Free The Dawn of Human Culture by Richard G. Klein Page A

to Oldowan standards. The cores have a battered look, reflecting Kanzi’s many unsuccessful attempts to strike flakes, and his flakes are mostly tiny and difficult to distinguish from naturally fractured pieces.
    In sum, despite having the best possible human mentor, Kanzi has never mastered the mechanics of stone flaking, and if his products turned up in an ancient site, archeologists would probably not accept them as unequivocal artifacts. Kanzi’s younger sister, Panbanshiba, has now also been encouraged to flake stone, and there are plans to involve common chimpanzees. Archeologists await the results with interest, but the evidence so far suggests that even an especially intelligent and responsive ape cannot grasp the mechanics of stone flaking.

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Oldowan tool makers did much more than flake stones. At Gona, Koobi Fora, Olduvai, and other sites, they accumulated the flakes and core forms in clusters that mark the world’s oldest known archeological sites. Where soil conditions were favorable, the clusters also preserve fragmentary animal bones. The bones commonly come from antelopes, zebras, pigs, and other animals that are far larger than any on which chimpanzees feed, and it is tempting to regard each cluster as a campsite where Oldowan people converged each night to exchange food, have sex, or simply socialize, just as modern hunter-gatherers often do. Such an interpretation may be too far-reaching, however, and the clusters could represent something far more prosaic, like clumps of trees in which individuals congregated to feed in safety.
    So far, no cluster has provided unequivocal traces of fireplaces or of structures that would imply anything more.
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    Cut and bash marks show that Oldowan people handled the bones at their sites, but carnivore-damaged specimens are also common, and this raises the question of how the people obtained the bones.
    Some archeologists argue for hunting or for confrontational scavenging in which groups of people drove carnivores off still-fleshy carcasses. Others argue for more passive scavenging from carcasses that carnivores had largely consumed. In advance, the simplicity of Oldowan technology may favor passive scavenging, but direct evidence is sparse, and naturalistic and experimental observations can be used to support hunting or scavenging. We know, for example, that carnivores largely ignore limb bone shafts that people have smashed, because the marrow is gone and the shaft fragments themselves have little food value. In Oldowan sites, limb bone midshaft fragments from antelopes and other animals often show numerous carnivore tooth marks, and this may mean that the people mainly scavenged from carcasses on which carnivores had already fed. Yet, we also know that carnivore feeding tends to remove the most nutritious skeletal elements first. These are bones of the upper fore limb (humeruses and radioul-nas) and upper rear limb (femurs and tibias) that are especially rich in meat, marrow, and grease. Compared to less desirable parts, such bones tend to be common in Oldowan sites, and this might mean that the people often got to carcasses first and did not have to settle for scraps—
    in short, that they were hunters or confrontational scavengers.
    Passive scavenging could still have been the rule, however, if we assume that Oldowan people favored environments with few hyenas, so that they could scavenge directly from lions or other large cats.
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    obtain numerous marrow-rich, meatless arm and leg bones. Marrow alone, however, provides relatively little food value, particularly when the effort to remove it is considered, and scavenging focused on marrow would provide little sustenance, unless