http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/7939243/Hail-Lucy-the-new-Queen-of-the-Stone-Age.htmlHail Lucy! – the new Queen of the Stone Age
An archeological find has added a new chapter to the history of humans and could shift the Stone Age back almost one million years.
By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent
Published: 6:00PM BST 11 Aug 2010
Scientists have discovered evidence of the use of stone tools to eat meat 3.4 million years ago – 800,000 years earlier than previously thought.
The find means that our first ancestor to use tools was not Homo "the handy man" Hablis but Australopithecus afarensis, the half ape, half human, nicknamed "Lucy" when her skeleton was found in 1976.
The team led by Dr Zeresenay Alemseged from the California Academy of Sciences discovered two fossil animal bones dating back 3.4 million years that had evidence of being cut and having their marrow extracted with a stone tool.
The find in Ethiopia, close to where Lucy was found in 1976, means that our ancestors first use of technology was nearly a million years earlier than first thought.
"This find will definitely force us to revise our text books on human evolution, since it pushes the evidence for tool use and meat eating in our family back by nearly a million years," said Dr Alemseged.
"These developments had a huge impact on the story of humanity."
His colleague Dr Shannon McPherron, an archeologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, said: "This is pushing the Stone Age back 800,000 years.
"It is profound. We can now picture Lucy walking around the east African landscape with a stone tool in her hand scavenging and butchering meat.
"With stone tools in hand to quickly pull off flesh and break open bones, animal carcases would have become a more attractive source of food.
"We have shown that two key aspects of our evolution – meat eating and stone tool use – took place much further back in our history."
Until now, the oldest known evidence of butchering with stone tools came from Bouri, Ethiopia, where several cut-marked bones were dated to about 2.5 million years ago, generally considered the beginning of the Stone Age.
The oldest known stone tools, dated to around the same time, were found at nearby Gona.
The new fossil bones marked by stone tools, described in Nature, were also found in Dikika, Ethiopia around 250 miles north east of Addis Ababa.
They were found just 200 yards from the site where Dr Alemseged's team discovered "Selam", dubbed Lucy's daughter in 2000, the youngest example of Australopithecus afarensis species ever found.
Both bones came from mammals—one is a rib fragment from a cow-sized mammal, and the other is a femur shaft fragment from a goat-sized mammal.
The bones are marked with cuts that suggest stone tools were used to remove the flesh from the bones and extract the bone marrow.
Radiometric tests showed they dated back 3.4 million years.
Dr Alemseged said the behaviour was a "game changing" event for mankind.
"Tool use fundamentally altered the way our early ancestors interacted with nature, allowing them to eat new types of food and exploit new territories," he said.
"It also led to tool making—a critical step in our evolutionary path that eventually enabled such advanced technologies as aeroplanes, MRI machines, and iPhones."
Professor Fred Spoor, of University College London, hailed the discovery as a new "chapter" in the history of humans.
"It is a major step forward and we have been waiting for this for a long time. We don't have to disregard everything from before but we have to add a new chapter," he said.
