And this is segment 6 of learning module 12. So we left off last time with talking about whether homo erectus could use fire or not in a purposeful way. Of course, there would be lots of advantages to being able to use fire, which would have been a total game changer for homo erectus. But at this point, the evidence is inconclusive. as to whether Homo erectus was really able to employ fire in a purposeful and controlled way. But beyond fire use, probably the greatest cultural innovation for Homo erectus had to be advanced tool use.
And it is presumed that the enlargement of the brain enabled Homo erectus to develop a more sophisticated toolkit than seen in earlier hominids. Now, this early technology was labeled as the Acheulean stone tool industry. Now the most important tool of the Acheulean Toolkit is called a biface, sometimes called a hand axe or a chopper.
It's sort of used universally all these different names and in this picture it's that tool that looks kind of like an avocado for some reason. But it's a fairly large tool, it's usually larger than the hand itself. It's used for all kinds of general purposes, so for chopping and hacking both plant material. and meat. So this would have been that general all-purpose tool that that Homo erectus would have gone to for almost everything.
And what's interesting about the biface is that it is a nodule flint and flint is usually the the stone resource that is most used with stone manufacture because it is a sort of A sort of stone that is hard, but it's not too hard. It has kind of a softness to it that allows for a percussive force to go through it smoothly and cleanly. But it does retain its shape. It's not overly brittle. You can see other stones that are used that like, for example, obsidian is a volcanic glass.
And it's very, very sharp. It holds an edge beautifully, but it is highly brittle. So flint is sort of a more preferred... stone resource for making stone tools because it is sort of soft enough to be able to Use it to make all sorts of Tools and but it's strong enough to hold an edge and so forth So the by faces and it comes from a nodule flint that has been worked on both sides of it to make sharp edges And probably the most important diagnostic feature of the hand X is that this core tool was?
obviously a target design. In other words, the main goal of the tool maker. There is no realistic way.
The two rocks just fell into each other and made the hand axe. A tool maker had to have a concept of the tool in his mind, had to make purposeful strokes, hitting the stone at just the right angle with just the right amount of pressure to break off numerous flakes on both sides to make sharp edges. So to make the Hand Axe required not only the ability to have good mental foresight, but lots of learned skill and superior hand-eye coordination.
Now the best part about the Hand Axe is that it made a good all-purpose tool for cutting, chopping, hacking, both soft and hard materials. And the Hand Axe was really the first purposefully made stone tool used by hominids. But the Acheulean Toolkit often included a couple of other tools that were used in the making of the Hand Axe.
core tools. For example, the scraper. Now the scraper is useful for scraping hides and mostly that. You can scrape other plant materials, for example, but really the main purpose of the scraper is for scraping hides. Now this tells us that there is the ability to make things out of skins.
So animal skins are highly useful, obviously, for protection from the elements for clothing for for Making housing and so forth even for making things hold things like bags for example But there's actually a whole process that has to happen with using hides Before you can actually use it for something effective So when you take a hide off an animal and this is probably going to be way more Information than you ever wanted to know about hides But when you take it off when you first take it off the animal you It has a lot of like fats and blood vessels stuck to it and everything. So it's kind of gross. You have to scrape all of that off, right?
If you leave it on, it'll rot on the hide and it'll make the hide rot in general. So you scrape all of that off if you want sort of hair. leather you have to scrape off all of the fur if you so you have to prepare the hide first but if you leave the hide just like that and let it dry it will dry very very hard you know that stuff that they make like dog bones out of raw hide that's like that unfinished state of hide where if you just leave it to dry it will dry very hard so that does not make for effective clothing So you have to cure the hide in order for it to be effective for clothing or for housing.
And so usually the easiest way to do that is to smoke it. So that would indicate some fire use. But you smoke it, you hold it over a fire, and you then cure it kind of like the way you would beef jerky, for example, and it remains flexible unless it gets wet. Then you have to redo it again. Another way to cure a hide is to...
soak it in a solution of the brains of the animal that the hide came from and water. So you like make a slurry from the brains. You sort of scramble them like scrambled eggs and you put the hide in there and it cures the hide. And so there's a couple of different ways that you can do this, but it's a whole process that has to end.
And there would have been a lot of trial and error to make this happen. And then a burin is a pointed tool. that is good for making holes and in the case of hides you would need to make holes if you are going to sew pieces of hide together so if you're going to use hide to make clothing or to make housing you would need to be able to thread either seeing you or strips of leather through holes that you make using the burin because the leather is too thick and there's certainly no evidence of needles and even if they had needles It wouldn't be effective with leather.
