With its powerful jaws and teeth, Paranthropus (shown in a composite photo illustration) was thought to have no need for stone tools to process food.Roman Uchytel/Prehistoric Fauna Studio
Posted on 02/12/2023 7:19:51 AM PST by SunkenCiv
...It's not the first time stone tools have been found with fossils of Paranthropus, a genus with several species that lived from about 2.8 million to 1.2 million years ago across Africa. In 1955, Louis and Mary Leakey discovered the Nutcracker Man, a skull with a robust jaw and teeth now classified as Paranthropus boisei, in the same 1.8-million-year-old layer of sediments as Oldowan tools. But Mary Leakey soon found a skull of Homo habilis (Latin for "handyman") in the same layer and thought that species, in our own genus, was a better fit as the principal toolmaker. Paranthropus, with its powerful jaws and teeth, was seen as not needing tools to process tough food...
...the 2011 discovery of crude stone tools dating to 3.3 million years ago at Lomekwi in northern Kenya threw a wrench in that neat view. The tools predated Homo and showed that an earlier hominin, perhaps Australopithecus afarensis, already knew how to make flakes, albeit less sophisticated than those of the Oldowan. Ever since, researchers have been eager to find fossils and tools dating to the roughly 700,000-year gap in the fossil record between 3.3 million years and 2.6 million years ago, says archaeologist Sonia Harmand of Stony Brook University, who reported the Lomekwi tools.
The new tools and molars from Nyayanga fall right in that gap. The ancient butchers left two hippo carcasses, many large-animal bones bearing cutmarks from tools, and 330 artifacts, including blades used to cut meat and plants. Plummer's team used multiple methods to date the site to about 2.8 million years ago, with a range of 2.58 million to 3.03 million years. "They've made a solid case with the evidence they have," says geologist Craig Feibel of Rutgers University, Piscataway.
(Excerpt) Read more at science.org ...
With its powerful jaws and teeth, Paranthropus (shown in a composite photo illustration) was thought to have no need for stone tools to process food.Roman Uchytel/Prehistoric Fauna Studio
A very primitive fly rod....
That primitive rod is so fly...
Genetic anomalies and or birth defects.
Non-human animals use tools. Gulls use sticks to pry oysters out of shell.
OTOHand, if something uses a tool to make another (generation) tool, that is something!
Is that Fetterman?
Given that crows can use tools, perhaps tools aren’t the best indicators of early human development.
Nonsense, he looks smarter than Fetterman...and he has hair.
The gulls around here use gravity to open bivalves. The crows will drop walnuts from power lines, repeatedly. I saw a couple that had gotten ahold of a golf ball. They were a bit puzzled.
Even birds have been shown to use tools. No surprise that monkeys use them.
“Gulls use sticks to pry oysters out of shell.”
Why is it just limited to man or close relatives. Many animals like sea otters still use stones to crack shellfish. Sometimes on the stomach while floating. And there are other animals that use tools like:
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/animals/g39714258/animals-using-tools/
Paranthropus was man, not a relative. He didn’t survive because he wasn’t as smart as sapien sapien who hid in the trees during the day when most of the dangerous animals were out hunting and he forged at night. Brains over brawn for sapien.
wy69
The ancient butchers left two hippo carcasses, many large-animal bones bearing cutmarks from tools, and 330 artifacts, including blades used to cut meat and plants. Plummer’s team used multiple methods to date the site to about 2.8 million years ago, with a range of 2.58 million to 3.03 million years.
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Keep firmly in mind that from 2.58 million years ago to 12,000 years ago, nothing happened.
I think “man” has risen an fallen many times on this planet.
agreed. and some of them left. and some stayed behind.
They had to be tough to take on hippos.
I had an ancestor that used a Dremel tool.
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