(ORDO NEWS) — More than 1.2 million years ago, an unknown group of human relatives created sharp volcanic glass hand axes in a “stone tool workshop” in what is now Ethiopia, a new study says.
This discovery suggests that ancient human relatives regularly and methodically made stone artifacts more than half a million years earlier than the previous record, which dates back about 500,000 years ago and refers to finds in France and England.
A recently analyzed hoard of obsidian tools may be the oldest stone tool workshop run by hominins.
In a new study, scientists studied a cluster of objects known as Melka Kuntur located in the upper Awash Valley in Ethiopia.
The most famous early hominin fossils have been found in the Awash Valley, such as the famous ancient relative of mankind, nicknamed “Lucy”.
The scientists focused on 575 obsidian artifacts at a site known as Simbiro III in Melka Kuntura. These ancient tools were found in a layer of sand called Level C, which is over 1.2 million years old, according to fossil and geological evidence.
These obsidian artifacts included more than 30 hand axes, or teardrop-shaped stone tools, with an average length of about 11.5 cm and a weight of 0.3 kg. Ancient humans and other hominins may have used them for felling, scraping, butchering and digging.
Obsidian was found to be much rarer in Simbiro III before and after level C, and scarce elsewhere in Melk Kuntur.
The new excavations have also shown that there were seasonal floods at level C and a shallow river probably accumulated obsidian stones at this site during level C. The obsidian axes from this level were much more regular in shape and size, indicating mastery of the technique.
Ancient hominins “are very often depicted as barely surviving, struggling with a hostile and changing environment.
We prove that they were intelligent people who did not miss the opportunity to use any resource they discovered,” the scientists write.
This near-exclusive use of obsidian at Simbiro III level C is unusual for the Early Stone Age, which lasted from about 3.3 million to 300,000 years ago, the researchers say.
Obsidian tools can have unusually sharp cutting edges, but volcanic glass is brittle and difficult to work without breaking.
According to them, obsidian was generally only widely used to make stone tools from the Middle Stone Age, which lasted from about 300,000 to 50,000 years ago.
“The idea that the ancient hominins of this era valued and specifically used obsidian as a material is of great interest,” says John Hawkes, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Obsidian is widely recognized as unique among natural materials for flaking pointed tools; it is also highly distinctive in appearance. Some historical cultures have used obsidian and traded it over distances of hundreds of kilometers.”
Perhaps such trade was conducted in more distant times than is commonly believed.
“Since the 1970s, there has been evidence that obsidian could have been transported long distances as early as 1.4 million years ago,” Hawks said.
“This evidence has not been confirmed by later excavations, but the new report by Mussi and colleagues could be a step in that direction.”
It remains unclear which hominin could have created these artifacts. Previously, at other sites in Melka Kuntur, researchers found hominin remains about 1.66 million years old that could be Homo erectus and fossils about 1 million years old that could be Homo heidelbergensis, Moussi says.
H. erectus is the oldest known early human, with body proportions similar to modern humans, while H. heidelbergensis may have been a common ancestor of both modern humans and Neanderthals, according to the Smithsonian Institution.
Since Level C at Simbiro III is more than 1.2 million years old, the hominins who made the obsidian hand axes there may have been closer in nature to H. erectus, Moussy believes.
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