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| © Trustees of the British Museum |
Wednesday, January 11th's object was the Olduvai Stone Chopping Tool.
To listen to the full BBC recording, click here.
This chopping tool is the oldest man-made object in the British Musuem. This object dates back between 1.8 to 2 million years ago.
This object was found in the Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, Africa.
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| © Trustees of the British Museum |
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| © Trustees of the British Museum |
This chopping tool is the oldest humanly made object in the British Museum. It could be used for many purposes including chopping bones, plants and wood. By using a stone hammer to knock flakes off of a pebble our ancestors could make a tool with a sharp, functional edge. Olduvai is part of the great East African Rift Valley torn open by massive earthquakes. Many skulls and bones of our early ancestors have been found along this valley.
Can we be human without objects?
The creating of this tool is one of the most important moments in human history. The ability to make tools allowed humans to adapt to new environments and become superior to animals. All modern technology began with these first chopping tools.
This stone tells two stories: one about the fossil ancestor who made the tool and the other about the fossil hunter who found it. Is it having objects that makes us human?
The ancestor and the archaeologist are separated by almost two million years. They are similar because both walked upright and used tools. However, they differ greatly in the size of their brains and the sophistication of their technology. So are they both human?
Louis Leakey, the flamboyant Kenyan-born fossil hunter and champion of the importance of Africa for human evolution, was 28 when he found this stone tool. Not everyone believed that they were ancient artefacts and he had to wait another thirty years before it could be scientifically proven.
At the time, he claimed that these ancient Olduvai people, for whom 28 was a ripe old age, were our ancestors because they had things, like this tool. But crows, sea otters, monkeys and apes all make and use tools and we don’t call them human. In fact, these ancestors had brains not much larger than a chimpanzee – almost three times smaller than our own. So, if it wasn’t big brains that made us tool users or tools alone that made us human, was it our minds and imagination?
But how can a stone tool help us to understand the extent of the human mind? Certainly, it cannot tell us about a capacity for language or a passion of religious beliefs. However, the action of flaking the stone repeatedly to create a sharp-edged tool points to other imaginative powers - appreciating the properties of materials, predicting the outcome of physical actions, and understanding that an alternative point of view exists other than your own and acting accordingly. In other words our ancestors had an understanding of how other minds work, something no animal has and which children develop by the age of four.
To complete Leakey’s tale, his discoveries were questioned and his long search for our African origins, as predicted by Darwin, went on and on. His task was to convince others and eventually he triumphed. That was his story.
The toolmaker had other concerns to deal with. As this simple tool shows, he or she was just beginning to appreciate the potential of being human, moving beyond the mental ability of apes and crows and into the foothills of the human imagination. Brains are needed to make objects. But two million years ago a new story began that married brains to objects in such a way that together the human mind evolved
For more information, see the BBC website.
-VB
