It’s not difficult to find some claim of controversial findings in anthropology or archeology. On any given day, there are a hundred “amazing discoveries” popping up on YouTube and crowding the few non-alien slots available on the History Channel. Many of these stories claim to have evidence that shows that “mainstream scientists” have it all wrong.
Even within the confines of juried scientific journals, it’s never difficult to find raging conflicts when it comes to theories that are based around one particular topic: Stone tools. Tools can tell a tremendous amount about a culture, but sometimes they say more about the culture of the scientists involved than any ancient peoples. Some of these controversial theories maintain levels of support for years, even when the “tools” involved are little more than rock fragments with scant evidence they were produced by anything other than purely accidental actions.
For example, the Pedra Furada site in Brazil is claimed to be the location of stone tools that would show the Americas were occupied at a much earlier date than is generally accepted. However, buying into this theory requires explaining why these early Americans crafted tools far cruder than those humans had been making for hundreds of thousands of years. Confronted by the theory that the broken stones at the site might have been created by capuchin monkeys (which do make stone tools) one researcher put it succinctly: “The Pedra Furada stuff is not even up to capuchin standards.”
However, there is one set of stone tools that are very clearly that—stone tools. That is, a set of implements made with a consistency of design and clarity of purpose that certainly indicates they were made by humans. Humans who had developed skills in working with various types of stone.
Or it would mean that … if there had been any humans to make them.
A study published in Nature in 2015 reported on a location called Lomekwi 3, in the northwest corner of Kenya. There a collection of stone artifacts were found “in situ,” meaning they had not been weathered out of the layer in which they had been buried. That allowed them to be dated with some accuracy.
The tools included stones that had been shaped to better fit the hand for pounding plants and nuts. There were also flakes of sharp stone that may have served as tools for cutting meat or hide and choppers for breaking open bones. The authors of the 2015 paper suggested that the creators of these tools had developed an “understanding of stone’s fracture properties” in order to create the shapes they needed, and there did seem to be recurring forms — the kind of thing anthropologists sometimes refer to as a “toolkit.” They even found stone “anvils” used by the people who had worked the stones at Lomekwi, as well as some of the flint cores from which sharp tools had been produced.
There was more to these tools than just their design. The stones also recorded some of the technique that had been employed, such as rotating the stone core and pounding or flaking it against the anvil from different angles to get the desired results. There was very good evidence these were not accidental forms.
Altogether, there were about two dozen well-preserved tools. Add in the cores, anvils, and bits of worked stone that hadn’t been completed, and the tally came to over 100. These tools appeared to be similar to another set of ancient tools, now found at several sites, that is known as “Oldowan” from the first location at which tools of that design were discovered.
Then there was … that other thing. That thing that allowed these tools to not just crush some ancient rhino bones, but to take a fresh swing at human ego. Because not only are these tools older than modern humans, which date back to around 200,000 years ago, they are older than the genus Homo. Older by some half a million years. What really set the Lomekwi tools apart was they were 3.3 million years old.
That alone might not be a problem to the traditional way of thinking about the development of more advanced tools. In fact, some early speculation associated with these tools suggested they could be a signal that our good old early Homo ancestors breaking away from the rest of our hominin kin. We hadn’t found their bones yet, but we had found the evidence that they were around: complex tools.
If you haven’t looked lately, our subset of the tree of life has become rather bushy. The combination of DNA analysis and careful cladistics has suggested some relationships and reorderings that are sometimes confusing. For example, good old “handy man” Homo habilis, long a fixture of those “march of evolution” posters that suggest a straight line path from not-quite-a-chimp to very definitely us has been shuffled into a little side branch as an evolutionary second cousin rather than a great-great-grand human. There it hangs out with a member of the Australopithecus genus, which is, to put it mildly, a kitchen sink mess at the moment.
But hey, there’s still that long branch that carves off from the rest of the hominin clade somewhere around 4 million years ago. We may still be missing the remains and the name of the ur-Homo that would fill in that first member of our home team, but all those tools could be made by folks that would would one day lead to folks like us.
So all remained well … until enough evidence piled up that things may be more complicated than we want to believe.
Earlier this month, an article in Science looked at some of the sites with the oldest sets of Oldowan tools—tools that are actually nicer and far more widespread than those at Lomekwi. Tools that are seriously tools. Oldawan tools appear not just in Africa, but in the Middle East, in Europe, and in Asia. So of course our guys made these.
