Homo erectus Fossils and Tools Unearthed in Ethiopia

Africa’s smallest Homo erectus cranium and the various stone tools discovered in Gona, Ethiopia, indicate that human ancestors were more varied, both physically and behaviorally, than previously known.

A Cranium was discovered by an international study team headed by the U.S. and Spanish scientists, including a Michigan geologist university, An almost complete hominin cranium is estimated to 1.5 million years, and a partial cranium dated to 1.26 million years ago, from the Gona study area, in the Afar State of Ethiopia discovered by international study team.

All cranies that are assigned to Homo erectus were associated with simple Oldowan-type (Mode 1) and more complex Acheulian (Mode 2) stone tool assemblages. This suggests that H. Erectus had a degree of cultural/behavioral plasticity that has yet to be fully understood.

The team was led by Sileshi Semaw of CENIEH (Centro Nacional de Investigación Sobre la Evolución Humana) in Spain and Michael Rogers of Southern Connecticut State University. U-M geologist Naomi Levin coordinated the geological work to determine the age of the fossils and their environmental context.

The nearly complete cranium was discovered at Dana Aoule North (DAN5), and the partial cranium at Busidima North (BSN12), sites that are 5.7 kilometers apart. The research team has been investigating the Gona deposits since 1999, and the BSN12 partial cranium was discovered by N. Toth of Indiana University during the first season.

The DAN5 cranium was found a year later by the late Ibrahim Habib, a local Afar colleague, on a camel trail. The BSN12 partial cranium is robust and large, while the DAN5 cranium is smaller and more gracile, suggesting that H. Erectus was probably a sexually dimorphic species. Remarkably, the DAN5 cranium has the smallest endocranial volume documented for H. Erectus in Africa, about 590 cubic centimeters, probably representing a female.

The smallest Homo erectus cranium in Africa, and the diverse stone tools found at Gona, show that human ancestors were more varied, both physically and behaviorally, than previously known, according to the researchers.

This physical diversity is mirrored by the stone tool technologies exhibited by the artifacts found in association with both crania. Instead of only finding the expected large handaxes or picks, signature tools of H. Erectus, the Gona team found both well-made handaxes and plenty of less-complex Oldowan tools and cores.

The toolmakers at both sites lived in close proximity to ancient rivers, in settings with riverine woodlands adjacent to open habitats. The low d13C isotope value from the DAN5 cranium is consistent with a diet dominated by C3 plants (trees and shrubs, and/or animals that ate food from trees or shrubs) or, alternatively, broad-spectrum omnivory.

The ages of the fossils and the associated artifacts were constrained using a variety of techniques: standard field mapping and stratigraphy, as well as analyses of the magnetic properties of the sediments, the chemistry of volcanic ashes, and the distribution of argon isotopes in volcanic ashes.

“Constraining the age of these sites proved particularly challenging, requiring multiple experts using a range of techniques over several years of fieldwork,” said Levin, an associate professor in the U-M Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences and in the Program in the Environment.

“This is a great example of scientific detective work and how science gets done, drawing on a community of scholars and their collective knowledge of the geology of eastern Africa,” said Levin, who co-directs an isotope geochemistry lab that conducts studies of ancient environments using carbon and oxygen isotopes.

Along with the University of Arizona geologist Jay Quade, Levin also coordinated the environmental reconstruction of the Gona sites. At the Gona study area in Ethiopia’s Afar State, H. Erectus used locally available stone cobbles to make their tools, which were accessed from nearby riverbeds. Fossil fauna was abundant at the BSN12 site, but cut marks or hammerstone-percussed bones were not identified.

At the DAN5 site, an elephant toe bone was found with stone tool cut marks, and a small antelope leg bone had a percussion notch, implying that H. Erectus butchered both large and small mammals, though it is not clear whether they hunted or scavenged their prey.

There is a common view that early Homo (e.g., Homo habilis) invented the first simple (Oldowan) stone tools, but when H. erectus appeared about 1.8 to 1.7 million years ago, a new stone tool technology called the Acheulian, with purposefully shaped large cutting tools such as handaxes, emerged in Africa.

