The First Tools

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Africa, 3 million years ago, and our distant ancestors have just discovered an ingenious

solution to their limitations. They may not be as fast as the cheetah, as powerful as the hippopotamus, as agile as the antelope. But from now on, bit by bit, by bit, this imbalance of power in the ancient African landscape will slowly start to shift.

“At some point, one of these hominins picks up a stone, weathered and unremarkable.”

Then they smash it against another rock, they modify it, giving them a sharper object, a tool to forage wild plants, to craft wood, to slice flesh from bone, to reach the marrow hidden within. No longer is this the world as it is. This is changing it, and in that long lost moment, something novel is born.

The first technology. So what do we know about the people who made these earliest tools, and how big a leap in our evolutionary story really was this moment? Welcome to the ancients. I'm Tristan Hughes your host, and today we are traveling back millions of years to the very

infancy of technology itself, on earthing the origins of this prehistoric industrial revolution that would alter the course of human history forever. Our guest today is Dr. Emma Feinstein, associate curator of human origins at Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Emma, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast.

Thanks. I'm really glad to be here.

“And to talk about the earliest tools, Emma, I feel it's important stating right at the”

beginning. This is the story that takes us long before our species, Homer Sapiens, long before Neann's tools, too.

This is the story that takes us back over a million years.

It's incredibly. Yeah, it's actually over several million years, so yeah, tools are a broad thing. It's not just humans. And talking about a broad term, I mean, the word tool, what do we mean, how do we classify a tool?

Yeah, that's a good question, and you might not find the answer particularly helpful because it's also very broad. So a tool is really any object that's used to obtain an outcome or a function. It doesn't even have to be modified. So by this definition of a tool, many, many animals use tools.

It's not just humans, it's an object that helps us to obtain an outcome. So that includes things that birds do. I mean, if you're listening, you might think even your dog is maybe using tools sometimes, but what makes human tool use unique is that we take it beyond that initial definition. And taking it beyond that initial definition is that when we're talking about deliberate

modification of an object, like a stone for a particular function. That is part of it. But other animals actually do that as well. The longer we've studied tools, the more and more messy it gets and trying to figure out what is distinctly human about the ways that we use tools.

So what we do is we don't just use an object for an outcome, but we modify the object

However, there are other animals that do that too, including other primates.

What humans really do with tools, though, is that we have cumulative culture. So we modify our tools and they are passed from generation to generation. There's a lot of debate about when this begins, but the scale at which we use tools and the way that we've really begun to use tools to solve adaptive problems and rely on tools for our survival is beyond the scope of any other animal.

“So my next question was going to be like, well, how far back then can we go?”

We've won the earliest tools were made, but from what you're saying there, Emma, because it's such a broad term and depending how we're reviewing this, I mean, that could take us back even more millions of years. If we're thinking actually, if it's just a natural object that was just used and we just don't know the evidence is in there from the surviving archaeological record.

The way that a lot of non-human primates tool used works is that, for example, chimpanzees will use sticks for termite fishing. So they'll modify a stick and then they'll stick it in a termite mound and they'll eat the termites, so they're modifying an object to eat termites. A stick isn't going to fossilize, so when we're dealing with the archaeological record,

we can only begin to see tool use once we start to see modified rocks. So we base our understanding of human tool use in an evolutionary context. We base it off of when we see modified rocks, because those are preserved, they don't disintegrate.

“But I think most archaeologists would agree that all of our lineage even before modified”

rocks enter the archaeological record, we're using tools in one way or another. OK, I think I'll still try and make sure that the producer calls this episode the first tool is rather than the first modified rocks, because it's not quite the same. But we will be focusing on those, there's earliest modified rocks, so how far back are we going with these earliest, finally, earliest, and what if I could call them stone tools, that

might be easier. OK, let's do it.

