Early Humans Handed Down Toolmaking Tech
Baku, November 13 (AZERTAC). Early humans may not have needed to continuously reinvent the proverbial wheel. A newly discovered cache of stone tools representing 11,000 years of human habitation suggests that perhaps human innovations didn't flicker in and out of early human history as once suspected, driven into obscurity by external pressures such as climate change. Instead, researchers suggest, at least some ancient humans apparently managed to pass an innovative type of stone tool down to their descendants. Other researchers welcome the additional evidence of ancient technological know-how, but say that other sites show that such technologies do indeed appear and disappear across human prehistory.
The new find amounts to a few dozen slivers of stone, slightly curved on one edge, that are only a few centimeters long on average. But they are tens of thousands of years old, and the product of the longest and most complex known manufacturing process devised by early Homo sapiens. The stone slivers, which were excavated from the Pinnacle Point caves on South Africa's southern coast, are actually sharp miniature blades that would've been incorporated into arrows or other projectile weapons. Crafting the blades, the researchers argue, was a long, painstaking process that included using a primitive kiln to heat the stone, making it easier to shape. Only humans who'd evolved sophisticated thought could've been up to the task, the researchers say.
"When we find these complex-recipe technologies, that's a signal that people have complex cognition," says paleoanthropologist Curtis Marean of Arizona State University, Tempe, and one of the paper's authors.
The 11,000-year timespan of the blades shows that this know-how was handed down from older to younger toolmakers. It "indicates populations were large enough … and people were smart enough to transmit technology between the generations consistently, over a long period of time," Marean says.
Over the course of 6 years of excavations at Pinnacle Point, Marean and his colleagues excavated a massive layer of sediment rich with objects made by ancient humans. Among the recovered items were tiny, sharp-edged chips of stone carefully blunted on one edge. The blunt edge was likely glued into a groove along an arrow shaft or into a projectile for an atlatl, a device for hurling a spear or dart. These blunted miniblades show signs of heat treatment, which was in use at Pinnacle Point as early as 162,000 years ago, according to previous research by some authors of the new paper.
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