14 DAY TRIAL // Perhaps the most important thing that separates us from other animals is the fact that we are able to use tools proficiently, and to a great extent. One could easily argue that the instruments are what allowed our species to evolve to the point it's at today, alongside fire and speech. These three aspects of human evolution are also the ones that pose most problems to anthropologists and historians, as their evolutionary pathway is still surrounded by the unknown, LiveScience reports.
However, more and more studies done lately seem to bring our knowledge on the evolution of tools to new heights, clearing mysteries associated with how tools helped shape our evolution in the process as well. Studies of humankind's family tree have revealed that our ancestors had been using tools for millions of years. After our lineage broke away from that of the other primates, the monkeys that remained in trees continued to use basic tools to aid them in procuring food. However, modern chimpanzees have not managed to move beyond using sticks to hunt for termites.
The thing about the way they use tools is that they do not have the imagination of creating new ones for themselves. Rather, as studies suggest, they learn from each other how to use the sticks, and do not seek to improve their techniques. This cannot be said about humans. Since the first tools, we have always tried to produce better and better weapons that would diminish the amount of our physical labor. Fire was also used as a tool, and its influence on the size of our guts and the length of our teeth was felt shortly. These two no longer had to retain their impressive sizes by today's standards, because the food was now easier to chew and digest.
“So the hominids at this time [some 2.6 million years ago], based on all the evidence that we have, had small australopithecine-sized brains, but nevertheless they figured out how to cut through often tough hide to efficiently get the meat off the bones and break the bones open for the marrow,” University of Wisconsin-Madison (UWM) paleoanthropologist Henry Bunn says. Tool manufacturing “was probably very ad hoc – when you needed a stone tool and you didn't have one, just made one, then dropped it,” University of Colorado in Colorado Springs paleoanthropologist Thomas Wynn adds.
Then, some 1.8 million years ago, “Homo erectus [..] started carrying tools around, instead of dropping them after use. Technology has become part of their adaptive niche, a more or less permanent day-to-day thing relied on regularly. It's all tremendously significant from a cognitive point of view. I would place all this as an even more significant transition than the initial use of stone tools,” Wynn adds.