Stone Age Europeans may not have been the last to hear about those nifty gadgets called stone axes, after all. New research at two sites in southern Spain indicates that the people there were fashioning hand axes as early as 900,000 years ago, far earlier than previously believed.
Hand axes have sometimes been called the Swiss Army knives of the Stone Age world. They vary in shape and size, but most are at least roughly symmetrical, with one pointed and one rounded edge. Hand axes were very handy for butchering animals and cutting the stalks of tough plants [ScienceNOW Daily News]. Previously, archaeologists believed that the first Europeans lagged behind people living in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia in their tool-making capabilities. Axes dating back to 1.5 million years ago have been found in Africa, while the earliest axes found in Europe were thought to be no more than 500,000 years old.
The new study, published in Nature, suggests that vital information about tool-making traveled relatively quickly through the ancient world. The new time frame was determined through a process called paleomagnetic dating, which takes advantage of the fact that the Earth’s magnetic field has reversed itself often on geological timescales. By analyzing the polarity of magnetic minerals in rock, scientists can determine when the rock formed…. At each site, the researchers took samples at regular intervals above and below the level where hand axes were found. The last complete magnetic reversal was 780,000 years ago, and both sites dated back to about this time [The New York Times]. At the two sites, the analyses indicated that the tools were at least 760,000 and 900,000 years old, respectively.
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Image: Michael Walker
A Stone Age campsite on the coast of South Africa has revealed the earliest evidence of early humans who used fire to make better, sharper stone tools. Researchers had been surprised to find spear points and other stone implements made of silcrete, a crumbly rock that doesn’t respond well to the flaking, chipping process that early tool-makers employed. But lead researcher Kyle Brown noticed that many of the ancient blades bore the same glossy sheen as North American tools created from heat-treated stone. “It seemed like the most logical thing to do was take some of this poor quality material that we’ve been collecting and put it under a fire and see what happens,” he says [New Scientist].
Brown buried silcrete stones in a fire pit and kept a roaring fire going for up to 10 hours at a time. When the blaze eventually died down and the rocks had cooled, they looked different, with a new reddish sheen. They also had different physical properties. “The stone becomes harder and stiffer,” Brown says. “It basically becomes more brittle, which is great if you are breaking something [and] you want it to break more easily” [NPR News]. The flakes from the treated stones were also sharper than those created from untreated silcrete.
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A 35,000-year-old flute made of vulture bone found in a cave in southwestern Germany is the world’s oldest known musical instrument. The artifact suggests music may have been one advantage our ancestors had over their cousins, the now-extinct Neanderthals, according to a report published in the journal Nature.
The five-holed flute, which is fully intact and made from a griffon vulture’s radius bone, was discovered with fragments of other flutes crafted out of mammoth ivory. The bird-bone instrument was found in a region in which similar instruments have popped up lately, says lead author Nicholas Conard, but this flute is “by far the most complete of the musical instruments so far recovered from the caves.” … Until now the artifacts appeared to be too rare and not as precisely dated to support wider interpretations of the early rise of music [The New York Times]. To make sure the newly discovered instruments were dated correctly, samples were tested independently and using different methods at facilities in England and Germany. Both found the bone to be at least 35,000 years old, during the Modern Paleolithic era.
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It may sound like a paradox, but a new theory suggests that one of humanity’s most noble instincts, altruism, evolved on bloody battlefields in prehistoric times. Evolutionary biologist Samuel Bowles argues that prehistoric culture may have selected for individuals who behaved altruistically towards other individuals in their social groups. The story begins with the climactic swings that occurred between approximately 10,000 to 150,000 years ago in the late Pleistocene period may have pushed once-isolated bands of hunter-gatherers into more frequent contact with one another…. “I think that’s just a recipe for high-level conflict” [New Scientist], says Bowles.
These conflicts weren’t large-scale pitched battles, Bowles explains. “We’re talking about groups of men who got out in twos or threes or fives,” he says. “They didn’t have a chain of command and it’s hard to see how they could force people to fight.” For this reason, altruistic intent on the part of each warrior is key. Each person would do better to stay home than to put their life on the line for their neighbours – yet they still went out and risked their lives, Bowles says [New Scientist].
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Researchers have endowed lab mice with the human version of a gene involved in language, and while the mice didn’t exactly sit up and start reciting poetry about cheese, they did show some intriguing differences in both their vocal patterns and brain structure.
Mice have their own form of the gene, called FOXP2, but they and all other animals lack key changes found only in humans and our evolutionary cousins, Neanderthals. Some researchers speculate that these differences may help explain why humans are the only animal able to communicate with complex languages, and not simple grunts, barks or songs [New Scientist]. By tweaking the gene in mice and changing it to the human form, researchers hoped to get a clue as to how our early hominid ancestors were changed by the new form of the gene.
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A belligerent chimpanzee in a Swedish zoo that stockpiles projectiles to hurl at visitors may be the first definitive proof that some animals can plan far ahead, researchers say. For years a male chimp named Santino has collected stones and other potential missiles into caches around his enclosure, which he returns to hours later when he wants to attack visitors. Researchers say the behavior proves that Santino was planning for the future because he collected the stones in a calm state, prior to the zoo opening in the morning. The launching of the stones occurred hours later – during dominance displays to zoo visitors – with Santino in an “agitated” state [BBC News].
Lead researcher Mathias Osvath says the behavior reveals an advanced animal intelligence. “These observations convincingly show that our fellow apes do consider the future in a very complex way…. It implies that they have a highly developed consciousness, including lifelike mental simulations of potential events” [AP], he says.
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A particularly clever band of chimpanzees living in one area of the Congo basin have found a better way to fish for food in termite mounds. Zoologists have long known that chimps eager for a tasty termite snack use a short stick, which is thrust into the termites’ nest. The insects bite on the intruding probe and are then extracted and slurped down [AFP]. But chimps living in an area called the Goualougo Triangle in the Republic of Congo have been observed crafting more complex tools that increase their haul of insect morsels.
Instead of using a simple pointed stick, lead researcher Crickette Sanz says these chimps modify their tools by making a special brush tip. To make their rods, the chimps first picked some stems from the Marantaceae plant and plucked off the leaves. “They then pulled the herb stems through their teeth, which were partially closed, to make the brush and they also attended to the brush by sometimes pulling apart the fibres to make them better at gathering the termites,” Dr Sanz added [BBC News].
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Capuchin monkeys not only have the capacity to use tools, they also know which tool is best for the job at hand, according to a new study. Researchers observed capuchin monkeys in the wild testing out different stones and consistently settling on the heaviest, sturdiest stone to crack open palm nuts. Although anecdotal reports existed before, the new study is the first to systematically document tool use in capuchin monkeys. Because capuchins last shared a common ancestor with humans approximately 35 million years ago, the team writes, the capacity for stone-tool use evolved earlier than thought [New Scientist].
Researchers studied eight wild capuchins living in a forested area of Brazil. In several different trials, researchers planted two or three different rocks, of varying hardness, size, and weight, near where the monkeys were feeding. The choices ranged from crumbly sandstone to tough quartzite, with some artificial stones that the monkeys would not normally encounter also thrown in the mix. Capuchins chose the most effective stone for cracking nuts more than 90 percent of the time in four conditions. That figure fell slightly to 85 percent when the monkeys selected from artificial stones of the same size and different weights [Science News].
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