegetation or carve flesh from dead animals.
And by 1.5 million years ago, they were employing more sophisticated tools made of bone, according to a recent study published in Nature, which dates the systematic use of bone tools to a million years earlier than archaeologists had previously imagined.
The research's lead archaeologist, Ignacio de la Torre of the Spanish National Research Council, said the finding made him question what more might be found. He remarked, "We might be missing a whole world of tools made by early humans."
Dr. de la Torre has been studying the earliest phases of human toolmaking in Tanzania, East Africa, for years. Before 1.8 million years ago, hominins would merely tear off a sharp-edged flake by knocking one rock against another. However, they went on to create a wide variety of stone tools.
One kind, called a hand ax, is a big stone with two sides that resembles a teardrop. Hominins also used bone to make scrapers and cleavers. These tools, referred to as Acheulean technology, imply that hominins developed the capacity to imagine the form of an intricate instrument and then shape a rock to make it a reality.
After discovering Acheulean stone tools on the ground in 2015, Dr. de la Torre and his associates started excavating a trench in a ravine called the T69 Complex. They hoped to discover more of them imbedded in the rock below, possibly with bones and other hints about the tools' use by hominins.
Indeed, they discovered millions of fossils of fish, crocodiles, and hippopotamuses—animals that formerly resided in a lake or pond some 1.5 million years ago. In addition to almost 10,000 stone tools, the researchers found cut marks on the hippo bones. They thought that Homo erectus, a tall, bipedal hominid, was responsible for the butchering, but they did not locate any fossils of the hominins that scavenged the carcasses.
Then, in 2018, the researchers discovered something unexpected in their trench. According to the current study, scientists discovered a hand ax that was fashioned from elephant bone rather than stone.
Hominins had to have discovered an elephant carcass and broken off one of its enormous limbs in order to make the hand ax. A piece of bone was then broken off, and they sharpened its edge.
Only a small number of bones have been discovered at other East African locations before this discovery. For instance, in 2020, scientists discovered a 1.4 million-year-old hand ax in Ethiopia that was fashioned from a hippo's femur.
Bone tools were so uncommon that it was difficult to determine their use in comparison to the thousands of stone tools that had been discovered.
"The fact that these humans were producing bone tools was completely unexpected," Dr. de la Torre stated. "It made us believe there might be more."
To find more bone tools—some from hippos and others from elephants—the researchers dug a much larger trench. After that, the researchers examined bits of bones they had previously discovered, which they had presumed were merely pieces that hominins had cracked open to consume the marrow within. They discovered, upon closer examination, that some of those bones were also tools.
Dr. de la Torre and his associates discovered 27 bone tools in all, some of which were up to 15 inches long. They weren't unique creations made by hominins once per 100,000 years: The fact that the scientists discovered every instrument in a single 20-inch-thick layer of sandstone suggests that they were all used over "dozens of years," he said.
According to James Clark, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge who was not involved in the study, "one of the genuinely exciting things about the paper is that there are so many of these things in the same site, and that is genuinely unusual." "They are obviously very comfortable working with bone, and they are obviously very familiar with doing it," he added of the local hominins.
Dr. de la Torre and his associates discovered 27 bone tools in all, some of which were up to 15 inches long. They weren't unique creations made by hominins once per 100,000 years: The fact that the scientists discovered every instrument in a single 20-inch-thick layer of sandstone suggests that they were all used over "dozens of years," he said.
According to James Clark, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge who was not involved in the study, "one of the genuinely exciting things about the paper is that there are so many of these things in the same site, and that is genuinely unusual." "They are obviously very comfortable working with bone, and they are obviously very familiar with doing it," he added of the local hominins.
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