Yeah, so the earliest stone tools are found 3.3 million years ago in West Turkana Kenya

at a site called Lemekwe3, and then those tools, which are called the Lemekwean industry, disappear from the archaeological record, and then at around 2.9, we see the next industry, which is called the older one, which is the industry that I study. It's the first widespread and persistent tool industry, so rather than appearing in one place at one time, it spreads all across Africa and out of Africa, and it evolves and

persists for over a million years in time. So 3.3 is the earliest stone tools, and then 2.9 is when we get a record that becomes continuous. OK, so Lemekwe's almost has the gold medal for the oldest, but as you're saying, in regards to the significance in regards to the amount of archaeological discoveries made, this other

technology slightly later, a few hundred thousand years later, the older one, it becomes more widespread. I don't want to use the word more important, but I guess more prominent in the surviving archaeological record. Yes, and we know a lot more about it, because there's so many sites.

It's practiced by more hominens.

“It shows up more places, so we're able to learn more from it, but also I think you could”

make the argument that it is more important to the hominens at that stage, because they're all practicing it in different places through time. However, I will say that the Lemekween, we weren't even looking for tools 3.3 million years ago, until these were discovered in 2016. So right now, it's localized to Western Khan Academy, but I do suspect that that could

change, and perhaps the Lemekween's a little bit more widespread and persistent than what we currently understand. Gosh, OK, and before we're kind of exploring the key differences between the two. However, you've mentioned dates, so over 3 million years ago from Lemekween, almost 3

million years for Olderland, I've got to ask about the dating first of how can you and

your colleagues, how can you date these two? Yeah, that's a good question, and it's own specialty, so we have geologists who specialize in dating sites that come to our sites and help us to figure out how old they are. For a lot of the Olderland sites and the Lemekween sites, they're able to date, because there's a lot of volcanic activity in the past in those regions, and the volcanic ash,

you can actually date because there's parts in the volcanic ash that decayed and known rate, and they're able to measure how long ago it was that the volcanic ash erupted and then settled on the landscape. So when you find an archaeological assemblage, whether it's below or above a specific layer of volcanic ash, that constrains what time period you're dealing with.

And what sorts of landscapes should we be imagining where these tools have been discovered in, including, of course, the sites that you've been working on in Western Kenya? Yeah, that's a good question, so in the past, for example, at the site I work at, we have

Victoria, but Lake Victoria was not present at the time, the lake developed later, but there was a freshwater spring in the past that was nearby, so there would have been access to fresh water. A lot of sites obviously accumulate around places where there's access to water, and also access to stone material. So stones are often found in rivers, riverbed streams, and a lot of sites accumulate in

those places because you need those resources in order to make the tools. And then there also has to be food resources, and this can vary a lot from site to site. The site I work at is more wooded, and there's a stream along a channel with some woody cover. Other sites are more open and grassland dominated, but wherever it is, there has to be access to stones, access to food resources, and proximity to water generally. Something

interesting is that the 2.9 million year old old one site, which is where I work, isn't

near good quality stones, and our research has shown that they actually forged for stones over distances of over 10 kilometers. So it doesn't have to be right next to a high

“quality source of stone, but you need to be somewhere in the vicinity of able to access”

high quality stones to make tools, food resources, whether it's a plant or animal materials to eat, and then also generally having access to water, some form of shade is often important too. But that's really interesting there, because this seems to be another area where geology is really, really helpful. Whether it's with big stone age monuments from the last few thousands of years, like stone circles and so on, or back to like your

old-rand site 2.9 million years ago. By looking at the geology of the rocks, let's say

of these early tools, is figuring out the source. You know, whereabouts they were found, and then getting a sense of the distances involved of these early humans that use them, you know, almost 3 million years ago. Yeah, and to figure out where the stones were coming from, it was actually quite complicated, and it took years to survey all of the ancient river beds. We actually looked at the geochemistry of the different rock types, and then of the

tool assemblage. So we linked the artifacts to their sources from the geochemistry, so what types of trace elements are present in the rocks? What types of rocks are present in different

“ancient river systems? And that's how we were able to figure out where the rocks were coming from.”

