Surprising leap in ancient human technology

tied to environmental upheaval

Sediment core evidence reveals the critical factors that may have
given rise to strikingly complex behaviors some 320,000 years ago,
around the time the first members of our species appeared.

BY MAYA WEI-HAAS

PUBLISHED OCTOBER 21, 2020

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/10/surprising-leap-in-ancient-human-technology-
tied-to-environment/

For 700,000 years, our species’ ancient relatives in East Africa led rather
stable lives, relying on an enduring set of skills and survival strategies.
They made large, simple hand axes from nearby stones, perhaps using
them to slice up prey, cut down branches, or dig for tubers.

But by 320,000 years ago—around the same age as the earliest fossil

evidence of Homo sapiens—these early humans drastically changed their
ways. They began crafting smaller, more nimble points that could fly
through the air as projectiles, some made from obsidian gathered from
many miles away. They collected red and black pigments—substances
later humans frequently used in symbolic ways such as cave painting.

Now a new study in  Science Advances suggests that one major reason
behind this sudden shift in behavior lies underground: tectonic activity
that fragmented the landscape.

Scientists have long pointed to changes in climate, such as the onset of

wet or dry periods, as the key driving force behind the adaptation of our
early ancestors. The new study puts this idea to the test by examining a
detailed record of environmental changes over almost a million years,
etched into a 456-foot-long core of sediment layers extracted from an
ancient lake.
The geologic record of the lake reveals a cascade of ecologic change
around the same time new technologies appear in the archaeological
record. A variable climate and a shifting landscape caused once stable
food and water resources to ebb and flow, likely throwing the lives of early
humans in East Africa into turmoil and forcing them to innovate and adapt.

“Adaptability is, I think, really the crucial hallmark of our species,” says the
study’s lead author Rick Potts, a paleoanthropologist at the Smithsonian
National Museum of Natural History.

Homo sapiens’ flexibility in the face of new challenges may have been a

vital reason the species outlasted other related hominins. What was once
a gnarled family tree of different kinds of humans—Denisovans,
Neanderthals, Homo erectus, and more—eventually dwindled to a single
branch. “We’re the last bipeds standing, as I like to call us,” Potts says.

Of course, many mysteries still remain about the provenance of our

species. As the study authors note, their work cannot pinpoint the origin of
modern behaviors or the location where Homo sapiens arose. But the
research does provide a strikingly detailed look at changes in the ancient
landscape that set the stage for the development of some fundamentally
human behaviors.

‘All chaos broke loose’

The study’s reconstruction of ancient environmental conditions is set in a
basin known as Olorgesailie, in southern Kenya, which was first excavated
in the 1940s by British paleoanthropologists Mary and Louis Leakey. Potts
began work at the site when he joined the Smithsonian in 1985. “I thought
it was going to be about a three-year project,” he says. “It’s now in its third
decade.”

At the time, advances in dating techniques revealed

that Olorgesailie contained a rich array of hominin tools that dated as far
back as some 1.2 million years ago. But as researchers carefully teased
through the layers of sediment laid down over time, they ran into a
problem. “We had 180,000 years that were missing,” Potts says.

Some 500,000 years ago, movement along big fractures remodeled the
landscape. What was once a basin became a high point on the land,
exposing it to wind and water that eroded a blank spot in the geologic
record until some 320,000 years ago. During that interval, Potts says, “all
hell broke loose, and something changed in the behavior of the hominins
in a big way.”

Windows into our ancient ancestors’ lives at this time reveal they were
surprisingly advanced for such an early date. Their tools were diverse and
much more compact, including small triangular stone points that could
have been used as projectiles. “Things start out big and clunky and they
become small and portable,” Potts says of the shift. “It’s like the history of
technology ever since.”

The world around these early humans also transformed. Before the leap in
human behavior, large-bodied animals grazed the region—"lawn mowers
of the Pleistocene," Potts says—including Palaeoloxodon recki, one of the
largest elephants that ever walked the Earth; Theropithecus oswaldi, a
supersize relative of living African baboons; and Hippopotamus gorgops, a
hefty ancient cousin of hippos. But by 320,000 years ago, around 85
percent of the mammal species in this region disappeared, and a
menagerie of modern critters with smaller bodies popped up in their stead.

To better understand the drivers behind the change, the team began in
September 2012 to drill into a flat plain that once contained an ancient lake
near their study site. “It was a lot of guesswork, but we guessed well,”
Potts says of the drilling location.

They pulled up a 456-foot-long core of lake mud, which was riffled through
with layers of volcanic ash that helped pin the segments to specific points
in time. The core spanned a period between roughly a million years ago to
83,000 years ago—including the missing 180,000 years.

The missing time

With a battery of tests, the researchers untangled the complex history of
the landscape, which is punctuated by tectonic unrest. The region is set in
the East African Rift zone, where the continental tectonic plate is splitting
into two chunks. As the land stretches, it thins and fractures, forming new
valleys and hills where there was once a flat expanse—and a key period of
this breakup started some 500,000 years ago, previous research suggests.

The newly formed smaller valleys exacerbated any changes in rainfall,

according to the team's analysis, causing frequent swings between flooded
and dry ground starting some 400,000 years ago. The greenery also
swung wildly between woody and grassy as water availability yo-yoed.
These ever shifting conditions are likely what jump-started the leap in
hominin behavior, Potts says.

“Water availability is key to survival,” says Kristin Krueger, a

paleoanthropologist from Loyola University who was not part of the study
team, via email. “If that changes, organisms have three basic choices:
migrate, adapt, or go extinct.”

With resources scarce or in flux, ancient humans were likely forced to

travel farther away from familiar lands, she notes. “Did that lead to them
discovering different types of resources? Did that lead to increased
cooperation with other groups to survive? Did it lead to advances in
technology to help them eke out a living?” Krueger wonders. “These are
the questions this study is exploring.”

There are many tangles in the branches of the hominin family tree, and the
connections between each seem to grow more complicated as researchers
find more clues. One of the tricky parts of the story at Olorgesailie is the
lack of human remains, says John Stewart, an evolutionary paleoecologist
at Bournemouth University who also was not part of the study team. “You
could have more going on than we can see,” he says.

Studying the ancient ecology in other locations throughout Africa would

help researchers better understand the factors that could have driven
hominin evolution over time, says Isaiah Nengo, a paleontologist with
Stony Brook University's Turkana Basin Institute, who was not involved in
the new study. Nengo is leading a team to look at how similar tectonic and
climatic influences could have shaped evolution in northern Kenya, starting
at a time before the first hominins had even taken shape.

“To have that fine-grained record of data is really cool,” he says. “It could
turn out that they’re onto something.”