7 hours agoShareSaveDavid BraunAt around 2.75 million years ago, the region was populated by some of the very first humans, who had relatively small brains. These early humans are thought to have lived alongside their evolutionary ancestors: a pre-human group, called australopithecines, who had larger teeth and a mix of chimpanzee and human traits.The tool users at Namorotukunan were most likely one of these groups or possibly both.And the finding challenges the notion held by many experts in human evolution that continuous tool use emerged much later, between 2.4 and 2.2 million years ago, when humans had evolved relatively larger brains, according to Prof Braun.”The argument is that we’re looking at a pretty substantial brain size increase. And so, often the assertion has been that tool use allowed them to feed this large brain.”But what we’re seeing at Namorotukunan is that these really early tools are used before that brain size increase.””We have probably vastly underestimated these early humans and human ancestors. We can actually trace the roots of our ability to adapt to change by using technology much earlier than we thought, all the way to 2.75 million years ago, and probably much earlier.” …