So it's a good deal of geology. Well, let's now delve into Lemakorean versus older ones. So you have these two different types of technologies, very early technologies. Emma, can you describe both of them, and then explain how they differ? So with older one tools, you're able to produce sharp cutting edges by the most common technique they would use is they use both hands, and they would bash one rock against another, which sounds simple, but it's actually quite hard to do your

first time. You probably won't get a sharp cutting edge detached. You need to strike it at exactly

the right angle and in the right location in order for a sharp piece to pop off, that has, it's like a stone knife. It has a sharp cutting edge that actually is sharp enough in our experimental studies. We use it to butcher a variety of animals that like at a goat roast, sometimes we'll do experimental studies. We'll use flakes that we make to butcher goats that we were of course already eating, and to process different types of plant materials, even ones that are quite hard.

So these stone knives are really sharp. They're as sharp as the knives we have now, depending on

“the type of stone that you use, but some stones can produce really sharp knives. And you have to”

actually be careful when you're napping them to not cut yourself. So that is the old one generally is that there's two stones held in hand that you fracture, and then you get this sharp piece, which is called a flake. There's other ways to produce old-a-one tools, but that is the most common, and the two stones are the size that you can hold them in your hand. Now the lo mech win is also focused on producing stone knives, but the tools are much bigger, and the method for

producing them is different. The most common way that lo mech win tool makers seem to have produced tools is either by a type of percussion where they just have a stationary animal on the ground, and they have a core that they strike on the stationary animal, and a flake, the sharp cutting piece, pops off, so they're striking two rocks together, but they're not holding them in their hand. There's an animal stationary on the ground, or there's a type of percussion called

bipolar percussion where you place one rock between an animal, and then you smash the top of it, and so the impact coming from both sides, that's why it's called bipolar, will shatter off pieces that have sharp flakes. This is a technique also used sometimes in the old-a-one, but not as often, and it's also more similar to the technique that non-human primates

animal, and struck from above, it's a stone that is, and it produces these flakes that have sharp

cutting edges, which is, it seems like that is really what the tool makers are after, is the cutting tools, both for the lo mech win and the old-a-one, although they also sometimes pound food items using the cores and larger rocks. So can you argue that the leap from

“the mech queen to old-a-one? Can we say that it is then, but a technological leap forwards?”

How with the old-a-one, you don't have that amville, it's just two stones together to create those really, really sharp knives. Is it fair to say that there is a technological leap forwards, a development between these two early technologies?

Yeah, I would say that the old-a-one is another level of refinement, you could say,

because holding two stones in a hand and using what we call hand-held percussion to produce a flake, it gives you more control over the resulting flake. So you can standardize the size more easily, you can maximize the cutting edge to the mass of the flake, and with the lo mech win techniques, there's not as much control. And so part of this also might have to do with it takes more manual dexterity to do the hand-held percussion, and the lo mech win tool is it takes less manual dexterity.

“So I will say that if a technique works, you don't always need to reinvent the wheel,”

and so like how we see in the old-a-one, they still do by polar percussion, even though that uses less control, it produces sharp edges that can be used to cut things, so sometimes that's enough. Nah, not yet a flake for an end. Besuch the road kept in a leapness world in Freiburg, with a run-mails, or with a channel of course, you can take a look at all the years, and take our interactive exhibition with the elite tool, audio guide and a classic and

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We love delving into the nerdy details, and we're absolutely going to do that with the rocks themselves, because I've got to ask about these rocks that were used at the old-a-one size, including one you've been working at. Should we be imagining to very hard, I guess that

vodka, igneous stones, that they're using, or that always one of the stones harder than the other,

so they're using the hardest stone to kind of bash a little bit off of the one which they can make the tool from. I mean, do you know much about the stones themselves? Yes, and you're right to ask about, does one have to be harder than the other? The hammer stone, which is the one that is fracturing, that is percussing against the core, which is the rock that the flake comes from, has to be harder, because otherwise, it would

