1.8 million year old Stone Balls & 1.8 myo "butchered large animal bones" used for busting open bone marrow - meat fat crucial for hominin brain growth

 we learned how to do spiritual healing as modern humans (over 200,000 years ago) but 2 million years ago we grew our big brains from stone balls smashing bone marrow. hahahaha. So in terms of evolution - that's really our dominant psychophysiology I think - the stone ball in the hand, Sucking in the bone marrow - something very ancient about that behavior.

Around 2 million years ago, hominin brains were roughly between 550 and 650 cubic centimeters in size, with species like "Homo erectus" having a brain volume closer to the larger end of that range, representing a significant increase from earlier hominins but still considerably smaller than modern human brains which average around 1300 cubic centimeters.

https://australian.museum/learn/science/human-evolution/larger-brains/

Our brains are now three times larger than those of our early ancestors and we have a large braincase with a tall forehead. 

 2 million old stone balls vid

Wow so you're too afraid to google something in case you might learn something you don't "want" to exist? hahaha. 

 https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/ancient-human-ancestors-may-have-grown-big-brains-scavenging-bone-marrow

Eating bone marrow played a key role in the evolution of the human hand by University of Kent The strength required to access the high calorie content of bone marrow may have played a key role in the evolution of the human hand and explain why primates hands are not like ours, research at the University of Kent has found. In an article in The Journal of Human Evolution, a team lead by Professor Tracy Kivell of Kent's School of Anthropology and Conservation concludes that although stone tool making has always been considered a key influence on the evolution of the human hand, accessing bone marrow generally has not. It is widely accepted that the unique dexterity of the human hand evolved, at least in part, in response to stone tool use during our evolutionary history. Archaeological evidence suggests that early hominins participated in a variety of tool-related activities, such as nut-cracking, cutting flesh, smashing bone to access marrow, as well as making stone tools. However, it is unlikely that all these behaviours equally influenced modern human hand anatomy. To understand the impact these different actions may have had on the evolution of human hands, researchers measured the force experienced by the hand of 39 individuals during different stone tool behaviours—nut-cracking, marrow acquisition with a hammerstone, flake production with a hammerstone, and handaxe and stone tool (i.e. a flake) - to see which digits were most important for manipulating the tool. They found that the pressures varied across the different behaviours, with nut-cracking generally requiring the lowest pressure while making the flake and accessing marrow required the greatest pressures. Across all of the different behaviours, the thumb, index finger and middle finger were always most important. Professor Kivell says this suggests that nut-cracking force may not be high enough to elicit changes in the formation of the human hand, which may be why other primates are adept nut-crackers without having a human-like hand. In contrast, making stone flakes and accessing marrow may have been key influences on our hand anatomy due to the high stress they cause on our hands. The researchers concluded that eating marrow, given its additional benefit of high calorific value, may have also played a key role in evolution of human dexterity. 

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4027422/ 

The manual pressures of stone tool behaviors and their implications for the evolution of the human hand by Erin Marie Williams-Hatala, Kevin G. Hatala, McKenzie Gordon and Margaret Kasper, all Chatham University, Pittsburgh, USA and Alastair Key and Tracy Kivell, University of Kent is published in the Journal of Human Evolution.

Mystery of 2 million-year-old stone balls solved News By Laura Geggel published April 17, 2020 Here's how ancient cave dwellers used these stone balls.

For nearly 2 million years, ancient humans crafted stones into hand-size balls, but archaeologists were unsure why. Now they know: Ancient people used them as tools to get at the tasty marrow within animal bones, a new study finds. In other words, if a bone were a can of soup, these ancient stone balls were like ancient can openers. The finding is a remarkable one; archaeologists have wondered for decades exactly how ancient humans used these stone balls. "Our study provided evidence, for the first time, regarding the function of these enigmatic-shaped stone balls that were produced by humans for almost 2 million years," study lead researcher Ella Assaf, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near East Cultures at Tel Aviv University in Israel, told Live Science in an email. Archaeologists have found "these enigmatic, mysterious artifacts" in some of the world's oldest archaeological sites in Africa, Europe and Asia, but no one in modern times had figured out how these ancient round stones were used, Assaf said. That changed when Assaf and her team came across a cache of 30 stone balls in Qesem Cave in Israel, where humans lived from about 400,000 to 200,000 years ago.

