Consider the possibility that all human technology began with a mistake. At least the lack of hand-eye coordination. To pursue this idea, Lydia Lanz and Tomos Profitt of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, traveled to an abandoned oil palm plantation near Phang Nga Bay in Thailand to live there. I collected nutcrackers used by the military. Cercopithecus. The macaque puts the oil palm nut on a flat stone and hits the shell open with another stone. These monkeys often miss nuts and unintentionally crack stones to produce sharp flakes. and other now-extinct early hominin relatives may have been the first step in creating sharp-edged tools used for slaughtering animals and cutting edible plants. claims. In other words, they are a kind of tool for making our species more productive hunter-gatherers and technological tinkerers in the course of evolution.
Macaques are one of three modern non-human primate species that use stone tools (the other two being chimpanzees and capuchin monkeys). Luncz and Proffitt suggest that sharp flakes accidentally produced by activities such as nut-cracking may have deliberately created tool flakes for groups that include humans and their extinct ancestors and close relatives. I have been researching the idea. “This is completely rowdy behavior,” he says Profitt. “And it’s behavior to get food. In that sense, you could say that this could have been the mechanism for the emergence of flake technology.”
for their study published Friday scientific progressAn international team of researchers has collected more than 1,100 stone fragments used by Thai macaques to crack oil palm nuts, an archaeological discovery of the oldest known stone tool site in Tanzania, Kenya and Ethiopia. We compared it with our collection. Their analysis revealed some surprising facts. The flakes unintentionally produced by macaque monkeys closely resembled the earliest stone tools intentionally made by hominins, found at sites dating from 3.3 million to 1.5 million years ago. “If you dropped a herd of macaque monkeys somewhere in East Africa, everyone would definitely think they were created by early hominins,” says Luncz.
Luncz and Proffitt found similar results in stone flakes produced by capuchin monkeys in Brazil’s Serra da Capivara National Park. “What’s very interesting is that we found another primate that exhibits exactly the same phenomenon on the other side of the world,” he says. “It doesn’t take a huge brain to make a sharp cutting tool. The challenge is to use stone tools. I think that’s where the difference lies.” Or it becomes clear when you compare it with the tools on the Oldowan site. Monkeys have sharp teeth and don’t need cutting tools, Luncz said. However, ancient stone tools show evidence of their use for cutting operations.
As paleoanthropologist Thomas Plummer of the Queen’s College of the City University of New York puts it: profit team. Plummer is part of a research group studying fossil sites in Nyayanga, Kenya. Excavations at these sites, dating from 3 million years to 2.6 million years before him, have found Oldowan tools and two of his teeth from an extinct hominin. The researchers analyzed the tool’s usage wear patterns and found that some were used to beat and process plant foods. was seen. This indicates that it was used for cutting. Hippopotamus bone cuts and a type of fossilized cow reveal that hominins used stone tools to slaughter animals, revealing that sharp stone tools were not an unintended byproduct of other strenuous activities. became. However, these tools are not necessarily created by our ancestors.
A hominin tooth found with Oldowan tools at Nyayanga belonged to a member of the genus Paranthropuson a different branch of the human family tree than the one leading to clever personOldowan’s tool is Paranthropus At other sites, such as the Frida Leakey Korongo Zinj (FLK Zinj) site in Olduvai Valley, Tanzania, Paranthropus Fossils have been discovered. At the time, paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey argued that humans’ more direct relatives found nearby had slightly larger brains. handy man Must have made Oldwan’s tools. And he proposed the manufacture of stone tools as one of his criteria for distinguishing humans from other apes. However, evidence from sites such as Nyayanga is beginning to point to both. Paranthropus and H. Handy Be a tool maker. The macaque and capuchin assemblages also suggest that the use of stone tools may have begun much earlier in evolutionary history than previously thought. The last time humans shared a common ancestor were capuchin monkeys about 35 million years ago and macaques about 25 million years ago, he says. “I would be surprised if the use of stone tools was such a new development in the human lineage,” she says.
Luncz and Proffitt ultimately want to know how primates made the leap from accidentally producing sharp flakes to picking them up and using them. But for the time being, scientists can only speculate. Plummer suggests a scenario in which a group of hominins stumble upon an animal corpse and use stones to break its bones to reach the nutrient-rich bone marrow. stone used. The hominin then came up with the idea of using the flakes to cut meat from the corpse.
