Ancient Humans Used Heat Over 300,000 Years Ago To Create “Sophisticated ” Tools

It should no longer come as a surprise that ancient humans were far more advanced than we were led to believe. This idea, firmly rejected until not so long ago, has recently been reaffirmed. Scientists have found that not only did human ancestors know how to use fire, they also developed sophisticated technologies for making tools.

This discovery was made by researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Sciences who used their own cutting-edge technologies to take a look at a collection of stone tools.

Their results suggest that the first humans to make them may have had a good understanding of the effects of heating stone before chipping it into sheets, and may even have used different temperatures to create different types of tools. This implies an excellent understanding of heat and how it can be used to manipulate materials.

The findings were reported in a study published in Nature Human Behavior.

Some of the tools analyzed were discovered at the Qesem Cave, a site in central Israel, which was excavated by Professor Avi Gopher and his colleagues at the University of Tel-Aviv. The fragmented tools that were found in the cave were dated to be between 420,000 and 200,000 years old, which means they were likely crafted during the Lower Paleolithic.

The discovery further proves that early humans had highly developed skills already hundreds of thousands of years ago.

The ancient hominids (a group that included members of the modern hominin group as well as extinct members of our family tree) lived in the Qesem Cave and the left behind tens of thousands of stone tools.

These tools are made primarily from flint, a hard grey rock consisting of nearly pure silica, and a material that is available throughout the country, and were produced in a process called carving, that is, using another stone or tool to chip pieces, sharpening an edge.

Sometime between 300,000 and 400,000 years ago, the main source of food that these hominids hunted changed from elephants to deer. The ancient people understood very well that they needed to adapt and change their hunting methods and tools. And so they did, as we now have evidence that suggests this change in hunting led to a change in the weapons used, requiring much finer hunting equipment that the ancestors eventually developed and crafted. Read the free article.