Compared to animals, hominids do not have great speed, great strength, or large canine teeth. There was a time when our ancestors could do less with tools than today’s chimpanzees can. However, in order to survive in particular, tools made them hunters.
Earliest use
Man’s ancestors were at one stage hunter-scavengers adapted to life on the ground. The very earliest use of tools by these ancestors may have received the greatest impetus from the value that threat had against competing species. For example, in a group of not-too-large great apes, an upright monkey will make quite an impression, because it appears taller than the rest when standing. Waving sticks or branches will further enhance this effect. Sometimes this can even be the deciding factor in a dispute with hyenas over ownership of killed prey.
First tool
The ready-made tool (a stick or a stone) has apparently been the only tool for a very long time. It was picked up and thrown away as soon as its immediate usefulness was over. At a certain point, Australopithecus (or its ancestors) began to see more and more clearly the usefulness of certain objects. Due to their usefulness, these objects were kept longer. At some point the Australopithecinae reached the point where they carried them around most of the time. According to scientist Washburn, that would have been the great incentive to walk on two legs. After all, the more you want or have to carry things around, the more you have to walk on your hind legs. The more you walk on your hind legs, the freer you are to carry things.
Development
Stones
It’s easy to find rocks and throw them. Perhaps our forefathers initially did it only to intimidate, but eventually they became increasingly aware of the possibility of injuring or even killing if those stones were thrown hard and accurately.
Bat
It might be even easier to hit with a bat. The great abundance of wood and the fact that wood is softer and easier to work than stone (i.e. until real stone working was ‘invented’) makes it likely that the earliest hominids used a lot of wood in addition to the long bones of some animals.
Worked stone
However, the great triumph of our ancestor as a novice culture bearer lies in the legacy he left us in processed stone. It is pointed out that the majority of the stone finds consist of tools and not weapons .
The stone culture
Anthropologist Mary Leakey has classified the Stone Culture. In doing so, she discovered that there were roughly two traditions of stone working in Africa’s Olduvai Gorge.
Oldowan
The older and more primitive of the two stone workings is Oldowan, which mainly concerns the production of rolled stone tools. Mary Leakey preferred to call these rolling stone tools boulders. This is because when people hear the word ‘rolling stone’ they involuntarily think of something small. Mary’s name ‘fist boulder’ is an improvement, because a number of Oldowan boulders are the size of a chicken egg or even larger, some with a diameter of 7 to 10 centimeters.
The Acheulean
A more developed stone working is the Acheulean stone working. The word comes from Acheuléen, named after the French town of St. Acheul. The characteristic feature of this stone tool is that it has two surfaces. The cutting surface has been more carefully worked on two sides, so that it is straighter and sharper than the primitive Oldowan fist boulder. Moreover, the Acheulean tool has often been completely edited or updated to give it the desired shape, size and weight. The result is the hand axe, the most important tool of the early Stone Age.