The strongest evidence of the first human butchery animals discovered in North Africa | Science

On a high grassy plateau in Algeria, just 100 kilometers from the Mediterranean Sea, early human ancestors slaughtered horses, antelopes and other extinct animals with primitive stone tools 2 to 24 million years ago. The dates, reported today, push back the age of North Africa's oldest tools to half a million years and give a new insight into how these protohumans have spread across the continent.

For decades, East Africa has been considered the cradle of our kind. Homoand the epicenter of tool making for nearly a million years. The oldest known Homo Fossils date back 2.8 million years in Ethiopia. Nearly 200,000 years later, scientists have found simple tools, such as one-inch-sized stone flakes and fist-sized cores, in the nearby Rift Valley. , in Ethiopia. Even older tools and animal bones with cutting marks date back to 3.4 million years ago in East Africa, but these claims are controversial.

Be that as it may, it's been a long time since hominins, or members of the human family, invented stone tools in East Africa, they did not travel to them until 1.8 million years ago (or, more controversially, 2 million years ago). , China) when tools appear in Algeria, Georgia and China.

The new study reverses this view. After 25 years of excavations in the Ain Hanech complex, a dry ravine in Algeria, an international team has announced the discovery of about 250 primitive tools and 296 animal bones on a site called Ain Boucherit. About two dozen animal bones have cut marks that show that they have been stripped, torn or pounded for the pith. Composed of limestone and flint, the sharp-edged flakes and round cores – some the size of a tennis ball – resemble those of East Africa. Both are the oldest known toolbox known as Oldowan, named after the site where they were found 80 years ago in Olduvai, Tanzania.

Ain Hanech lacks volcanic minerals, which constitute the gold standard for dating sites in East Africa. Instead, the researchers used three other dating methods, including paleomagnetic dating, which detects known inversions of the Earth's magnetic field recorded in the rock. The tools and the cut bone date from 2.4 million years ago, researchers report today. Science. They also used the identity of large extinct animals, such as mastodons and ancient horses, to confirm the dates.

The cut bones represent "the oldest substantial evidence of butchery," said paleoanthropologist Thomas Plummer of Queens College at City University in New York, who was not involved in the study. Although other sites of this age in East Africa have stone tools, evidence of a real butchery of animals is not as strong, he says.

At Ain Hanech, the dates provide "compelling evidence of stone tools and carved bones scarred around 2 million years or more," says geologist Warren Sharp of the Berkeley Geochronology Center in California. But he finds the date of 2.4 million "less convincing", because of the potential problems related to dating methods.

Whether they are 2 million or 2.4 million years old, they suggest that toolmakers have been spreading earlier and more widely across Africa sooner than expected. "There had to be a corridor across the Sahara with movements between East Africa and North Africa," says paleoanthropologist Rick Potts of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington. Alternatively, the new dates suggest hominins in at least two different regions. from Africa, separated by 5,000 kilometers, were sophisticated enough to independently invent rudimentary stone tools and make them usually, says Potts.

Be that as it may, the study suggests that about 2 million years ago, making stone tools and cutting meat with them became a routine for human ancestors in the most remote corners of the world. African continent. And this technological revolution may have given them the tools to travel further and further in Africa and beyond.