The tool at left is a hand axe.Explore some examples of Early Stone Age tools. Acheulean refers to an archaeological industry of stone tool manufacture characterized by distinctive oval and pear-shaped hand-axes associated with early humans.Assortment of Early and Middle Stone Age tools found in the Olorgesailie Basin, Kenya. Stone tools including chopping tools, hand-axes, picks and spheroids, from the Acheulean industry. However, when the discovery of 3.3 million year old stone tools and cut marks on fossilized animal bone remains, found in Dikika, Ethiopia in 2010, was made Shannon McPherron and her team mentioned, our discovery extends by approximately 800,000 years the antiquity of stone tools and stone-tool assisted consumption of ungulates by hominins.They were shaped like a tear drop, with a rounded end and a pointed eye. Tools Early man used stone in its basic form to.The oldest innovations were axes designed to be held in the palm of the hand. But since necessity is the mother of all inventions, they invented things that made living better. It is produced from either a small blade (microblade) or a larger blade.
Rick Potts, director of the National Museum of Natural History’s Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian. A chemical analysis of the stone shows it was made with locally available rocks.“I think of the hand axes as the Swiss army knife of the Stone Age,” says paleoanthropologist Rick Potts, director of the Human Origins program at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History and one of the lead scientists in a new study by a team of international scientists.The researchers also found that the next technological revolution, marking the beginning of the Middle Stone Age happened tens of thousands of years earlier than previously thought.And the researchers think that long periods of stress from repeated earthquakes and cycles of drought and heavy rains may have pushed these early humans to partner up with neighboring communities to come up with ways to cope. This early Stone Age hand axe was excavated at Olorgesailie, Kenya. And they look as if they were great at chopping down branches — or chopping up the carcass of a large animal. Potts says the ancient humans of that time likely scavenged dead animals, as their heavy, clunky hand axes wouldn’t have served well for hunting big game. The carcasses probably belonged to large animals like the giant (now extinct) ancestors of hippos, elephants and wild pigs that roamed the grasslands back then. This is the earliest evidence of the extraction and use of pigments among ancient humans.In addition to branch- and carcass-chopping, the axes were likely used to dig for water to drink or tubers to eat. In this Olorgesailie Basin excavation site, red ocher pigments were found with Middle Stone Age artifacts. The oldest stone tools discovered there are characteristic of what’s called the Acheulian culture of the Early Stone Age and consisted mostly of the hand axes. Stone Tools Made By Early Man Series Of StoneThe scientists report their findings in three new studies published Thursday in the journal Science.“In Olorgesailie, you have the only record of the last million years in Africa,” says Marta Mirazon Lahr, a paleoanthropologist who wasn’t involved in the new study. These tools were designed for specific purposes — some were used as blades, some as scrapers or spear heads. The scientists found numerous smaller, flatter, sharper stone tools.“We see a smaller technology, a more diverse series of stone tools,” says Potts. They remained unchanged for several hundred thousand years.Nevertheless, these hand axes served the ancient humans well for several hundred thousand years — from 1.2 million years ago to 500,000 years ago — and the technology remained largely unchanged during the time.But around 320,000 years ago, the ancient humans seem to have switched to an entirely new technology. “They might have been thrown but not very accurately.” The hand axe was a multipurpose tool used by our ancestors for chopping up branches and carcasses as well as digging for tubers. And in addition, they are made with much finer grained material,” which allowed them to allowed them to better control shapes and sizes of the stone tools.“We see the ability to produce small triangular points, that look like they were projectile points,” says Potts. “The flakes are being much more carefully prepared for a particular purpose,” says Alison Brooks, an anthropologist at George Washington University and an author of the three studies.“They are fairly small in size, compared to the technology of earlier people. Scientists think this is evidence of a larger social network of groups of ancient people who stayed in touch and exchanged obsidian and other resources.The diversity of stone tools from the Middle Stone Age suggest advanced thinking and planning. “They have stone tools that are small, that are prepared and retouched, that are made with technique thought to come hundreds of thousands of years later.” Obsidian rock found at Olorgesailie was originally brought by the ancient humans from distant places, some as far away as 50 miles from the site. It is the full-blown Middle Stone Age,” Lahr says. They have strategies to maintain these contacts — either by encouraging their children to marry into these other groups, or they take trips to visit the groups, to maintain ties by giving gifts. There is evidence that the rock was drilled to extract its red pigment.There’s that same kind of exchange today, says Brooks, referring to hunter gatherer groups like the Hadza people of northern Tanzania.“They deliberately maintain distant contacts with people in these other groups,” she says. Red rock found on the site. “It changed the shape of the landscape.” This was accompanied by repeated cycles of droughts and extremely high rainfall for a few hundred thousand years.“And it is precisely during those time periods that we expect to see hunting and gathering people to move further distances,” says Potts, “and to begin to nurture relationships with groups beyond their own group.”It is no different than what humans all over the world do today, he adds. “They don’t have any other way of saving for a rainy day.”And as she and her colleagues show, the beginning of the Middle Stone Age in Kenya was preceded by a long and tumultuous phase in the region.“Things were going haywire, in terms of the development of geological faults, earthquake activity that moved the low places high and the high places low,” says Potts. “So the networks are like money in the bank, or wheat in your silo or cows in your barn,” says Brooks. The archaeological records from the Middle Stone Age at Olorgesailie reveal “the roots of that kind of migration,” he says.
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