To solve the mystery of the stone balls, study senior researcher Emanuela Cristiani, an archaeologist at Sapienza University in Rome, and her colleagues examined the stone balls microscopically. They discovered wear marks and organic residues indicating that the stones "were used by the cave inhabitants to break animal bones and extract the nutritional marrow," Assaf said. However, the international team wanted to be sure, so they did two experiments. In the first, they used cobblestones (naturally rounded stones larger than pebbles) to break apart bones. In the second, the team used tools to shape their own stone balls and then tested them on bones.

After busting some bones, the team learned that the shaped stone balls were much more efficient than the natural ones at breaking bones and getting to the marrow, a finding that supported the conclusion from the microscopic analyses. "These tools provide comfortable grip, they don't tend to break easily, and you can rotate them and use them repetitively since they have multiple ridges," Assaf said. "These high ridges help to break the bone in a 'clean' way, and you can extract the marrow relatively easily." Moreover, breaking bones left tiny wear marks on the modern replicas that were "very similar to the archaeological traces" on the ancient stone balls, Assaf said. "This confirmed our preliminary assumption that these items were indeed used to extract bone marrow," she said.

Ancient Human Ancestors May Have Grown Big Brains Scavenging Bone Marrow By Thomas Garlinghouse

In a paper recently published in the journal Current Anthropology, Jessica Thompson, an anthropologist at Yale University, and her colleagues suggest that hominins were primarily after bone marrow — that gloppy, spongy, calorie-rich substance inside bones — rather than skeletal muscle tissue, or “meat.” “Meat-eating is kind of a misleading term,” said Thompson. “Meat-eating can loosely mean so many things, many of which are not actually meat.” In fact, the researchers believe that skeletal-clinging meat was frequently avoided, perhaps because it can rapidly acquire harmful bacteria from exposure or the mouths of animals. Marrow and brains, by contrast, because they are encased inside bones, retain low bacteria counts and persist much longer without spoiling. The researchers use the term “inside bone nutrients” to distinguish these resources from “outside bone nutrients,” namely the muscle tissue, or meat. Although direct evidence is currently lacking, the researchers contend that the hypothesis allows anthropologists to take a fresh look at the fossil record and the behavior of our early ancestors. In mammals, marrow is where blood cells are produced. It is also high in fat, cholesterol and numerous micronutrients. This rich resource, they believe, may have acted as a catalyst in the development of humans’ distinctively large and complex brain. “The brain is a very expensive organ,” Thompson said. Although it takes up only 2 percent of our body weight, it requires approximately 20 percent of the body’s energy even at rest. This percentage is much higher than what other primates allocate, including humans’ closest relatives, chimpanzees. Over the course of some 6 million years, the size of the human brain has increased by over 300 percent. This evolution required a rich reservoir of energy, one that a diet of lean, wild meat would not have been able to sustain, Thompson and her colleagues contend. “We’re used to thinking of meat as a fatty product,” Thompson said. “But wild game is not very fatty at all. If you eat a lot of lean meat it doesn’t actually provide you with the sustenance you need to function well.” Bone marrow, by contrast, is an excellent source of surplus energy, she said. “Bone marrow is actually a nicely accessible package of fat in an otherwise fat-poor landscape.”

Lower Paleolithic Shaped Stone Balls—What Is Next? Some Cultural–Cognitive Questions 

 

 Humans were occasional tool users probably before 2 million years ago, then became habitual tool users after 1.7 my, and finally became obligatory toolusers in the last 300,000 years [34]. This suggests an increasing “prosthetic capacity”, in which tools are progressively integrated into the body structure and into the neural schemes of the body [35]

 

 Occasional, obligatory, and habitual stone tool use in hominin evolution

 

  study of 55 stones, roughly the same size and shape as a tennis ball, from the Makapan
Valley in South Africa (from sites dated between 70,000 and 1.8 million years old)

 

 Scientists have pieced together an early human habitat for the first time, and life was no picnic 1.8 million years ago. Our human ancestors, who looked like a cross between apes and modern humans, had access to food, water and shady shelter at a site in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania.