Plummer et al. report on an older fossil site from around 3 to 2.6 million years ago in Kenya, where Oldowan tools were not only present, but were also being used to process a variety of foods, including hippopotamus. Thus, it appears that these tools were widespread much earlier than previous estimates and were widely used for food processing. Which hominins were using these tools remains uncertain, but Paranthropus fossils occur at the site.
If you have a good set of letters to represent a thousand paleoanthropologists either gapping in horror or sputtering in rage, please insert it here. Because … Paranthropus? Paranthropus?
Check out that chart above. See how Paranthropus is way down at the bottom, several branches removed from anything that starts with Homo? See how it’s not even on the line that leads to Homo? This is not a new thing.
If there was any hominin on the chart that would have been everyone’s last guess to kickstart the manufacture of complex tools, it would have been Paranthropus. This is a species that’s always been seen at the guys who kind of started down the path toward us, then took a severe wrong turn. To quote their little plaque at the Smithsonian,
[Paranthropus] is characterized by a specialized skull with adaptations for heavy chewing. A strong sagittal crest on the midline of the top of the skull anchored the temporalis muscles (large chewing muscles) from the top and side of the braincase to the lower jaw, and thus moved the massive jaw up and down. The force was focused on the large cheek teeth (molars and premolars). Flaring cheekbones gave P. boisei a very wide and dish-shaped face, creating a larger opening for bigger jaw muscles to pass through and support massive cheek teeth four times the size of a modern human’s.
What’s Paranthropus nickname in the list of all those “upright man” and “handy man” hominins? This is “Nutcracker man.” It holds the record for the biggest, thickest teeth of any hominin. That big crest on top of its head and massive jaw muscles have always made it seem like a species that took a look at all the work needed to become human then decided gorilla would be simpler.
Discovering that Paranthropus invented the first toolset is like discovering that Ted Cruz is secretly a brain surgeon.
These guys couldn’t actually believe that Paranthropus invented these tools. Could they? I mean, couldn’t some member of club Homo just have been practicing some good old fashioned kin consumption and just left a few teeth and bones behind? Because everyone knows Homo habilis made Oldowan tools. It’s in all the books.
We argue that the earliest Oldowan was more widespread than previously known, used to process diverse foods including megafauna, and associated with Paranthropus from its onset.
Oh frack. They genuinely are saying that the first set of complex stone tools; the first scrapers used in butchering meat, the first blade used for cutting, the first chopper designed to split open large bones or work with wood, the first awls designed for boring holes into other materials, were made by Paranthropus?
Why would the guys with the best teeth in history and jaw muscles that could practically chew rocks be the first people to design tools that helped them cut up and process food. Most of all, how dare them be so, so … not us?
There actually are sites that seem to show these same Oldowan tools being used by H. habilis and other members of Team Human. but those are younger sites.
As this interview with the authors of the paper in New Scientist points out, “Paranthropus lived alongside other hominins, including Homo, for over a million years. However, it is generally thought that they have no living descendants.”
Is it possible that the very thing that made humans human, wasn’t invented by us at all? Even the authors of the paper are still open to the idea that the association of Paranthropus bones with the early Oldowan tools isn’t necessarily a smoking gun (or a signed scraper). Maybe these tools were made by someone else in the neighborhood. Things were really complex back there around 3 million years ago, with human ancestors going in a lot of directions. Maybe there was more exchange of ideas and culture, in its most basic form, than we have generally thought.
There are also arguments that, precisely because the Oldowan and even the Lomekwi are so clearly purpose-built tools, they can’t be the first tools. Chimpanzees make tools in the form of stripped sticks and pounding stones used to crack nuts, but there are clearly several generations of development between those tools and the ones found at Lomekwi. Who, or what, made the Lomekwi tools 3.3 million years ago. What about the many iterations that must have come before Lomekwi? Who really first eyed a stone and said to themselves. “Hmm, if we knock off a flake here, and another there...” ?
For paleoanthropologists, this is all very exciting. Honestly, it should be exciting for all of us. Tool making now looks like something that began very early, and it may have been spread across the whole hominin clade, rather than just being confined to our little branch.
If we did borrow the cornerstone of our whole culture from a relative now long extinct, a group of human relatives who passed into history without leaving behind any representative to speak for them, then … that’s our job. Let’s hear it for Nutcracker man. Maybe they didn’t have just big teeth, but a big heart. Maybe they also invented sharing.