Early pre-hmans (Evolution)

by David Turell , Friday, February 10, 2023, 15:32 (650 days ago) @ David Turell

Paranthropus had tools!!:

https://www.sciencemagazinedigital.org/sciencemagazine/library/item/10_february_2023/40...

"Beneath it [ a hippo], Blasto Onyango, head preparator of the National Museums of Kenya, found a huge hominin molar. It lay intermingled with hammerstones and sharp flakes that Finestone recognized as early Oldowan tools, an ancient technological breakthrough long thought to be a defining hallmark of our genus, Homo. But the molar was from a very different human relative: Paranthropus, known for its huge teeth and crested ape-size skull, not toolmaking skills. “When we found the Paranthropus molar, it got really, really exciting,” says Finestone, of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

"The tools, dated to about 2.8 million years ago, are the oldest known examples of the Oldowan toolkit. They also hint that Paranthropus, often seen as an also-ran in the story of human evolution, might have made or at least used tools. “I have been skeptical of Paranthropus using stone tools. … But maybe we do have multiple hominins using the Oldowan,” Finestone says. “We know very little about the beginnings of stone tools and the emergence of early Homo,” says paleoanthropologist Sileshi Semaw of Spain’s National Research Center for Human Evolution (CENIEH), who is not part of this study. This is “why the Nyayanga discovery is important.”

"It’s not the first time stone tools have been found with fossils of Paranthropus, a genus with several species that lived from about 2.8 million to 1.2 million years ago across Africa. In 1955, Louis and Mary Leakey discovered the Nutcracker Man, a skull with a robust jaw and teeth now classified as Paranthropus boisei, in the same 1.8-million-year-old layer of sediments as Oldowan tools. But Mary Leakey soon found a skull of Homo habilis (Latin for “handyman” in the same layer and thought that species, in our own genus, was a better fit as the principal toolmaker. Paranthropus, with its powerful jaws and teeth, was seen as not needing tools to process tough food. “Homo was always given credit for the tools,” says paleoanthropologist Bernard Wood of George Washington University.

"As more Oldowan tools were discovered across Africa and beyond, most researchers concluded that their appearance coincided with the earliest fossils of Homo, dating to 2.8 million years ago in Ethiopia. Many saw the Oldowan as a key technological revolution that helped early Homo expand its diet, adapt to different habitats, and rapidly extend its range in Africa and beyond to Asia, where some of the oldest Homo fossils are found with Oldowan tools, also known as Mode 1 tools. All of this, the theory goes, helped fuel Homo’s expanding brain.

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"The ancient butchers left two hippo carcasses, many large-animal bones bearing cutmarks from tools, and 330 artifacts, including blades used to cut meat and plants. Plummer’s team used multiple methods to date the site to about 2.8 million years ago, with a range of 2.58 million to 3.03 million years. “They’ve made a solid case with the evidence they have,” says geologist Craig Feibel of Rutgers University, Piscataway."

Comment: this leads back to dhw's criticism of God's work. In a past discussion dhw wondered why God bothered to create so many pre-sapiens forms. My answer as usual is God prefers to create by evolution of living organisms, and in the universe by using a multitude of stars to create the original 92 elements, whilev the Earth evolved as life appeared on it.