200 plus MADE technology as stone tools at over 3 million years old....
In 2010, researchers found fossilized animal bones in Kenya dating to 3.4 million years ago with cut marks on them—possibly made from a stone tool, though still controversial. Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy’s species) was the only human ancestor or relative around at the same time and place. Another hominin, Australopithecus africanus, appears to have had a grip strong enough for tool use. Studies show chimpanzees use rocks as hammers or anvils on their own in the wild, and, with a little guidance, bonobos are capable of creating stone tools.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14464
Bones found in Ethiopia show cuts from stone and indications that the bones were forcibly broken to remove marrow.
Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London cautions against making firm conclusions about the development of tool use, given the limited number of artifacts from the current find.
"We have to be cautious that these are just a couple of bones with what seem to be cut marks on them; one would like to have stone tools associated with them to really clinch the case," he told BBC News.
However, he agrees that pushing the first known date of tool use back by nearly a million years is, regardless, "a big story".
"It suggests that meat-eating and butchery behaviour is pre-human - it's an ancestral behaviour and as such it gives an interesting perspective on the Australopithecines that we didn't have before," he said.
3.3 million year stone tools vid
So even though they had SMALL brains the brains grew slowly and the children were trained by their parents as cultural use of tools....
Prolonged brain growth and maturation have often been viewed as a consequence of evolutionary brain size increase in the genus Homo: a shift in life history required to evolve large adult brains despite obstetric constraints related to upright walking (25). In contrast to this view, our data from A. afarensis demonstrate that prolonged brain growth is not a mere by-product of evolutionary brain size increase. One can predict the average neonatal brain size in A. afarensis based on the statistical relationship between the brain size of newborns and adults in anthropoids (26). The pelvic dimensions of the small, presumed female A. afarensis specimen A.L. 288-1 (Lucy) suggest that it would have been possible to give birth to such a predicted A. afarensis neonate, potentially requiring some rotation of the fetus during parturition (26–28). Our findings therefore challenge the central tenet of the obstetric dilemma hypothesis (25) and suggest that obstetric constraints are not the proximate cause of the origins of prolonged brain growth in hominins. This view is in line with an earlier study that emphasized the importance of energetic constraints of the maternal metabolism on fetal growth and gestation length, suggesting that the evolution of altriciality in hominins had little to do with pelvic morphology (29).
The evidence from virtual dental histology shows that the dental development of DIK-1-1 was broadly comparable to that of P. troglodytes and therefore faster than in modern humans, whereas the same individual’s small rEV suggests a prolonged period of brain development relative to chimpanzees. This indicates that the developmental pace of teeth and brain need not always be synchronized and can evolve independently, at least to some degree. The fact that protracted brain growth emerged in hominins as early as 3.3 Ma ago could suggest that it characterized all of subsequent hominin evolutionary history. However, it is possible that patterns of brain development varied among hominins and did not follow a linear evolutionary trajectory toward the modern human condition (5). Among primates in general, different rates of postnatal growth and maturation are associated with different infant-care strategies (30), suggesting that the extended period of brain growth in A. afarensis may have been linked to a long dependence on caregivers (24, 31)
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2006/9/20/scientists-hail-lucys-daughter
Some scientists do NOT believe the evidence....
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-11756602
Dr McPherron said he was disappointed that the Spanish team had not examined the bones directly - only pictures of them.
"There are quite a few marks on these bones and on a few of them they think that the pattern that you see falls within the range you see for trampling," he said.
"But the point is to explain the totality of the marks on these bones, and the totality fits very well within the pattern for cut-marked, or stone-tool-modified, bones," he told BBC News.
“I've seen the altered rocks, and there is definitely purposeful modification of the stones by the hominins at the Lomekwi site 3.3 million years ago,” says paleoanthropologist Rick Potts, director of the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program, who was not affiliated with the study. Potts notes that while the study is exciting, it also raises a lot of big questions.
Exploring Humanity’s Technological Origins talk by Sonia Harmand, 2023
Sonia F. Harmand, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Turkana Basin Institute, Stony Brook University; Director, Mission Préhistorique au Kenya/West Turkana Archaeological Project Human evolutionary scholars have long assumed that the earliest stone tools were made by members of the genus Homo, 2.4–2.3 million years ago, and that this technological development was directly linked to climate change and the spread of savannah grasslands. In the last decade, fieldwork in West Turkana, Kenya, has revealed evidence of much earlier technological behavior. Sonia Harmand will discuss the discovery of stone tools in a 3.3-million-year-old archaeological site in Kenya known as Lomekwi 3. She will show how this discovery is reshaping our understanding of the emergence of human-like manipulative capabilities, as well as the development of cognition in early hominins—the group consisting of modern humans and all our immediate ancestors. Presented by Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology and Harvard Museums of Science & Culture
Louise Leakey lecture from six months ago