fracture, so the hammer stone needs to be very hard. Sometimes these are igneous rocks, but often it's also rocks that are like quartzite, or quartz, at the site I work at, they use both quartz, quartzite, but then also volcanic rocks like rylite, rylite is the main one in the region that I work. Different study areas have different types of rock. It's usually quartzite, quartz, rylite, basalt, it's a combination of different types of rock, and it doesn't necessarily

have to be volcanic, but it does have to be hard. What actually makes volcanic rocks sometimes better than rocks like quartz or quartzite is if there's finer grain sizes, then it fractures more predictably. Quartz and quartz have larger grains and more irregularities, so that makes the resulting flake sometimes more difficult to control, because the grains can cause fractures in ways that a finer grain like a volcanic material will fracture more smoothly and predictably, but what

really matters is the hardness and the durability, and so if quartz and quartzite are able to produce durable sharp edges, they'll still use those even if they don't fracture as predictably. And you see a lot of assemblages that use quartz, even though quartz is a very difficult material to flake and has often large grain sizes. Well this is the thing, they're not all going to be exactly the same in how they look, but they can still all serve an important function, it's that they don't

that they made one flake out of, and then they didn't try again, but I suspect that they try to

“flake most of the rocks that are available to them, and then they have preferences for some”

rocks over others, but any material will do. And do we find at these old-an sites? Do we find lots of hammerstones, lots of cores together in regards to the quantity when you do find run these sites? Is it notable just how many there are that survive in a small area? Hammerstones are actually fairly rare. You get less hammerstones. You also get less cores than the detached pieces,

but sometimes you can still get a good percentage of them. We have over 20 percent cores at the

Nayanga assemblage, which is the 2.9 million year old old-an site that I work at. The most common type are usually what we call angular fragments, which are pieces that flaked off, but unlike a flake, they aren't complete, and they don't preserve the elements that we look for on a flake. These are

“especially common if they're working materials like quartz that fracture less predictably,”

so actually most of what you get are what we call angular fragments, but most of our analysis focuses on the flakes and the cores, which usually still make up a decent portion of the assemblage. Like I said, cores are 20 percent of the assemblage that I studied the 2.9 million year old site, and we had a good number of flakes too. We had more flakes than we had cores, so you still get a good number of them. All right, so function. So what do we think, Emma? These people, whoever made

these tools, modified stones, what would they have used them for? What would they have used the flakes for? And I guess what would they have used the cores for? That's the question, and we do have a lot of evidence now that can answer it, but when we talked about different types of tools not fossilizing and how that limits our ability to understand what the tools were before stone tools. We have this problem with studying the materials that they would be eating, because a lot of the

materials that they were likely accessing with these tools wouldn't fossilize. Like the plants, potentially if they're woodworking, if they're processing fruits, those sorts of things, you're not going to find evidence of them in the archaeological record. What we do have is animal bones that bear the marks from flakes cutting into them. So we have cut marks on bones, and so that tells us that at least one of the functions of ancient tools, at least in the

oldo one industry, was accessing animals. We have a cut marked hippo at the actually we have two cut marks typos published from the site that I work at, so they were they were accessing even large animals, although these were likely scavenged and not hunted because it's so early in the oldo one industry. You also find lots of cut marks on antelope in the oldo one record, a variety of different mammals, you see cut marks. So we know from the cut marks that they are accessing meat and also

sometimes marrow, so they would break apart a bone to access marrow at the center. But the real unknown is how much of the oldo one is for things like plant processing or behaviors that aren't associated with butchery. And we might suspect that that actually was a huge function of the oldo one, because that's a big part of human diets. And when we're talking about millions of years ago,

it was likely the main part of diets for hominens when we're talking like 3.3 million years ago,

2.9. And one way we can get it understanding how much plant processing is happening is looking at it's called U-Swear, and we look at the edges of the stone tool to try to figure out what type of contact material the edge was working because the edge will chip in a different way, whether it's cutting into different types of plants or animals. And what we found at our sites

“is that plant processing was actually the majority of use. Animal processing was still important,”

but over 50% of the U-Swear signals plant processing. And also we found evidence of woodworking. So it's possible that they're using these stone knives to also shape wood, so it's like using a tool to make another tool, which is really interesting if you think about it because that's now a step removed from just directly accessing food. You're using a tool to make another tool.

