This 1.4-million-year-old hand ax adds to Homo erectus’ known toolkit
Homo erectus, a possible direct ancestor of people today, crafted a surprisingly cutting-edge tool out of a hippo’s leg bone around 1.4 million years ago, researchers say. This find is a rare example of an ancient type of hand ax made out of bone rather than stone, reports a team led by paleoanthropologists Katsuhiro Sano of Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, and Gen Suwa of the University of Tokyo. The tool was discovered at Ethiopia’s Konso-Gardula site (SN: 1/2/93), which has produced stone tools and fossils attributed to H. erectus. Along with a variety of stone tools now recognized at several East African sites (SN: 3/4/20), the bone hand ax “suggests that Homo erectus technology was more sophisticated and versatile than we had thought,” Suwa says. Taken together, these finds show that, perhaps several hundred thousand years earlier than previously known, the H. erectus toolkit consisted of items requiring a series of...