Southern Australia’s interior, with its dry hot summers and cool winters, doesn’t sound like the most inviting environment for early humans. Yet a new study found evidence that early settlers arrived in the Flinders Ranges around 49,000 years ago—nearly 10,000 years earlier than it was initially reported. The authors analyzed results of an excavation at […]
Tag: tool use
Stones broken by wild monkeys add an edge to early-human tool use theories
As seen in the video, wild bearded capuchin monkeys also adopt a stone-on-stone percussion technique to produce stone flakes similar to early-human stone tools. Broken stones with distinct sharp edges are thought to be a precursor to more sophisticated tool use by early humans. However, a recent Oxford study found that sharp-edged stones may not […]
