In a study published on August 15 in the journal Science Advances, an international team of researchers brought to light traces of human activity old at least 2.6 million years, on the Nyayanga site in Kenya. The first manufacturers of tools of the Oldowayan tradition, of the lower Paleolithic, were not content to cut stones found at hand. They selected quality materials and transported them over 11 kilometers to transform them into tools.
This discovery repels the chronology of this behavior of at least half a million years compared to previous archaeological explorations and shows that hominids already had complex cognitive capacities, reports the US online media 404 Media. Long before the invention of modern logistics chains, our ancestors already had a long -term vision, an elaborate organization and a real culture of material.
“I have always thought that the first tool manufacturers should have more capacities than we sometimes attribute to them”says Emma Finestone, holder of the Chair Robert J. and Linnet E. Fritz on the origins of humanity at the Cleveland Natural History Museum (Ohio). It insists on the importance of seeing, so early in evolution, hominids capable of planning, of deferring the benefit of their efforts and of mentally mapping their territory.
Explore the territory to survive
Unlike most animals that use what they find on site, some human and related species had already broken with this scheme. They spotted, selected and transported private rocks (Quartz, Cherlet, Granite) for several kilometers through the savannah. This mode of action reflects a more thoughtful and cooperative approach than we imagined, each stage of the process – Collect, transport, transformation – being separated in time as in space.
In Nyayanga, the tools were used to prepare plants, but also to strip of large animals, such as hippopotamus. It is still unknown who were these tool manufacturers. Researchers evoke representatives of the genre Homobut do not exclude a missing cousin, Paranthropuswhose fossils were found on the spot. The latter was not until then considered a tool user. The enigma therefore remains complete, opening the way to new hypotheses on the transmission and acquisition of know-how among hominids.
These discoveries are not simple archaeological curiosities. They reveal that there were already 2.6 million years ago, the manufacture of tools exceeded simple opportunism to become a real survival strategy. Nyayanga hominids seem to have laid the basics of technology, the very one that will shape all human history.
The excavated tools highlight the deep dependence of humanity to technology: a constant that has continued to strengthen over time. Human is a technological being, using their creations to survive, explore, flourish and adapt, all cultures combined, since longer than we thought.