Stone toolmakers reached North Africa and Arabia surprisingly early

Two new studies reveal that ancient stone tool makers have spread rapidly in under-researched areas of North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. Discoveries in Algeria and Saudi Arabia highlight how tool-making traditions have allowed stone age Homo Researchers say groups have to travel long distances and adapt to different environments.

Hominids used simple cutting and chopping tools to extract meat from animal carcasses in North Africa about 2.4 million years ago, the archaeologist Mohamed Sahnouni and his colleagues report online November 29 Science. This is about 200,000 years after the first known appearance of such tools in East Africa. The first members of the human race, Homo, conclude the scientists, either continued to manufacture these tools after leaving East Africa, either created independently of similar tools in East and North Africa.

Previous excavations of two other Algerian sites, also conducted by Sahnouni's team, had uncovered stone tools and traces of butchery not more than 1.8 million years old.

No fossils of hominids have been found in any of the sites of North Africa. But the discovery of stone tools scattered among the remains of animals dismembered on the Algerian site of Ain Boucherit adds to the evidence that Homo Evolution did not take place in East Africa (SN: 12/23/17, p. 24). "Our ancestors have ventured to every corner of Africa," said Sahnouni, of the National Center for Research on Human Evolution in Burgos, Spain.

Discoveries at Ain Boucherit "show that the corridor of the North African savannah and that of East Africa were connected[[[[Homo]began using stone tools and eating meat simultaneously in both regions, "explains archaeologist Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo of the Complutense University of Madrid, which was not part of the group. ;Research Team.

Sahnouni's group excavated stone tools and animal bones in two layers of sediment at Ain Boucherit. After initial discoveries in 2006 and 2008, fieldwork conducted from 2009 to 2016 produced a total of 17 stone artifacts from an earlier lower sedimentary layer and 236 similar specimens from an upper sedimentary layer. The lower and upper layers also contained 296 and 277 fossil animal bones, respectively.

The identification of previously dated reversals of the Earth's magnetic field recorded in the soil and the estimation of the time elapsed since the burial of the sediments provided ages of about 2.4 million years for the lower layer and about 1.9 million years for the upper layer.

The fossil bones found among the stone artefacts at Ain Boucherit came from animals living in the savannah, such as elephants, horses, rhinos, antelopes and crocodiles. Typical butchery incisions appeared on 17 bones of the lower layer of sediment and two bones of the upper layer. These marks were mainly made on limb bones, ribs and skulls, suggesting activities such as skinning and removal of flesh. Four other bones of the lower layer and seven of the upper layer showed pounding and broken marks, probably due to the removal of marrow.

Sahnouni suspects the hominids of Ain Boucherit to acquire game-hunts, either by hunting or by searching new killing sites.

"The proof of Ain Boucherit could indicate a kind of confrontational cleansing where [hominids] Carnivores were flying before the carcasses were completely deflowered, "says archeologist Ignacio de la Torre from University College London, who did not participate in the study. This tactic seems most likely, he says, as evidence of hunting in Africa around the time hominids used meat-cutting tools in Algeria is rare.

Long after North Africans cut carcasses, another form of tool making took another unexpected direction. An African tool-making style dating back nearly 1.8 million years (SN: 08/10/11, p. 12), which included tear-shaped hand axes, appeared in the center of the Arabian Peninsula about 240,000 to 190,000 years ago, researchers said on November 29 Scientific reports.

Archaeologist Eleanor Scerri of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, and her colleagues found more than 500 stone artifacts at a site in central Arabia Saudi Arabia called Saffaqah. The stone artifacts included large, sharp-edged flakes, stone blocks with depressions where the flakes had been pounded, and hand axes. Calculations of time since sediment burial provided an age range for the Saffaqah discoveries. Excavations carried out by another group in the 1980s had uncovered nearly 8,400 hand axes and related instruments that had not been dated or analyzed in detail.

Previous evidence, including stone tools, had suggested that the Homo genus reached grassy Arabia and vegetated at least 300 000 years ago (SN: 24/11/18, p. 16), although the range of tools made by these former colonizers is unclear. Scerri and his colleagues suspect a species similar to the man already living in Eurasia, such as Homo heidelbergensis or Homo erectus, arrived in central Arabia and managed to cope with increasingly cold and dry conditions. For about 240,000 years, rainy conditions have allowed hominids in East Africa to spread to the Middle East and Arabia along rivers and lakes, Scerri suspects.