Yeah, so almost kind of the Swiss Army knife equivalent of 3 million years ago.

And when you're talking about cutting plants, should we be thinking like foraging bushes or mushrooms or what should we be thinking? You swear can't tell you the exact type of food item

tubers, so think like potatoes, yams, those sorts of things. There's also evidence for

for processing things that are more like grasses or reeds. But I imagine it was a wide variety

“of foraging for different plant materials like how you brought up mushrooms. Certainly I think that”

that would be something that hominins would have eaten. It's just we're limited in the archaeological record to see exactly what the food items were that they were eating when they're not fossilizing. So it's kind of a guessing game. Fair enough. But is this of somewhere where experimental archaeology can help? At least when they say the function that people might think of straight away, which is the getting meat of the bone of an animal. Do we know how effective an old one,

there are a sharp old one to a flake would have been yet? Yeah. Well experimental studies are really

the way to get at these questions. And I'll add that the use where is experimental because they're they're experimentally processing different animal and plant materials and then using that to

“interpret the archaeological record. So experimental studies are really one of the only ways that”

you're going to fully understand these questions about old one use. And the flakes very efficiently can deflesha carcass. And I mentioned this earlier, but we we do that in the field all the time and we use the flakes for the experimental useware studies. It works the same as a knife. It takes more than one flake usually because the flakes dull. And this is what would have happened for the hominins too because they discarded flakes, which is why we find them associated with carcasses in the

archaeological record or else they'd only ever need to make one and they would carry it around with them for their whole life. And then we wouldn't have these assemblages of many, many stone tools. So it takes more than one flake to be able to like efficiently process an animal. But you can definitely do it with a handful of flakes, especially if it's a type of material that doesn't dull easily. I mentioned that they really prefer hard and durable material. And part of that is because

“you need to have the edge stay sharp for a decent amount of time because you'd just be”

discarding flakes and making new ones all the time if you were using a soft material. So I said anything worked before in terms of stone, but there's some stones that aren't going to be sharp enough and there's some stones that you're going to have to discard quickly. So having the right type of material will be a stone knife that can really efficiently process an animal. Emma, is the word weapon? Is that word banned? For when we're going this far back in time? I mean, has there been any thought

about these kind of stones being used as weapons? Or is that just something we just have no idea about? At least in the part of the old one record that I work in, we don't even ask that question. It's clear that the stone knives are useful for processing foods, but they are almost certainly scavenging the animals and they're coming across them on the landscape. Now, I'm talking about 2.9 as you move later, they do start to sometimes actively hunt and there's evidence based on

the location of where cut marks are in relation to other damage from animals like carnivores that they had primary access to carcasses. But we're not in the time period where we're imagining that they have spheres that they're taking the animal down with. So, I mean, it does eventually become a weapon. I wouldn't say that term is banned when thinking about the old one, but I at least see the flakes, not so much as weapons, but like a fork in life. Like, do we think of those

as weapons? It depends on the, depends on how that, that's in the part he's going, I guess. But anyways, moving on from that, we've been dancing around this next question, which I'm sure many of you listening are shouting at already. We've talked a lot about the rocks themselves. Emma, the big question is who? Who are the potential candidates that were making these tools

around 3 million years ago? Yes. Who is the question? And it's been a question for decades and

decades of research. The history of it is actually interesting, because the first old one stone tools were discovered at Old Divide Gorge in Tanzania in Bed One. And initially, they were attributed to a skull that was nearby. The skull is OH5, and it was called Zinjanthropus, nowadays peranthropus is the term we generally use for this group. It's nickname is the nutcracker man, because it had enormous teeth, like four times the size of our teeth today, and really robust

likely wasn't eating nuts, but that was an idea a while ago, because it had such heavy chewing

