When We First Made Tools

The tools made by our human ancestors may not seem like much when you compare them to the screen you’re looking at right now but their creation represents a pivotal moment in the origin of technology and in the evolution of our lineage.

Produced for PBS Digital Studios

Super special thanks to the following Patreon patrons for helping make Eons possible:

Katie Fichtner, Anthony Callaghan, XULIN GE, Po Foon Kwong, Larry Wilson, Merri Snaidman, Renzo Caimi, Ordenes, John Vanek, Neil H. Gray, Marilyn Wolmart, Esmeralda Rupp-Spangle, Gregory Donovan, Ehit Dinesh Agarwal, الخليفي سلطان, Gabriel Cortez, Marcus Lejon, Robert Arévalo, Robert Hill, Kelby Reid, Todd Dittman, Betsy Radley, PS, Philip Slingerland, Jose Garcia, Eric Vonk, Tony Wamsley, Henrik Peteri, Jonathan Wright, Jon Monteiro, James Bording, Brad Nicholls, Miles Chaston, Michael McClellan, Jeff Graham, Maria Humphrey, Nathan Paskett, Connor Jensen, Daisuke Goto, Hubert Rady, Gregory Kintz, Tyson Cleary, Chandler Bass, Maly Lor, Joao Ascensao, Tsee Lee, Sarah Fritts, Ron Harvey Jr, Jacob Gerke, Alex Yan

Want to follow Eons elsewhere on the internet?

References:
De Heinzelin, J., Clark, J. D., White, T., Hart, W., Renne, P., WoldeGabriel, G., ... & Vrba, E. (1999). Environment and behavior of 2.5-million-year-old Bouri hominids. Science, 284(5414), 625-629.
Ferraro, J. V., Plummer, T. W., Pobiner, B. L., Oliver, J. S., Bishop, L. C., Braun, D. R., ... & Hertel, F. (2013). Earliest archaeological evidence of persistent hominin carnivory. PloS one, 8(4), e62174.
Gabunia, L., Antón, S. C., Lordkipanidze, D., Vekua, A., Justus, A., & Swisher III, C. C. (2001). Dmanisi and dispersal. Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews: Issues, News, and Reviews, 10(5), 158-170.
Harmand, S., Lewis, J. E., Feibel, C. S., Lepre, C. J., Prat, S., Lenoble, A., ... & Taylor, N. (2015). 3.3-million-year-old stone tools from Lomekwi 3, West Turkana, Kenya. Nature, 521(7552), 310.
Kappelman, J. (2018). An early hominin arrival in Asia. Nature, 480.
Scott, G. R., & Gibert, L. (2009). The oldest hand-axes in Europe. Nature, 461(7260), 82.
Stout, D., Toth, N., Schick, K., & Chaminade, T. (2008). Neural correlates of Early Stone Age toolmaking: technology, language and cognition in human evolution. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 363(1499), 1939-1949.
Tuffreau, A., Lamotte, A., & Marcy, J. L. (1997). Land-use and site function in Acheulean complexes of the Somme Valley. World Archaeology, 29(2), 225-241.
Williams-Hatala, E. M., Hatala, K. G., Gordon, M., Key, A., Kasper, M., & Kivell, T. L. (2018). The manual pressures of stone tool behaviors and their implications for the evolution of the human hand. Journal of human evolution, 119, 14-26.
Zhu, Z., Dennell, R., Huang, W., Wu, Y., Qiu, S., Yang, S., ... & Ouyang, T. (2018). Hominin occupation of the Chinese Loess Plateau since about 2.1 million years ago. Nature, 559(7715), 608.

[Tekrothebountyhunter]

What I find amazing is the archeologists' ability to distinguish early stone tools from random rocks.

[coltonross]

Keep them coming especially these “story of humanity” ones.

[SirSilicon]

I think it is underestimated how much wood early humans used because of the lack of fossils.
I`m sure humans used wooden tools long before stone tools.

I would love to see an Eons episode about that.

[eubalenaglacialis]

There’s also a hypothesis that stone tool treated food require less powerful chewing muscle to handle, which relaxed the selection pressure on powerful chewing muscles. The size of chewing muscle and brain volume are sort of antagonistic, thus smaller chewing muscle enable the evolution of larger brain size. Cooked food may also had similar evolutionary impacts.

[WickedWildlife]

How about a video on wolves and early humans, and how it may have changed both out species?

[bjarnes.]

Progress:
Use Tools to make more Tools

[nevermindoff-]

Thank you! Now, how about when we started cooking, especially with fire, but also other ways of food preservation and preparation?

[grahamscottwright]

Hello I would like to know about the evolution of the nerves, nerve cells

[battman]

Can we have a whole video about synapsids and Protomammals

[OneCutSlash]

I would love to see a video on ancient cave paintings

[davidbuschhorn]

When I was in college I was out fishing and had brought some hotdogs. I seriously made a little stone tool to cut the hot dog wrapper open. It was amazing how well it sliced.

[patrickmccurry]

I tried to make stone tools as a teen. I couldn't get anything that didn't look like random rock debris. Far trickier than it looks.

[sanders]

Damn. We've been looking for tools in oldowan places.

[synonymous]

Can you make a video about the evolution of monotremes?

[diebesgrab]

How about a video on the evolution of fur? Or maybe one on how mammals came to be the only surviving synapsids? We hear so much about the early evolution of dinosaurs or specific groups of mammals from all sorts of sources, but I don’t remember hearing much of anything about synapsids after the permian extinction but before mammals became mammals.

[hollyjacobs]

This is my favorite channel on YouTube, I love it!! I would love to see more about early trees and flora! Thank you for the wonderful content!

[Dragrath]

One issue is the findings of nonhuman animals have made the tool picture quite more complex as not only have "complex tools" been developed by other animal lineages but these stone tool traditions can arise and decline within a species and have multiple times within different primate lineages from what I've read about the emerging discipline of non human archaeology. So we can't really assume a tool came from a human ancestor especially since the vast majority of tools among tool using animals are plant based and thus don't fossilize well. Who knows how many times in the Earth's past animals have used tools without it catching on long enough to become impossible to live without or with the tool users going extinct for one reason or another?


It is also probably important to keep New Caledonian Crows in consideration as they are so far the only other animals known to have evolved a tool manufacturing process to make reusable tools. After all studying independent evolutionary events of tool use should give a less biased view on the underlying sort of conditions that can lead to complex tool development and associated biological adaptations to further drive tool development.

[cynocephalusw]

The central point seems to me: The externalisation of functionality away from the body. This results in new degrees of freedom: for instance portability, disengagement, infinite complexity and in present age the interaction of complex external functionality over great distances by digital electronic means. Its a kind if evolutional supernova exploding right before our eyes.

[Filthnails]

How about an analysis on the Clovis and Deer Cave people? I'm always curious about the obscure ancient hominids and they don't get much coverage as is.

[myusername]

So what happened was, tool making started in Africa and then it was outsourced to China.