When We First Made Tools

Try CuriosityStream today: http://curiositystream.com/eons PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to http://to.pbs.org/DonateEons The tools made by our human ancestors may not seem like much when you compare them to the screen you’re looking at right now but their creation represents a pivotal moment in the origin of technology and in the evolution of our lineage. Thanks to Fabrizio De Rossi, Julio Lacerda and everyone else at Studio 252mya for their excellent hominin illustrations. You can find more of their work here: https://252mya.com/ Produced for PBS Digital Studios Super special thanks to the following Patreon patrons for helping make Eons possible: Katie Fichtner, Anthony Callaghan, XULIN GE, Po Foon Kwong, Larry Wilson, Merri Snaidman, Renzo Caimi, Ordenes, John Vanek, Neil H. Gray, Marilyn Wolmart, Esmeralda Rupp-Spangle, Gregory Donovan, Ehit Dinesh Agarwal, الخليفي سلطان, Gabriel Cortez, Marcus Lejon, Robert Arévalo, Robert Hill, Kelby Reid, Todd Dittman, Betsy Radley, PS, Philip Slingerland, Jose Garcia, Eric Vonk, Tony Wamsley, Henrik Peteri, Jonathan Wright, Jon Monteiro, James Bording, Brad Nicholls, Miles Chaston, Michael McClellan, Jeff Graham, Maria Humphrey, Nathan Paskett, Connor Jensen, Daisuke Goto, Hubert Rady, Gregory Kintz, Tyson Cleary, Chandler Bass, Maly Lor, Joao Ascensao, Tsee Lee, Sarah Fritts, Ron Harvey Jr, Jacob Gerke, Alex Yan If you'd like to support the channel, head over to   / eons   and pledge for some cool rewards! Want to follow Eons elsewhere on the internet? Facebook -   / eonsshow   Twitter -   / eonsshow   Instagram -   / eonsshow   References: http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/h... http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/h... https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowl... https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowl... https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowl... https://www.nature.com/articles/d4158... https://www.smithsonianmag.com/scienc... https://anthromuseum.missouri.edu/exh... De Heinzelin, J., Clark, J. D., White, T., Hart, W., Renne, P., WoldeGabriel, G., ... & Vrba, E. (1999). Environment and behavior of 2.5-million-year-old Bouri hominids. Science, 284(5414), 625-629. Ferraro, J. V., Plummer, T. W., Pobiner, B. L., Oliver, J. S., Bishop, L. C., Braun, D. R., ... & Hertel, F. (2013). Earliest archaeological evidence of persistent hominin carnivory. PloS one, 8(4), e62174. Gabunia, L., Antón, S. C., Lordkipanidze, D., Vekua, A., Justus, A., & Swisher III, C. C. (2001). Dmanisi and dispersal. Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews: Issues, News, and Reviews, 10(5), 158-170. Harmand, S., Lewis, J. E., Feibel, C. S., Lepre, C. J., Prat, S., Lenoble, A., ... & Taylor, N. (2015). 3.3-million-year-old stone tools from Lomekwi 3, West Turkana, Kenya. Nature, 521(7552), 310. Kappelman, J. (2018). An early hominin arrival in Asia. Nature, 480. Scott, G. R., & Gibert, L. (2009). The oldest hand-axes in Europe. Nature, 461(7260), 82. Stout, D., Toth, N., Schick, K., & Chaminade, T. (2008). Neural correlates of Early Stone Age toolmaking: technology, language and cognition in human evolution. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 363(1499), 1939-1949. Tuffreau, A., Lamotte, A., & Marcy, J. L. (1997). Land-use and site function in Acheulean complexes of the Somme Valley. World Archaeology, 29(2), 225-241. Williams-Hatala, E. M., Hatala, K. G., Gordon, M., Key, A., Kasper, M., & Kivell, T. L. (2018). The manual pressures of stone tool behaviors and their implications for the evolution of the human hand. Journal of human evolution, 119, 14-26. Zhu, Z., Dennell, R., Huang, W., Wu, Y., Qiu, S., Yang, S., ... & Ouyang, T. (2018). Hominin occupation of the Chinese Loess Plateau since about 2.1 million years ago. Nature, 559(7715), 608.