“musculature and such strong jaws. Now, initially Zinjanthropus was credited with the first old”

one tools, but it was only a year later that they discovered another hominin with a slightly larger brain and smaller teeth, and an associated partial hand that seemed to have dexterity, and this was then named Homo-Habolus, which you might have been familiar with. And that means handyman. So Homo-Habolus, the poor Zinjanthropus was the toolmaker for one year, and then Homo-Habolus was discovered as a better candidate for the old one tools, and since then there's been the assumption,

“which I think is still true that Homo-Habolus is the primary maker of old one tools. But there's”

always been a question mark about how much Zinjanthropus now renamed peranthropus, so I'll call it peranthropus

for now on. How much peranthropus could have also been making in using tools, because they overlap very heavily with the old one in space and time, the same way that Homo-Habolus does? First of all, I mean, peranthropus is such a fascinating species. I remember looking at the skulls that they have, and they've always got a crest in the middle of the head, really, really fascinating. But I guess the thing to highlight there straight away is obviously we are Homo-Sapiens.

So Homo-Habolus is on our line, I guess, but peranthropus is not.

Yes, thank you. I forgot to say that. Homo-Habolus is a member of Genus-Homo. It's the first species

in Genus-Homo, which is the Genus we belong to, and it's our ancestor, or our presumed ancestor. Peranthropus is an offshoot lineage that ends up going extinct, so it's like our extinct onsen uncles. It's not a direct ancestor to us, so that is another reason that Homo-Habolus being the first toolmaker made so much sense, because today we're the toolmakers, like that's who we are, and our lineage has been toolmakers undoubtedly, including Homo-Habolus. That is what we do.

But the question now is, is our lineage the only toolmaker, which is what many people believed

“for a long time, and I think recent evidence, though, has, especially the discovery of the”

Lomacquin, has made us have to say, "You know what, maybe our own lineage isn't the only makers of stone tools, and we have to start thinking of other scenarios." . We are now in the field of the world of rock-paper-scissors, and we are now in the field of the world of rock-paper-scissors, and we are now in the field of rock-paper-scissors. The world of rock-paper-scissors, we are now in the field of rock-paper-scissors, and now we are in the field of rock-paper-scissors, and now we are in the field of rock-paper-scissors, and now we are now in the field of rock-paper-scissors, and now we are in the field of rock-paper-scissors, and now we are in the field of rock-paper-scissors, and now we are in the field of rock-paper-scissors, and now we are in the field of rock-paper-scissors, and now we are in the field of rock-paper-scissors, and now we are in the field of rock-paper-scissors, and now we are in the field of rock-paper-scissors, and now we are in the field of rock-paper-scissors, and now we are in the field of rock-paper-scissors.

Well, let's continue the story then Emma, so if we go to the earlier Alduan and the Lometrean sites, who were the contenders at that time? Yeah, so beyond just the Homo versus Peranthropist for the Aldoan, when the Lometrean was discovered, this is 3.3 million years ago, Homo Habalus doesn't appear until 2.8.

A species true first appearance is usually longer ago than the first fossil we have, but half a million years is quite

a long time. It's a bit of a stretch to think that Homo would have been the makers of the Lometrean tools since they don't enter the fossil record until 500,000 years later. The Lometrean really shook up this idea that Genus Homo was the inventor of stone tools, and the most likely candidates for the Lometrean are hominins that we know from that time period that are members of the different Genus. We have Australopithecus Offerensis, which is known from the iconic fossil Lucy, if you're familiar with Lucy. It's a species of Australopithecusin that lived in the same time period as the Lometrean industry lived, and overlaps regionally where we find the Lometrean tools.

It's Kenyanthropus Platyops and Australopithecus Offerensis that are the hominins that make the most sense for the Lometrean if we're looking at which hominins are alive at the right place and the right time.

“The earliest evidence we have from modified rocks comes from species, not from our Genus. I guess that's it, actually it's not from our Genus, yes.”

