Cavemen Rule, Part
IV: Homo habilis
So, last week (ed.: month!) we talked about Australopithecus, and how over time this genus became more and more
gracile, relying on tools and problem-solving to get access to a variety of
food sources. We even have an assemblage
of stone tools that appear to have been manufactured by Australopithecus, and the astonishing Makapansgat pebble
demonstrates even a flicker of abstract thought. As time passed, some of these creatures
became distinct enough that we begin to refer to them as members of the genus Homo, or “man”, under the premise that
by this point, they had become more like us than like Australopithecus. The very
oldest find that could be reasonably argued to have Homo traits is the unassumingly named “LD-350-1” mandible, found in
Ethiopia and dating from around 2.7 to 2.8 MYA:
So, what were these first Homo creatures like? Well,
at the beginning, they probably weren’t that different from their
australopithecine brethren. They have
been traditionally referred to as Homo
habilis by science, traditionally translated “handy man”. Here’s what they looked like:
There
are a lot of reconstructions out there, of course, but I’m inclined in my
layman’s opinion to favor the ones that look more ape-like, since these guys
were very much a transitional species. It’s
also important to note that by this time, human ancestors probably hadn’t lost their body hair yet, although the process may
have been underway(1).
In
fact, habilis displays so many
archaic, australopithecine features that some scientists are arguing for a new
classification to what they would call Australopithecus
habilis(2). But I don’t really know enough about this
debate to have an opinion on it.
Let’s
talk about what the behavior of these creatures may have been like. A good place to start may be the toolkit they
left behind for us. Nowadays, we refer
to the tools made by Homo habilis as
the Oldowan industry, named after Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge. I remember it like this: the OLDowan industry is really OLD! Dohohoho!
Sorry.
These are the oldest manufactured items that
we have ever found; it cannot be repeated enough that, an unimaginably long
time ago, our ancestors held these very
stones in their hands and fashioned them into crude choppers and scrapers:
Here we
see a typical Oldowan chopper tool. As
we can see, there’s not a lot of complexity to it—it’s really just a rock that
they hit with another rock until they had a sharp edge to work with. Some background knowledge was necessary—the
toolmakers needed to know where, and at what angle, to strike in order to
produce a sharp edge. Regardless, as we
can see, there is a haphazard quality to these tools, and they were made with a
kind of strict practicality in mind.
These objects are functional, not aesthetic, and from this I infer that
their makers probably didn’t give a whole lot of thought to things beyond
simple survival. When I look at these
simple tools, I cannot imagine that, finding myself among a band of H. habilis, I would find myself feeling
much more at home than among a band of australopithicines.
But
even at this stage, there may have been some behavioral quality to these guys
that set them apart from Australopithecus. Their brains were about 50% larger(2),
and while that doesn’t necessarily
mean they were smarter—however “smart” may be defined—they certainly could have
been. This difference in cognitive
ability could have manifested itself as more “pickiness” in selecting rocks for
use as tools, or as more of a tendency toward teamwork in accomplishing tasks,
as opposed to intra-group competition.
Food could have been obtained in more innovative ways, such as by
waiting for predators to bring down an animal, scaring the predators away, and
taking the meat for themselves. On the
other hand, this competition with predators over carcasses may also explain why
habilis, in contrast to later humans,
was a “staple in the diet of larger predatory animals”(3). To me this suggests that they still had a way
to go in terms of outsmarting their predators.
If I were given the opportunity to
observe a living habilis community, I
would do so more as a primatologist than as an anthropologist. Their behavior certainly would have been more
humanlike than that of chimpanzees, but probably not by much. It’s doubtful that one of us could sit down
with a habilis and interact with it
in the same way we interact with one another, even by a long shot.
Safety would be a concern,
too. Primatologists are very rigorously trained in interpreting
great ape behavior before going into the field, because great apes can be
unpredictable and dangerous.
Behaviorally modern humans are the product of millions of years of
social evolution that allows us to be around people we don’t know without
killing each other. Habilis was only beginning this process.
One
very important issue regarding habilis is
where exactly they fit in the story of human evolution. Were they our direct ancestors, or were they
part of an evolutionary line that branched off from ours earlier on? If they are not our ancestors, did they have
descendants who were distinct from us?
The first question cannot be answered now, but in recent years,
incredible discoveries have been made that seem to imply that habilis founded a separate Homo lineage, developing entirely
independently of our own, that persisted to an astonishingly recent date. I don’t want to go any further, because that
would ruin the awesome twist ending, but stay tuned, because it’s gonna blow
your mind.
So
that’s it for Homo habilis. Next time we’re going to talk about Homo ergaster and Homo erectus, two species that would ultimately give rise to our
lineage. We’re even going to look at a
couple specimens of these guys and, amazingly, reconstruct what these
individuals’ lives must have been like.
See you next time!