The timing, causes, and nature of this significant transition to the Acheulian by about 1.7 million years ago is not entirely clear, though, and is an issue debated by archaeologists. The authors of the Science Advances paper said their investigations at DAN5 and BSN12 have clearly shown that Oldowan technology persisted much longer after the invention of the Acheulian, indicative of particular behavioral flexibility and cultural complexity practiced by H. Erectus, a trait not fully understood or appreciated in paleoanthropology.

“Although most researchers in the field consider the Acheulian to have replaced the earlier Oldowan (Mode 1) by 1.7 Ma, our research has shown that Mode 1 technology actually remained ubiquitous throughout the entire Paleolithic,” Semaw said.

“The simple view that a single hominin species is responsible for a single stone tool technology is not supported,” Rogers said. “The human evolutionary story is more complicated.” The DAN5 and BSN12 sites at Gona are among the earliest examples of H. Erectus associated with both Oldowan and Acheulian stone assemblages.

“In the almost 130 years since its initial discovery in Java, H. Erectus has been recovered from many sites across Eurasia and Africa. The new remains from the Gona study area exhibit a degree of biological diversity in Africa that had not been seen previously, notably the small size of the DAN5 cranium,” said study co-author Scott Simpson of Case Western Reserve University.

“The BSN12 partial cranium also provides evidence linking the African and eastern Asian fossils, demonstrating how successful Homo erectus was.”

In Africa, some argue that multiple hominin species may have been responsible for the two distinct contemporary stone technologies, Oldowan and Acheulian. On the contrary, the evidence from Gona suggests a lengthy and concurrent use of both Oldowan and Acheulian technologies by a single long-lived species, H. Erectus, the variable expression of which deserves continued research, according to the researchers.

“One challenge in the future will be to understand better the stone tool attributes that are likely to be passed on through cultural tradition versus others that are more likely to be reinvented by different hominin groups,” Rogers said.

Early humans feasted on fish in the Sahara Desert 10,000 years ago

A large number of animal remains – including fish – have been discovered in a location in the Sahara Desert by archaeologists, shedding new light on the ancient peoples who once lived there.

According to a study published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, almost 18,000 individual species have been found on recent investigations into the Takarkori rock shelter in the southwestern Libyan Acacus Mountains, of which almost 80% were fish — such as catfish and tilapia.

The fossils are evidence from 10,200 to 4,650 years ago that span much of the early middle and Holocene phase–the current geological epoch. The fossils were mammals (approximately 19%), while the researchers also found a small number of insects, rodents, molluscs, and amphibians.

The researchers say that the animal remains were human food waste given that they displayed cut marks and signs of burning. This has implications for our understanding of the people who used to live in the area, indicating that fish was an important food.

“The key findings are no doubt the fish remains. Although not uncommon in early Holocene contexts across North Africa, the quantity of fish we have found and studied are unprecedented in the central Sahara,” Savino di Lernia, from the Sapienza University of Rome and the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, told LiveScience.

“The study adds fresh information about climate change as well as cultural adaptations. It is particularly intriguing that fish was common also in the diet of early herders.”

“I believe that the quantity of fish remains in the earliest layers of occupation is really stunning. I particularly liked the fact that early herders were quite good fishers, and fish was an important staple food,” he said.

Today, the environment of the Acacus Mountains is windy, hot and extremely dry. But the fossil record here indicates that for large parts of the early and middle Holocene, the region—like other areas of the Central Sahara—was humid and rich in water, as well as plants and animals. During this period, the area was also home to prehistoric humans who left behind several notable rock art sites.

But over thousands of years, the area became increasingly dry and, thus, less capable of sustaining standing bodies of water that are home to fish. This change in the climate is reflected in the study results.

Around 90 percent of all the animal remains dated to between 10,200 to 8,000 years ago were fish. However, this figure decreases to 40 percent for those dated to between 5,900 and 4,650 years ago.

This changing environment forced the hunter-gatherers who once relied on the fish to adapt and alter their diet, with the researchers documenting a shift towards eating more mammals over time.

According to the authors, the results provide, “crucial information on the dramatic climate changes that led to the formation of the largest hot desert in the world.”

“Takarkori rock shelter has once again proved to be a real treasure for African archaeology and beyond: a fundamental place to reconstruct the complex dynamics between ancient human groups and their environment in a changing climate,” they said in a statement.