So that's the whole idea that you have to make holes using a burin So all together that the hand X the scraper in the burin altogether makes the Acheulean toolkit that would have allowed homo erectus the ability to process and manipulate all sorts of materials Furthermore the increased efficiency and effectiveness of the Acheulean stone toolkit over the Oldowan stone toolkit that was associated with Homo habilis, you can see this is a much more effective tool and as such would have been able to process a lot more things and it would have allowed Homo erectus the ability to take advantage of lots of different food resources and adapt. to lots of different environments, right? The ability to, let's say, scrape hides or butcher animals more easily would have allowed Homo erectus to take advantage of lots of environments.
For example, cold environments. Remember, we were talking about how we're looking at environments that are highly cold, like northern China near the glacier would have been very cold. So having access to these materials and these...
through the use of these tools was The main reason why we see homo erectus had the ability to expand outside of Africa Now looking at the Acheulean once again These are not hunting tools unless you're throwing a hand axe at an animal which again not very effective It's not a good hunting tool. This is not that's not the purpose. It's it's much more processing so Again, these are not good evidence that there's sophisticated hunting going on, but there is good evidence that butchery is going on, which of course would mean scavenging.
Now, there's lots of evidence that there's the butchering of animal carcasses. We already talked about at Zucodian Cay, there's potentially evidence of that. But a really good site that gives us clear insight into butchery is, oh, here's... how an Acheulean biface handaxe is made where your flakes are taken off of each side. Looking at a site called Olorgesaili, it's in East Africa in Kenya and it's dated to about 800,000 years ago and it has, Olorgesaili has thousands of Acheulean handaxes that were found in association with remains of some very large animals, namely Horse bones and hippo bones.
Now, I know that the hippo sounds like an easy target, but let me tell you, the hippo is, well, one badass. Basically, If you do not want to mess with a hippo because, at least at this point, I think they hold the record for the number of humans that they kill annually. Anyways, horse bones and hippo bones found at Olorgesaili. Now what's interesting is that there are thousands of these hand acts that were left out.
We're looking at probably a large group of people coming together for the purpose of exploiting this particular resource. Likely people were not living in big groups at this time because hunter-gatherers simply cannot the environment cannot hold large groups Usually unless there's some huge food glut like there's something available all of a sudden lots of food for some reason So we're looking at a large number of people coming to take advantage of this but there doesn't seem to be signs of hunting per se plenty of evidence of butchery of scavenging but Not necessarily hunting so for example these horses and hippos could have been let's say mired in sand pits or or even snow for example depending on the environment and Then it was very easy for Homorectus to come in and just take advantage of that situation so what's most likely in the debate over hunting and scavenging is that homo erectus was likely a potential hunter as well as a scavenger scavenging carcasses left behind by other predators or taking over their kills it was very likely that homo erectus was hunting small game fairly regularly merely chasing down larger animals that were either very young or weakened by old age or disease and at this point in time it was probably not very likely that we see extremely complex hunting behavior because the tools that we see homo erectus using you are not particularly hunting tools but rather much more concentrated on processing of food resources. So overall we can deduce that Homo erectus first arose in Africa but more likely than not there was more than one wave of emigration of Homo erectus leaving Africa possibly even several waves.
The earliest migration may have been forms of Homo erectus that still looked very much like Homo habilis or Homo rudolfensis and likely didn't have a very advanced toolkit at all. at that time and then these early emigrating homo erectus is migrated as far as Eastern Europe but the evidence shows they didn't go much further than that so for example what we were talking about with the Dmanisi hominids then there was probably a second migration of homo erectus groups that were more closely related to homo ergaster in East Africa with a bigger brain bigger bodies more advanced to shool in stone toolkit and it was these slightly later erectus groups that widely expanded into North Africa, Southeast Asia, Europe, Eastern Asia, and Indonesia. And it is from Homo erectus that the first anatomically modern Homo sapiens evolved from. All right, so now we've sort of covered all of early Homo and getting into talking about Homo erectus in coming learning modules.
We're going to be talking about what are termed pre-modern humans. And then eventually getting to talking about Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. So we are, we see the end in sight. All right.
Thanks for hanging in there with me. And I hope you have a great week.