Evidence of stone tool use a million years before Darwinists had assumed. How many advanced spaceage civilizations rose and fell within that million years of unaccounted for technological development?
Science Daily: Oldest Evidence of Stone Tool Use and Meat-Eating Among Human Ancestors Discovered: Lucy's Species Butchered Meat.
ScienceDaily (Aug. 11, 2010) — The evolutionary stories of the Swiss Army Knife and the Big Mac just got a lot longer. An international team of scientists led by Dr. Zeresenay Alemseged from the California Academy of Sciences has discovered evidence that human ancestors were using stone tools and consuming meat from large mammals nearly a million years earlier than previously documented. While working in the Afar Region of Ethiopia, Alemseged's "Dikika Research Project" team found fossilized bones bearing unambiguous evidence of stone tool use -- cut marks inflicted while carving meat off the bone and percussion marks created while breaking the bones open to extract marrow.
The bones date to roughly 3.4 million years ago and provide the first evidence that Lucy's species, Australopithecus afarensis, used stone tools and consumed meat. The research is reported in the August 12 issue of the journal Nature.
"This discovery dramatically shifts the known timeframe of a game-changing behavior for our ancestors," says Alemseged, Curator of Anthropology at the California Academy of Sciences. "Tool use fundamentally altered the way our early ancestors interacted with nature, allowing them to eat new types of food and exploit new territories. It also led to tool making -- a critical step in our evolutionary [sic] path that eventually enabled such advanced [sic] technologies as airplanes, MRI machines, and iPhones."
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