Early humans were using stone hand axes as far back as 1.8 million years ago. Credit: Pierre-Jean Texier, National Center of Scientific Research, France
Study co-author, Craig Feibel, is among the team of researchers that returned in 2007 to West Turkana to put dates on hand axes excavated earlier. Credit: Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
GGG Ping!........
Interesting. A lot of the same crowd would say the opposite is true today — changes in climate, vegetation or animal life are caused by shifts in human biology and behavior.
Look closely at that bottom picture. You can see the martian rover’s shadow at the bottom!
They had more technology than we do now, there is just little left from the era before they put leftists in charge.
This was described in the amazing book by Bill Bryson, “A Short History of Nearly Everything” in 2003.
Apparently, an entire civilization in East Africa spent their lives shaping hand axes. They hauled rocks from miles away to their village, and spent their time shaping stone axes, for no any apparent reason. They did this for up to 1 million years before they disappeared.
And the hand axes never improved in quality - they were the same for all that time.
Their brains never evolved past that of a young child.
Very eerie. Can you imagine? One million years of this?
That book by Bill Bryson is one of the best books on history you will ever read. And you should have your children read it as well.
Obviously, they weren't walking the landscape; they were driving their SUVs on it to cause all that climate change.
On a more serious note, I wonder why it took humans so long to develop any form of written language. More than a million years between inventing tools and inventing writing seems like a huge lag time.
Simple, it would make their baggage overweight, incuring a steep fee.
Why don't New Guinea headhunters use chainsaws.
They are just as Homo Sapiens Sapiens as we are.
And those tools have been due back at Grunk’s Tool Rental all these years. The late fees will be a bitch!
I have a billion year old nut cracker. It looks just like a rock, but I’m sure it was used to smash things and is quite valuable. If anyone wants to buy it, give me a bump. Isn’t one of the precepts of evolution that infinite variation is seen but only the fittest survive? Why is this not just one of an infinite variety of shapes of rocks that we should expect to see? Why is this rock intelligent but a leaf is not.
Image: JOHN GURCHE PORTRAIT OF A PIONEER With a brain half the size of a modern one and a brow reminiscent of Homo habilis, this hominid is one of the most primitive members of our genus on record. Paleoartist John Gurche reconstructed this 1.75-million-year-old explorer from a nearly complete teenage H. erectus skull and associated mandible found in Dmanisi in the Republic of Georgia. The background figures derive from two partial crania recovered at the site.
No, but humans today are sure good with shovels.