When We First Made Tools
1,322,887
Published 2019-03-26
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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.
Thanks to Fabrizio De Rossi, Julio Lacerda and everyone else at Studio 252mya for their excellent hominin illustrations. You can find more of their work here: 252mya.com/
Produced for PBS Digital Studios
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References:
humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils/species…
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www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/a-primer…
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All Comments (21)
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What I find amazing is the archeologists' ability to distinguish early stone tools from random rocks.
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Progress: Use Tools to make more Tools
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Keep them coming especially these “story of humanity” ones.
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Damn. We've been looking for tools in oldowan places.
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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.
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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.
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Thank you! Now, how about when we started cooking, especially with fire, but also other ways of food preservation and preparation?
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Can we have a whole video about synapsids and Protomammals
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How about a video on wolves and early humans, and how it may have changed both out species?
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I would love to see a video on ancient cave paintings
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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.
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Hello I would like to know about the evolution of the nerves, nerve cells
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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.
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I just became a patron of PBS Eons.
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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.
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Can you make a video about the evolution of monotremes?
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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!
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So what happened was, tool making started in Africa and then it was outsourced to China.
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Human: makes stone tools Advancement Made!: Stone Age Many years later Human: Plays Minecraft, Also Human: When have I learned this before?
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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.