Listen to the oldest song in the world which was written 3,400 years ago

In the early 1950s, archaeologists unearthed several clay tablets from the 14th century B.C.E. Found, WFMU tells us, “in the ancient Syrian city of Ugarit,” these tablets “contained cuneiform signs in the Hurrian language,” which turned out to be the oldest known piece of music ever discovered, a 3,400-year-old cult hymn.

Anne Draffkorn Kilmer, professor of Assyriology at the University of California, produced the interpretation above in 1972. (She describes how she arrived at the musical notation—in some technical detail—in this interview.)

Since her initial publications in the 60s on the ancient Sumerian tablets and the musical theory found within, other scholars of the ancient world have published their own versions.

The piece writes Richard Fink in a 1988 Archeologia Musicalis article, confirms a theory that “the 7-note diatonic scale, as well as harmony, existed 3,400 years ago.”

This, Fink tells us, “flies in the face of most musicologist’s views that ancient harmony was virtually non-existent (or even impossible) and the scale only about as old as the Ancient Greeks.”

Kilmer’s colleague Richard Crocker claims that the discovery “revolutionized the whole concept of the origin of western music.” So, academic debates aside, what does the oldest song in the world sound like? Listen to a midi version below and hear it for yourself.

Doubtless, the midi keyboard was not the Sumerians instrument of choice, but it suffices to give us a sense of this strange composition, though the rhythm of the piece is only a guess.

Kilmer and Crocker published an audiobook on vinyl (now on CD) called Sounds From Silence in which they narrate information about ancient Near Eastern music, and, in an accompanying booklet, present photographs and translations of the tablets from which the song above comes.

They also give listeners an interpretation of the song, titled “A Hurrian Cult Song from Ancient Ugarit,” performed on a lyre, an instrument likely much closer to what the song’s first audiences heard.

Unfortunately, for that version, you’ll have to make a purchase, but you can hear a different lyre interpretation of the song by Michael Levy below, as transcribed by its original discoverer Dr. Richard Dumbrill.

Rare 3.8-million-year-old skull recasts origins of iconic ‘Lucy’ fossil

The African skull aged 3.8 million years old is giving researchers a peek into humanity’s evolutionary history, a new study suggests.

The discovery explains what the face of a possible ancestor of the species famously represented by Lucy – the well-known Ethiopian skeleton discovered in the mid-1970s – may have looked like.

This thesis has been published in the British journal Nature, which was reviewed by superiors. The fossil cranium represents a specimen from a time interval between 4.1 and 3.6 million years ago when early human ancestor fossils are extremely rare, researchers say.

“The preservation of the specimen really is exceptional,” study co-author Stephanie Melillo, a palaeoanthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, told Nature. The skull was found in just two large pieces, which she says is unfathomably unlikely for a specimen of this age. “We just got really lucky with this find.”

The study was led by Yohannes Haile-Selassie of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. 

According to Nature, the scientists who discovered the skull say it was a male and belongs to a species called Australopithecus anamensis.

That ancestral species is the oldest known member of Australopithecus, a grouping of creatures that preceded our own branch of the family tree, called Homo.

It was also thought to precede Lucy’s species, which is known as Australopithecus afarensis.

But features of the latest find now suggest that the new fossil’s species shared the prehistoric Ethiopian landscape with Lucy’s species, for at least 100,000 years, the study authors say. This hints that the early evolutionary tree was more complicated than scientists had thought, Nature said.

This overlap challenges the widely-accepted idea of a linear transition between these two early human ancestors. “This is a game-changer in our understanding of human evolution during the Pliocene,” Haile-Selassie said.

“What we’ve known about Australopithecus anamensis so far was limited to isolated jaw fragments and teeth,” he said during a press conference. “We didn’t have any remains of the face or the cranium except for one small fragment near the ear region.”

The age of the fossil was determined to be 3.8 million years old and was done by dating minerals in layers of volcanic rocks nearby.

The fossil was found in 2016, in what was once sand deposited in a river delta on the shore of a lake in Woranso-Mille in Ethiopia. “I couldn’t believe my eyes when I spotted the rest of the cranium. It was a eureka moment and a dream come true,” said Haile-Selassie.

Experts unconnected to the new study praised the work. Eric Delson of Lehman College in New York called the fossil “beautiful” and said the researchers did an impressive job of reconstructing it digitally to help determine its place in the evolutionary tree.