These unexpected results may well generate a new understanding of early hominid behavior and will prompt a reexamination of the tens of thousands of animal bones already collected from this time period at Hadar, Lucy's home, and other sites in Kenya and Tanzania."Very often it is breakthroughs such as this that stimulate new and expanded research strategies that promise to significantly enlarge our understanding of human origins," Johanson said.Lead author of the Nature article Shannon McPherron observed: "Now, when we imagine Lucy walking around the east African landscape looking for food, we can for the first time imagine her doing so with a stone tool in her hand." McPherron is an archeologist with the Dikika project and research scientist at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany. He and Alemseged led the Dikika fieldwork.The last place early humans – like Lucy – wanted to be on the African landscape was in a competitive dangerous situation next to an animal carcass, noted Marean.Yet, "these marks are unusual compared to other butchery marks I have seen," he said. "They show a lot of force, a lot of heavy action."Marean framed the research findings as "a spectacular and exciting discovery pertaining to early human evolution." But, while the evidence shows the Australopithecines at Dikika were using sharp-edged stones to crack and strip meat from the bones, it is impossible to tell from the marks alone whether these early hominins were making their tools and carrying them, or simply finding naturally sharp rocks.Many questions remain about the use of stone tools by human Rosetta Stone ancestors and the introduction of meat into their diet."The subtle implication is that in this instance, it was not hunted but scavenged meat and marrow, since the really large animal was almost certainly outside the ability of hominins to kill. This could be a key tipping point in the origins of human uniqueness," Marean said. "One of the big steps in human evolution is when males and females pair-bond, and males provided females with meat. This result may suggest this is happening at this early stage in human origins."Other co-authors of the Nature paper include paleontologists Denné Reed, University of Texas, Austin; Denis Geraads, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris; and René Bobe, University of Georgia.The interdisciplinary nature of the team exemplifies what collaboration between social sciences and physical sciences can produce, noted ASU's Béarat."I believe that, in the coming few decades, major archaeological discoveries are to be expected in the laboratory rather than in the field," he said, advocating for more archaeometric studies, which are like forensic investigations. "In both cases, the scientist is investigating a process or an act. In this case from Dikika, our role was to confirm, using physical/engineering methods, that the act of cutting the bones was old and thus corresponded to our remote hominin ancestor.



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