Introducing the brain: half a brain; new erectus paper (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, March 06, 2020, 02:14 (1721 days ago) @ David Turell

Same find. Another article with a view:

https://cosmosmagazine.com/palaeontology/skulls-and-skills-varied-in-archaic-homo-erect...

The finds, published in Science Advances include two Homo erectus skulls at sites 6 kilometres apart, dating to 1.26 and 1.5-1.6 million years ago.

At both sites, archaeologists uncovered stone tools and artefacts close by, and in some cases encrusted with the same sediments the skulls were found in.

The surprise was that the stone tools weren’t just of a single type. Simple Oldowan artefacts as well as more sophisticated Acheulian hand axes were found.

That challenges the traditional view that different stone tools were made by different species, according to palaeoanthropologist Michael Rogers from Southern Connecticut State University, US, who specialises in stone tool analysis.

Oldowan tools – also known as Mode 1 tools – are made by smashing two rocks together to form a sharp flake.

“It’s the most basic kind of percussive technology you can imagine,” says Rogers, and has traditionally been associated with ‘handy man’ Homo habilis, a predecessor of Homo erectus.

Acheulian tools (Mode 2), on the other hand, are made by repeatedly chipping away at a rock to shape it into a hand axe, says Rogers.

The two Gona sites suggest that Homo erectus made both tool types concurrently and for several hundreds of thousands of years.

“The evidence suggests that we only have one species and yet we do have a diversity of stone tools, so that we can attribute that diversity to one species – Homo erectus,” says Rogers.

Archaeologist Mark Moore from the University of New England in Armidale, Australia, isn’t sure the distinction is so clear cut. The split between Acheulian and Oldowan is a “false dichotomy,” he says. A better approach, he suggests, would be to consider these tools as “two parts of the same technological continuum.”

Regardless of how they are classified, the mix of artifacts does indicate a flexibility in the technologies that Homo erectus employed while it was alive.

Comment: Archaeologists and paleontologists both equate tools and fossils to showing what the fossils created. Habilis did not tell Erectus what to do.