Exactly, and whether or not they're on our lineage is unknown or at least debated, but the fact that they're not in Genus homo is the headline, because for a long time, homoableness is named for making and using tools, and making and using tools was part of the definition for us and the other members of Genus homo.

So having a tool maker, especially the very first tool maker that wouldn't be in Genus homo, is very different than what the assumption had been for a long time.

So what do you think this can tell us about these early human species that we still know very, very little about? I guess also about tool making, yes, this far back in time, is it a tool possible that we might find evidence of modified rocks that might come from other lineages, maybe more closely aligned with primates and so on going forward?

“Yeah, it's interesting you say that, because there's also been a lot of work published recently about nonhuman primate tool use, and it's a lot more similar to homo and tool use than we initially thought.”

There are primates that produce flakes that are nearly identical to the flakes that we find and the archaeological record, but the main differences they don't intentionally produce the flakes and they don't use the flakes. The flakes are just by products of other activities that they're doing that are more pounding focused, but actually these flakes even form archaeological records and they go back in time thousands of years.

So there's archaeological records for nonhuman primates now, so that really muddies the waters.

“However, I want to emphasize because I get this question a lot, I don't think that hominin archaeological accumulations could have been made by nonhuman primates because we don't just have the flakes.”

We also have the cut marks on the fossils that they were used for, which is something nonhuman primates don't do, they don't use the flakes for tasks and they also don't use them to process meat. And we also have evidence of tool transport from longer distances, which isn't something nonhuman primates does. So I don't think that this calls into question the earliest archaeological assemblages, but it certainly broadens our idea of who could be making modified stones. It's not just humans, it's not just hominins, it's a variety of primates.

But as you were saying that Emma and this thing is really, really important then the intentional creating of flakes to them be used as tools for various different tasks as you've highlighted from cutting meat to cutting plants and creating wooden objects as well, which imagine if they survived that being credible.

And as that still feels, you know, in the story of our human evolution, 7 million year old story, they're in thereabouts, but this is roughly 3 million years ago, this is a big kind of step forward.

This is a big cognitive leap that deliberate creating, you know, modification and creating of these tools for various purposes. Yeah, I think the intentionality is important and also the level of investment rather than just using tools opportunistically, which is what I would say nonhuman primates tend to do, where they're using a stone that is already nearby to crack open, say a night. What hominins start to do is they really ingrain tool use in the daily rhythms of their life and in the way that they're using their landscapes and foraging for both food resources and stone resources.

I mentioned how the hominins at the site I work at were foraging over 10 kilometers to get rocks and that's something that nonhuman primates don't do. If you think about it, that implies a level of investment and importance to tool use that it's beyond just picking up something nearby to achieve immediate solution. That they're really starting to rely on tool use and invest in tool use in the same way that they would invest in food resources. And this I think is where you get a shift from a nonhuman primate style of tool use to something that then becomes uniquely human.

So that happens because I think millions of years ago our ancestors started to really integrate tools into their way of life and their foraging strategies and they became eventually dependent on it. That's one thing that's different with us. We're dependent on technology for survival and other species aren't. Wow, there you go psychology of it and the ramifications down to present day when you think about it. Yeah, that it's the passing down of that archaic knowledge, you know, the can you imagine these groups teaching their young, you know, this is how you make one of these tools.

“When you get the stones from or we've gone to a new area, this is we need to find a new source of these stones and then, but it's that passing on of that technology that ensures for was it many, many thousands of years is it?”

It's the older one industry is over a million years.

Wow, okay, so good as those how many generations of these early humans across Africa, they continue knowing this technology and sharing it's our generations. Yeah, and they also take it out of Africa, so the earliest migrations out of Africa, they take the tools with them and there's older one tools found as far away as China even two million years ago. Wow, and so how long is the old one industry around for because if my memory serves me right, the next big stage it's the hand axe is the more complex tool.

So how long is it is the old one thriving until we then see it's almost dare I say replacement by other humans. Yeah, that's a good question and it's a complicated one as most questions about human origins are the next industry is the azulean which is as you're describing hand axes by faces.

