Accounts of early technology often begin with the genus Homo, but the timeline of tool use may not be strictly bound to it. In August 2010, a study published in Nature found that Australopithecus afarensis evidently used stone tools for consumption of animal tissues. The research project at Dikika, Ethiopia, was led by Zeresenay Alemseged, an Ethiopian paleoanthropologist at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. If it holds up, the finding could change estimates of when early hominins began using stones to process food.

The Times reported that the oldest confirmed stone tools are less than 2.6 million years old, perhaps only a little before the emergence of the genus Homo. The findings indicate that early hominins were using stone tools to butcher meat about 800,000 years earlier than previous evidence dates to. Shannon P. McPherron, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, was the lead author of the Nature paper. McPherron says the best estimate is 3.39 million years.

Intentionality and Distance

One reading is that the behaviour may have involved some planning. The nearest source of suitable rocks was about 6 kilometres away from where the bones were found. Even if the hominins simply used convenient rocks rather than making tools, that distance might suggest some forethought about where useful stone could be found.

Perhaps the origins of technology lie less in sudden leaps than in small, practical choices about everyday materials.

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