Free The Dawn of Human Culture by Richard G. Klein

subsequent Acheulean Industry which emerged from it about 1.7 to 1.6 million years ago.
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    Specialists have sometimes defined yet further tool types or subtypes, but even the basic list probably exaggerates the formality of Oldowan assemblages. Anyone who has tried to sort Oldowan tools knows that many fail to conform to predefined types. Individual pieces often have attributes of two or more types, and they can be pigeonholed only after much subjective head-scratching. Gary Larson captured the essence of the problem in a cartoon showing an early human trying to crack a boulder with a roughly shaped stone. In exasperation, the would-be boulder breaker turns to his tool-box-toting assistant and says, “So what’s this? I asked for a hammer! A hammer! This is a cres-cent wrench. Well, maybe it’s a hammer. Damn these stone tools.”
    Archeologist Nicholas Toth of Indiana University has conducted experiments that explain why attempts to pigeonhole Oldowan tools are so frustrating. Toth is skilled at stone flaking, and his efforts to replicate Oldowan core forms show that their final shape depends not on a template in the maker’s head, but on the shape of the raw pebble or other unmodified rock fragment with which the maker starts.
    The result is that experimental products tend to intergrade in shape, just like genuine Oldowan core forms.
    Archeologists have often assumed that Oldowan people were more interested in core forms than in flakes, but Toth believes that the core forms were mainly byproducts of flake manufacture. Butchering experiments show that heavier core tools with long cutting edges and large gripping surfaces can be useful for dismembering large carcasses or for smashing bones to get marrow. But for entering a carcass and removing muscle masses, nothing that Oldowan people made could surpass a fresh lava or quartz flake. And when a flake became dull from use, a butcher could always strike a fresh one and continue on.
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    Cut-marked animal bones demonstrate that Oldowan people often employed stone flakes just as Toth proposes. In their stone working, they mainly focused on sharp edges, and they probably cared little about the final shape of the core.
    By later human standards, Oldowan stone-working technology was remarkably crude, and an observer might reasonably ask if it exceeded the capability of a chimpanzee. The answer is probably yes, based on research that Toth and his colleagues have done with Kanzi, a bonobo at the Yerkes Regional Primate Center in Atlanta, Georgia.
    (Bonobos differ from “common” chimpanzees in body proportions and in aspects of social behavior. They are geographically separated from common chimpanzees in the wild, and they are usually placed in a separate species, although they readily interbreed with common chimpanzees in captivity.) When Kanzi was still an infant, psychologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and her colleagues began to investigate his ability to communicate with symbols, and they found that he was an unusually talented subject. Toth had taught scores of students to make stone tools, and he reckoned that if he could teach any ape, Kanzi was the one. In the spring of 1990, when Kanzi was nine years old, Toth showed him how to strike a sharp stone flake from a core and how to use the flake to sever a nylon cord encircling a box contain-ing an edible treat. Kanzi got the point immediately, but he had great difficulty producing flakes in the standard human way by striking a core with a hammerstone. In his frustration and perhaps to his credit, he soon devised an alternative method: hurling a core against a concrete floor.
    Kanzi sometimes did obtain the sharp-edged pieces he needed, but even after months of practice, neither his cores nor his flakes came 03 Whodunit.r.qxd 1/29/02 5:04 PM Page 74
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