A Prehistoric Tool Discovery May Have Just Rewritten Human History

By Mirjam Guesgen
February 8, 2024, 12:23pm



Somewhere between 50-40,000 years ago, anatomically modern humans overtook Neanderthals and other archaic humans, spreading out all over Eurasia.

That shift has mostly been attributed to a dramatic and sudden “revolution” called the Middle-Upper Paleolithic cultural transition, where modern humans improved their tool-making, found new and different sources of food, took to the seas, and expressed themselves through ornaments and cave art. Now, a study published Wednesday in Nature Communications has challenged this narrative, instead implying that this “revolution” was more of a gradual and complex process.

Researchers came to this conclusion by analyzing how productive ancient humans were when it came to turning rocks into tools during a 50,000-year span between the Late Middle Paleolithic (69,000 years ago), through the Upper Paleolithic, to the Epipaleolithic period (15,000 years ago). The tools came from five sites across the western Hisma Basin in southern Jordan.

Specifically, researchers quantified the ratio between the length of a particular stone tool’s cutting edge with the mass of the stone as a whole. The more cutting-edge length per mass of stone, the more efficiently early humans used the raw stone material. “Stone raw material, like flint, is not everywhere. It needs to be procured from certain sources,” the study’s lead author, Seiji Kadowaki from Nagoya University in Japan, told Motherboard in an email. “So, more economical consumption of stone raw material reduces the cost for the procurement of raw material.”

More:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/a-prehistoric-tool-discovery-may-have-just-rewritten-human-history/