Ancient mountains of axes show that early humans made tools out of bones

Unlike most other species, humans have the tricks to make tools.

Six million years ago, our Apelike ancestors probably crushed nuts on rocks and caught termites with sticks. About 3.3 million years ago, humanity began to use stone flakes. Perhaps they cut meat from the corpse or chopped plants.

And by 1.5 million years ago, they used more refined tools made of bone, but a new study published in Nature dates millions of years ago the systematic use of bone tools, one million years ago than archaeologists previously thought.

Ignacio de la Torre, an archaeologist with the Spanish National Research Council, said the findings led the study but made them wonder what would be discovered. “We may be missing out on the whole world of tools created by early humans,” he said.

Dr. de la Torre has spent years exploring Tanzania, East Africa, to investigate the early stages of human tool making. 1.8 million years ago, 18 million years ago, Hymonin simply made one rock against another, splitting sharp flakes. However, after that point they made various stone tools.

One type known as a hand ax is a large tear-shaped stone with double-sided edges. Humanity also made clefts and scrapers from the bones. These tools, known as Acheulean Technology, suggest that Hominins conceptualizes the shape of a complex tool, and has acquired the ability to carve rocks and make them exist.

In 2015, Dr. De La Torre and his colleagues began digging trenches in Gully, known as the T69 complex. They wanted to find more embedded in the rock below, perhaps along with bones and other clues, how many of them use those tools.

They certainly discovered thousands of fossils of animals, crocodiles and fish that lived in ponds and lakes about 1.5 million years ago. Researchers have discovered cut marks on hippo bones and more than 10,000 stone tools. They could not find any human fossils that had cleaned the animals, but judging from similar locations nearby, they were responsible for the body, Homoerectus (tall, bipedal hominins).

Then, in 2018, scientists unearthed surprises in their trench. As explained in a new study, they found a hand shaft made from elephant bones rather than stones.

To create a hand ax, you must have found the body of an elephant and broke one of its huge limbs. After that, after breaking the bone fragments, they gave it a sharp cutting edge.

Prior to this discovery, researchers had only discovered a few bones at other sites in East Africa. For example, in 2020, researchers reported that they found a hand ax in Ethiopia, 1.4 million years ago, made from the femur of a hippo.

Compared to the thousands of stone tools discovered, bone tools were extremely rare, making it difficult to know what to make of them.

“We had no expectation that these humans were making bone tools,” Dr. de la Torre said. “I've come to think there might be other people there.”

So the researchers dig far larger grooves and found bone tools from elephants and hippos. The researchers then looked back at previously excavated bone fragments. A thorough examination revealed that some of those ruins were tools.

In total, Dr. Della Torre and his colleagues found 27 bone tools, 15 inches long. They were not unusual by Hymonin, created once every 100,000 years. Scientists have discovered all the tools in the same 20-inch thick sandstone layer, suggesting that they are all used in “decades.”

“One of the really exciting things about this paper is that there are so many of these things on the same site, and that's really unusual,” said James Clark, an archaeologist at Cambridge University, who was not involved in the research. The human race that lives there said “evidently are very comfortable with bones, and they are clearly very familiar with doing it.”

They also seemed to plan how to use them in advance. Eight tools came from elephant bones, but researchers found no traces of elephant corpses. Dr. de la Torre said it is likely that humanity has made elephant bone tools somewhere else.

He speculated that the brains of humanity of this era are already so refined that they can do more than simply lie on the rocks with images of specific tools. They went to the extra length, got the bones and turned them into tools.

Dr. de la Torre said it is likely that other bone tools are waiting for archaeologists from other ancient sites in Africa.

“Maybe we archaeologists aren't looking hard enough with our right eye,” he said.