"When our team determined the age of the Nyayanga evidence, the perpetrator of the tools became a 'whodunit' in my mind," said paleoanthropologist and study co-author Rick Potts, director of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History's Human Origins Program. The term hominin refers to various species considered human or closely related. Perhaps not only Homo, but other kinds of hominins were processing food with Oldowan technology," said anthropologist Thomas Plummer of Queens College in New York City, lead author of the research published in the journal Science. "The association of these Nyayanga tools with Paranthropus may reopen the case as to who made the oldest Oldowan tools. Instead, two teeth - stout molars - of a genus called Paranthropus were discovered there, an indication this prehistoric cousin of ours may have been the maker. But no Homo fossils were found at Nyayanga. Scientists had long believed Oldowan tools were the purview of species belonging to the genus Homo, a grouping that includes our species and our closest relatives.
To put the age of these tools into perspective, our species Homo sapiens did not appear until roughly 300,000 years ago. Three tool types were found: hammerstones and stone cores to pound plants, bone and meat, and sharp-edged flakes to cut meat. The Nyayanga site artefacts represent the oldest-known examples of a type of stone technology, called the Oldowan toolkit, that was revolutionary, enabling our forerunners to process diverse foods and expand their menu. Which of our prehistoric relatives that were walking the African landscape at the time made them? The chief suspect, researchers said on Thursday in describing the findings, may be a surprise. Scientists have a mystery on their hands after the discovery of 330 stone tools about 2.9 million years old at a site in Kenya, along Lake Victoria's shores, that were used to butcher animals, including hippos, and pound plant material for food.
0 kommentar(er)
