by Chip Colwell
The science of archaeology is in some sense always speculative nonfiction. It requires its practitioners to peel back layers of dirt and find history somehow in pieces of broken bones, scattered fragments of stone.
For humans, eating a dead buffalo is no easy task. Our hands aren’t strong enough to tear apart buffalo skin, which is so thick it is nearly bulletproof. Our teeth can’t saw through its dense muscles. Snapping tendons? Forget it. Breaking bones for marrow? No way. But the animals are loaded with nutrients, fats, easy calories. Buffalo are good eating—if only you can figure out how to eat one.
Millions of years ago, a very ancient ancestor of ours solved this puzzle. Most immediately, the discovery resulted in a good meal. More distantly, it changed the fate of our species and the future of our planet.
Only recently has this historical moment come into view. Although still hazy, we can look to the savanna of Ethiopia and imagine a family of lions devouring a buffalo-like animal along a riverbank. The prey lies prone on its back, not quite dead. Three lions pin the animal down with their massive claws. Their heads nod in jerks as they rip off chunks of muscle amid streams of dark blood.
At the river’s edge, a large troop of human-like creatures hides among reeds. They watch and wait. As soon as the lion at the buffalo’s neck suffocates it, the humanish tribe bursts out towards the lions screaming and fanning their arms. Some pick up round cobblestones and hurl them at the roaring lions. The battle wears on. As the sun nestles towards the horizon, the lions finally grow weary and abandon their feast.
The hungry scavengers hover over the buffalo. Some struggle to tear off the slivers of meat left hanging from the lion’s half-finished meal. Others imitate the lions, eating with their faces in the carcass. But one female pauses and looks down.
A cobble that had been thrown is lying on the ground, almost as if it had been waiting to be seen. The rock is half-broken. One side is rounded. The other side has been broken into a flat, sharp edge. She picks it up—fitting just right in the hand—and lifts it to the dead buffalo. When she moves the blade against the flesh, blood seeps from a deep groove. The first cut. The stone seesaws back and forth, and a slice of red meat peels off. Her fingers slip the chunk into the mouth, the velvety tissue enveloping her hungry tongue.
Or something like that. Whenever or however the first cut happened, it would come to reshape the ways in which our human ancestors behaved, imagined, and evolved. The first cut—the first tool—changed everything.
In 2010, archaeologists announced the discovery of bones in Ethiopia from several animals—one buffalo-sized, one impala-sized—that bore the remnants of cut marks, deep V-shaped lines incised into the skeletal fragments. Although researchers didn’t find any tools in association with the bones, the cut marks indicated that sharp stones had been used to butcher the animals. This meal took place 3.39 million years ago.
The date was breathtaking. It pushed back the first known evidence of tool use by 800,000 years. Even more significantly, it meant that the first tool users were not from the genus Homo—our branch of the human family tree—but instead came from the more distant hominin genus Australopithecus. Scientists hypothesized that Australopithecines—creatures very much like the famous fossil Lucy discovered in 1974—scavenged animals and butchered them with sharp rocks that happened to be lying around. This was a monumental find, because it points to both when ancient ancestors on our lineage began to see dead animals as food (Chimps and other known apes don’t see carcasses as dinner), and when they began to use stones as tools to make a meal.
The seeds of toolmaking are deeply buried among our animal instincts. A dizzying array of creatures use the world’s raw materials for survival. Birds gather straw, leaves, twigs, and more to weave their nest homes. Beavers build dams. Elephants use branches to swat flies. Otters place a clam on one flat stone and smash it with another stone to reveal its hidden salty muscle.
But within a million years of the discovery of stone tools, our more direct ancestors in the genus Homo began to go far beyond using raw materials to merely subsist. Instead of simply picking up stones with naturally sharp edges, one of our ancestors figured out that she or he could bang one stone against another in a particular way, thereby controlling the breakage in order to craft an instrument of one’s desire. By 2.5 million years ago, ancestors in the Homo line had created what archaeologists today call the Oldowan Toolkit—named for where these tools were first found, in the stark desert of Oldavai Gorge, Tanzania. The toolkit consisted of three key components: a stone core (the raw material that’s the basis of the small knives to be made), a hammer stone (used to strike the core and break off a flake), and the sharp stone flakes (the resulting tool, which could be used to cut and scrape).
These tools were not merely things. They also hint at a deeper intelligence that enabled the genesis of us. Studies have shown the areas of the brain that light up when creating stone tools are the same areas that are used for language. As Oldowan technologies developed, the tools became more symmetrical, evenly weighted, and sophisticated. Some scholars even suggest that these tools can be considered the world’s first art. Symbolic thought, complex planning, and beauty are all contained within utensils that were first engineered to turn animal flesh into feasts.
Beyond the conceptual, tools had a real biological impact as well. Experimental research shows that cutting up meat before digesting it makes it easier on the teeth and allows the body to extract more nutrients. More calories enabled the development of bigger brains.
Stone tools were the fountainhead of a kind of feedback loop: The pre-human mind could now make tools, which in turn would help our ancestors survive and thrive, and thus would allow their minds to further advance. These tools are not just the material reflections of the human imagination: They are the means by which humans could reimagine the world.
The science of archaeology is in some sense always speculative nonfiction. It requires its practitioners to peel back layers of dirt and find history somehow in pieces of broken bones, scattered fragments of stone. This is accomplished by using scientific tools to recreate long lost scenes, like trying to reproduce Michelangelo’s David, if it had never been seen before, from a scrap of a book vaguely describing it. The evidence is often so tenuous, interpretation of past people and their lives is inevitably a creative act. In other words, archaeology can always only imagine the shape of antiquity from the unknowable mists of time.
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Chip Colwell curates the anthropology collections at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science and is the founding editor-in-chief of the digital magazine SAPIENS. He has published 11 books, most recently Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America’s Culture, which the Wall Street Journal called “a careful and intelligent chronicle” and won the 2019 National Council on Public History Book Award. His essays have been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Atlas Obscura, and other corners of the Internet.