There is, at least at the beginning, no reason to infer that the cognitive skills of the archaic hominids differed significantly from those of today’s apes - which are, indeed, quite impressive. But no modern ape, even with intensive coaching, has been able to master the special skills involved in fracturing a piece of stone to obtain a flake with a cutting edge. Nonetheless, at about 2.5 Myr ago, well before we have any fossil evidence that any significant anatomical advance had been achieved, ancient hominids spontaneously began to manufacture stone tools, initially simply sharp-edged flakes knocked off one river cobble using another. With the introduction of such simple stone tools and the inauguration of what is known as the Palaeolithic period (the Old Stone Age), we witness the birth of the archaeological record, the direct material register of ancient human activity. The first archaeological sites are places on the landscape where ancient hominids butchered the remains of dead animals, the larger ones at least presumably scavenged rather than hunted. Indeed, it has been argued that early hominids were themselves favorite prey species of the many large carnivores that roamed the burgeoning African grasslands. Dismemberment of carcasses by hominids is attested to by cut-marks made by the stone tools on the animal bones, and we know that the tools were manufactured on site, from suitable stones carried in by forward-thinking homi-nids, because archaeologists have refitted entire cobbles from fragments of ‘foreign stone’ found among the remains. Largely because they fall within the period of early stone tool manufacture, several 2.5-2.0 Myr-old African hominid fossils have been described as belonging to ‘early Homo’, but in all likelihood the first stone tools were made by archaically proportioned hominids whose (poorly known) morphology does not warrant including them in our own genus. If so, we see here the beginning of a pattern that is repeated throughout the story of human evolution: new technologies tend not to be introduced by new types of hominid.
The first widely recognized species of Homo is H. habilis (‘handy man’), a form first described in the 1960s from Olduvai Gorge, and so-named because it was associated with crude stone tools of the eponymous Oldowan tradition. Almost half a century later this species has come to embrace a very motley assemblage of fossils indeed, none of them particularly advanced in aspect. The first hominid species to have a body size and structure essentially similar to our own is H. ergaster, most dramatically exemplified by the amazingly preserved 1.6-Myr-old Turkana Boy skeleton from northern Kenya. Other fossils from the same region that are assigned to this species range up to almost 2 Myr in age. The remains of an adolescent who would have topped 6 ft had he lived to adulthood, the Turkana Boy is our first definitive evidence of a hominid who was definitely emancipated from the woodlands and forest fringes that had sheltered his forebears. Yet his brain remained rather small, not much more than half the size of ours today, and his face was still quite large and protruding. What is more, the earliest H. ergaster continued to make Oldowan stone tools similar to those their predecessors had been manufacturing for million years. Some change in lifestyle is perhaps implied by the fact that soon after H. ergaster appeared on the scene homi-nids spread out of Africa for the first time, although findings in such Eurasian localities as the 1.8-Myr-old site of Dmanisi in the Caucasus show that this expansion was not propelled by larger brains or by better stoneworking technology. Still, it set another repetitive pattern, this time of the spread of repeated waves of new kinds of hominid out of Africa.
At about 1.5 Myr ago, a new kind of tool finally showed up in the African record. This is the ‘Acheulean handax’, a much larger implement consciously fashioned with multiple hammer-blows to a regular shape, most commonly that of a teardrop. Here we have a tool that was made to a ‘mental template’ held in the mind of the toolmaker, who was doing more than seeking just a cutting edge. But while it seems that we are indirectly glimpsing a cognitive advance here, it is impossible to know what its correlates were in the wider aspects of behavior. The handax-making tradition seems to have been confined to Africa for a long time, during which a new kind of hominid emerged there, this one with a brain approaching three-quarters of the modern size. Known as H. heidelbergensis (because it was first discovered in Germany), this species appeared in Africa at about 600 thousand years (kyr) ago - in association with remarkably crude tools - and spread rapidly throughout the Old World. Hominids of this kind may have been the makers of the first artificial shelters, constructed at Terra Amata in France some 400 000 years ago. This site also has indications of the domestication of fire in hearths, something that only subsequently became a regular feature of hominid life (although a recent report from Israel dates hearths back to 790 kyr). Still, we have to wait until after 300 kyr ago to find the next important innovation in stone tool-making, again in Africa. This was the ‘prepared-core’ technique, whereby a stone ‘core’ was elaborately shaped until a single blow would detach a more or less finished tool.
World History
