Though very basic, it was a sign of hominin cognition learning to manipulate the materials around them for a practical purpose.

The stone tools discovered consisted of basic choppers, hammerstones, and deliberate flakes, used for slicing animal flesh. Their opinion was that these were the earliest signs of hominin culture ever to exist. Mary and Louis Leaky claimed these stones to be part of the Oldowan Complex of the Lower Palaeolithic. Australopithecus or Homo ? – 3.3 million years ago BC to 1.6 million years ago BC.Īs stated in Spencer Larson’s textbook, Our Origins-Discovering Physical Anthropology, the earliest stone tools that were discovered, in 1978 by paleoanthropologists Mary and Louis Leakey in the Olduvai gorge in East Africa, dated to the Early Pleistocene between 2.6 – 1.6 million years ago. Though it may be alarming that primates use stone and wood tools for hunting and foraging, it is still crude compared to the robust history and relationship that our hominin ancestors have with stone tools. The cognitive abilities in the primate cousins have shown the possibility that humans may not be the only ones who benefit from the use of stone and wooden tools. Chimpanzees also use sticks to mine for termites as well as craft crude spears to hunt other mammals hidden in trees, as mentioned by Campbell et al, “… Pruetz and Bertonali report that chimpanzees in Senegal probe with sticks into holes to capture trapped vertebrate prey”.Ĭhimp using stick as a tool to eat ants. Chimps use stones to dig holes to extract roots. Of the most interesting are the tools used by chimpanzees.Ĭhimpanzees use stones and wood to crack nuts. Campbell and her colleagues, tool use among monkeys and apes has been thoroughly observed. Did primates learn this from humans or was it the other way around? However, can one say that tool use is uniquely a human trait? After all, chimpanzees, as well as many other animal species, also use stone tools for foraging, hunting, and grooming. The moment our hominin ancestors created stone tools we became the shapers of our destiny. Stone tools were so essential that the practice continued well past the Neolithic age, especially in places like Mesoamerica until the late 17th century. The mastering of stone knapping techniques (the act of shaping stone tools) allowed humans to create a plethora of stone devices ranging from hunting weapons to farming tools. However, we often dismiss stone tools as simplistic primitive technology. The process of creating lithic tools took our hominin species millions of years to perfect.

Aurignacian tool industry