kevin

While A. afarensis had a brain about the size of a chimp, I think it may have become specialized in a way different from a chimp because the front limbs were no longer being used for ground locomotion. I don’t know what afarensis was doing with its hands but I’m fairly sure they hadn’t invented pockets yet. In the article I read the authors seemed confident that these guys could have been tool users (at least as intelligent as chimps) but were less confident about them being tool makers. It seems to me that since we have about 1.5 million years before leaving Africa as full tool users, the time line is about right for more sophisticated tool use anyway.

bob

I have read the web sites of some quality museums, such as the Smithsonian. Adding a bit of synergy to your suggestion, I think I’ll email the people there with my questions on natural history. They may have the time to answer them.

One of my fantasies was to spend at least two weeks going through the Smithsonian. Unfortunately I waited too long to do it.

The “Oldowan choppers” depicted are “mode I’ oldowan cores. The pieces you see missing here are flakes.

There are no stone tool industries where the stones are just whacked together. There are a number of “eolithic” assemblages of rocks that are not human/hominid made, but entirely natural, and mistaken for real industries back in the day before replicative experiments were ever done. They are to be disregarded. They are the bigfoot, the UFOs, the woo, and the chain rattling poltergeists of archaeology.

Mode I/Oldowan (and related) industries are known from 2.6 mya and later, with nothing earlier at all.

the dating of the bones is an issue as long as they come from the surface. But there are reasons to accept the date, as is often the case with surface material. Hell, most of the Tanzanian material of Afarensis consists of surface finds. So, a surface-known hominid was making surface-find cutmarks!

Are the mode 1 stone tools “flakes”? I thought that “flakes” were mode 2 and later.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_tools

If you whack two stones of just about any kind together, you will get some pieces with edges that are sharper than the original stones. I am thinking like the stone tool on the right side of the first picture. Is that a “flake”?

I thought for a flake you needed a high aspect ratio.

As far as I know, the were.

The first manufactured stone tools were not flakes. If this is a singluar find, maybe the person who did it got a stone flake by accident or luck and used it for a long time.

Or maybe the person who did it was just ahead of his/her time by a couple of million years. Such things happen, even today. Getting people to appreciate the importance of new ideas is sometimes exceedingly difficult.

As I understand it, the habitats that hominids occupied did not lend themselves to fossils or even very good preservation. Same for most members of the primate order.

@Pilty, please indicate your Poe with some sort of smiley. I’d hate to think someone who actually believed that BS would actually have the ability to read this blog and know what it’s saying.

@mikeg, you are welcome.

Is it the same for the study of hominids? Not specifically discovery of new species, but the what, who, when, why and how of hominids. My guess is that there is a wealth of science remaining for students who want to enter those types of studies. Is there speculation about this that you know of?