 Famous paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey discovered the site in 1959 and uncovered thousands of animal bones and stone tools. Through exhaustive excavations in the last decade, Ashley, other scientists and students collected numerous soil samples and studied them via carbon isotope analysis.

The landscape, it turned out, had a freshwater spring, wetlands and woodland as well as grasslands.

“We were able to map out what the plants were on the landscape with respect to where the humans and their stone tools were found,” Ashley said. “That’s never been done before. Mapping was done by analyzing the soils in one geological bed, and in that bed there were bones of two different hominin species.”

The two species of hominins, or early humans, are Paranthropus boisei – robust and pretty small-brained – and Homo habilis, a lighter-boned species. Homo habilis had a bigger brain and was more in sync with our human evolutionary tree, according to Ashley.

https://www.rutgers.edu/news/early-human-habitat-recreated-first-time-shows-life-was-no-picnic 

 Through their research, the scientists learned that the shady woodland had palm and acacia trees. They don’t think the hominins camped there. But based on the high concentration of bones, the primates probably obtained carcasses elsewhere and ate the meat in the woods for safety, Ashley said.

 “We don’t think they were living there,” she said. “We think they were taking advantage of the freshwater source that was nearby.”

The study was conducted by Ashley; Clayton R. Magill of the Geological Institute in Zurich, Switzerland; Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo of Complutense University in Madrid, Spain; and Katherine H. Freeman of Pennsylvania State University.

 Dietary options and behavior suggested by plant biomarker evidence in an early human habitat

 The coexistence of butchered large animal bones and hominin
remains, including juveniles, within an isolated biomarker-
delineated wooded microhabitat at FLK Zinj provide support
for early provisioning behaviors by our ancestors [1.8 million years ago!!].

 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047248421001226

 Evidence for animal exploitation is often the best preserved direct evidence of Early Pleistocene subsistence, with the appearance of the Oldowan penecontemporaneous with the first secure evidence for hominin processing of animal remains.¹ This pattern is first documented at Gona and Bouri, Ethiopia around 2.6–2.5 Ma (de Heinzelin et al., 1999; Domínguez-Rodrigo et al., 2005), and at Ain Boucherit, Algeria, from 2.4 Ma (Sahnouni et al., 2018). Lithics are likely to represent an adaptation for a faster and more efficient processing of particular resources available to hominins, including the manufacture of organic implements (e.g., Isaac, 1986; Toth, 1987; Plummer, 2004; Domínguez-Rodrigo et al., 2009; Gürbüz and Lycett, 2021).As certain primate genera are known to sporadically consume animal resources (Stanford, 2001; Surbeck and Hohmann, 2008; Watts, 2020), occasional omnivory was likely a basal hominin trait (Stanford, 2012; Gilby, 2017). Nonetheless, meat is still a relatively marginal dietary component in bonobos (Pan paniscus; Oelze et al., 2011), while chimpanzees only rarely approach even the lowest levels of meat consumption seen in tropical hunter-gatherer societies (Watts, 2020). Therefore, it is likely that several shifts toward greater emphasis on animal consumption took place during the course of hominin evolution (Speth, 1989; Foley, 2001; Bunn, 2007; Domínguez-Rodrigo and Pickering, 2017; Thompson et al., 2019; Pobiner, 2020). This increasing reliance on higher-quality resources may have driven brain growth and physiological development (cf., Foley and Lee, 1991; Aiello and Wheeler, 1995).

 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aay5483

 Previous research has shown that modern Eurasians interbred with their Neanderthal and Denisovan predecessors. We show here that hundreds of thousands of years earlier, the ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans interbred with their own Eurasian predecessors—members of a “superarchaic” population that separated from other humans about 2 million years ago. The superarchaic population was large, with an effective size between 20 and 50 thousand individuals. We confirm previous findings that (i) Denisovans also interbred with superarchaics, (ii) Neanderthals and Denisovans separated early in the middle Pleistocene, (iii) their ancestors endured a bottleneck of population size, and (iv) the Neanderthal population was large at first but then declined in size. We provide qualified support for the view that (v) Neanderthals interbred with the ancestors of modern humans.