Human evolution: hominin bone & ,flint tools (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, August 15, 2020, 01:01 (1559 days ago) @ David Turell

Created by H. heidelbergenis in southern England, aged 480,000 years old:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/europes-earliest-bone-tools-hint-early-homini...

"Some 480,000 years ago, a group of 30 to 40 early hominins met at a rocky gravel pit in what is now southern England for a sumptuous feast. As detailed in a statement, the crowd—equipped with stone hammers and sharpened flint hand axes—gathered around the carcass of a large female horse and started breaking it down, stripping the creature of every ounce of flesh, harvesting its internal organs and even cracking its bones to suck out the fatty marrow.

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"Per the Conversation, the ancient hominins active at Boxgrove needed bone hammers to make flint blades, as well as other stone tools discovered at the site. Some of the butchered horse’s knee and leg bones bear signs of such use.

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“'Along with the careful butchery of the horse and the complex social interaction hinted at by the stone refitting patterns, it provides further evidence that early human population at Boxgrove were cognitively, social and culturally sophisticated,” she says in the statement.

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"Though the horse may have been hunted, researchers have yet to find any evidence confirming this theory, the archaeologist adds.

"The horse butchery site’s proximity to the shoreline may explain its extraordinary preservation, Pope tells BBC News. At low tide, the carcass was left exposed, but when the tide came in, it covered the remains in fine, powdery silt and clay, gently freezing the scene in time.

"Now, reports Paul Rincon for BBC News, archaeologists have identified the millennia-old bone tools crafted out of the horse’s remains as the oldest ever found in Europe. Excavations at Boxgrove, a Middle Pleistocene site in West Sussex, unearthed the instruments in the 1980s and ’90s.

“'These are some of the earliest non-stone tools found in the archaeological record of human evolution,” says Simon Parfitt, an archaeologist at UCL and co-author of the new book, in the statement. “They would have been essential for manufacturing the finely made flint knives found in the wider Boxgrove landscape.”

"Silvia Bello, a paleoanthropologist at the London Natural History Museum who conducted a detailed analysis of the bone artifacts, adds that the Boxgrove tools demonstrate H. heidelbergensis’ understanding of different materials’ properties.

“'Along with the careful butchery of the horse and the complex social interaction hinted at by the stone refitting patterns, it provides further evidence that early human population at Boxgrove were cognitively, social and culturally sophisticated,” she says in the statement.

The horse butchery site’s proximity to the shoreline may explain its extraordinary preservation, Pope tells BBC News. At low tide, the carcass was left exposed, but when the tide came in, it covered the remains in fine, powdery silt and clay, gently freezing the scene in time.

"In the statement, Pope says precise mapping of such a pristine site allows scholars “to get as close as we can to witnessing the minute-by-minute movement and behaviors of a single apparently tight-knit group of early humans: a community of people, young and old, working together in a co-operative and highly social way.'”

Comment: Hominins were social and certainly formed groups as hunter-gatherers. Amazing archaeological discovery.