It's where they're shaping cores rather than just concentrating on the flakes that appears potentially as early as two million years ago.

Definitely a lot of sites pop up by 1.7 million years ago. However, old one industry persists alongside the azulean in many places, so it isn't just like a replacement that happens at a particular point in time. You start to see asually in assemblages get more numerous around 1.7 and later, but you can still actually get old one industries, I mean really up until now. So I'm not even sure that there was a full extinction or replacement of the old one industry, but it becomes the less prominent industry by a 1.7.

It's amazing to think whether what we would see is very simple stone tool, the old one tool was for early humans for almost a million years, maybe the most important objects in their communities because of all the functions it had.

“Is there still so much more still to learn out in Africa at your site and elsewhere in Africa about these early as tools and what they can teach us about these early humans?”

Yeah, definitely, and I think the discovery of the low McQueen because it pushed back the origins of stone tool technology so much further in time than what we were currently thinking about. We've started to look in places that are older than what we normally would have looked at first on tools and you see ever since the discovery of the low McQueen.

And especially after Nyonga was published in 2023, there's just so many early old one sites that are getting published where it was only a handful of sites that were older than 2 million years old.

Just a few years ago, we now have a collection of sites that are 2.6 and older and even in the last six months, there was a 2.75 million year old old one site published. So I think it's only a matter of time, maybe before the old one gets pushed back even further. And part of that is just because we didn't think the old one went back further than 2.6 and we didn't think there was anything before it until relatively recently. So the field has to catch up in terms of funding and also leading field projects that are looking in earlier deposits because no one is going to look at it into deposits that are 3 million years old and tell there's some evidence that there would be tools there.

“So now everyone is starting to look more carefully in older deposits and I think that's going to just increase our sample and that will help us to understand the emergence of the old one and how it might relate to the low McQueen even more.”

Because my last question was going to be a side from pushing back the age, pushing back the dates even further. I mean, what other new information could actually be found out about these early people just from finding more and more of these very early tools, but it sounds like there are still many areas that can be learnt more about.

There are research groups that do probabilities based on the ages of sites that say that really we should be considering that the low McQueen and the old one might not represent an industry that went extinct and then a new industry that originated but they could be linked and if we find more sites that would fill that in and help us to understand whether the low McQueen was the precursor to the old one and a way that we can actually trace through time. Another big question will clearly what we talked about is who made the earliest stone tools that's a difficult question to answer but having a greater sample of both archaeological assemblages and also common in fossils.

It helps us to look at the overlap between hominins and tools and it increases the resolution, the more fossils and the more assemblages we find.

And in the last year I mentioned we have an early old one assemblage published that wasn't published before but we also have parenthrapes published in Ethiopia which is a region that we didn't know parenthrapes from before so it increases the range of parenthrapes and then adds parenthrapes as a question mark next to some assemblages from Ethiopia. So the fossil record is such a small portion, a snapshot of who was alive where and what assemblages were where at what place in time and the more we grow the number of fossils and the number of old one and the McQueen occurrences.

The more we can really start to understand the relationships of different hominins to tools. I think we'll wrap up there and love it to mention parenthrapes again. Any time we can give parenthrapes it's time in the sunlight that's good with me and it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I'm really glad that you invited me because I love that this podcast is about history and I like how the old one in the Blomacquian can be grouped in with human history because I really think that it is relevant to everything we do today is thinking about the origin of these technologies.

Where there you go, there was Dr. Emma Feinstein talking all the things the first tools how humans made that cognitive leap to modify rocks to modify stones some three million years ago in Africa.

I hope you enjoyed the episode. Thank you so much for listening. We love doing human evolution ones. They always seem so popular with you too, so don't worry. We'll be doing more around the story of ours distant distant distant ancestors. You love it. We love recording them. There is much more to come. In the meantime, if you've been enjoying the engines then please make sure that you're following the show on Spotify or wherever you get to your podcasts. That really helps us if you're doing us a big favor. If you'd also be kind enough to leave us a rating as well while we really appreciate that.

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