Erect people, the first representatives of our family, lost the competitive struggle to their descendants because of "laziness" - the inability to make complex tools. Anthropologists who published an article in PLoS One magazine write about this.
“It doesn't seem at all that these people were very tense for any reason. They made tools from the first stones they found at their sites, which is not at all like the older Homo, who purposefully looked for quality raw materials for their tools, says Ceri Shipton of the National University of Australia in Canberra.
Stone Age Conservatives
According to scientists, approximately 3-2.5 million years ago, our ancestors experienced a real food revolution during the transition from Australopithecus to the first Homo. It was accompanied by a noticeable decrease in the size of the teeth, miniaturization of the jaws and contraction of the masticatory muscles, simplification of the intestines and, as shown by isotope analysis of the teeth, noticeable shifts in diet.
The first "product" of this revolution, which did not cause controversy among scientists, were the so-called upright people (Homo erectus) - the most ancient "proven" representatives of our family, who learned to make relatively complex scrapers, choppers and other primitive tools belonging to the so-called "Asheulian" culture ".
One of the mysteries surrounding Homo erectus today is why they practically did not change the manner of making these instruments and did not try to improve them for more than a million years of existence. For comparison, the Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons have invented several "advanced" methods of their development at once in much less time.
Shipton and his colleagues found a simple yet extravagant explanation for this "conservatism" of the first humans on Earth by studying the Homo erectus site, discovered about 30 years ago in the central regions of Saudi Arabia, in a place called Saffakah.
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At the time, as the anthropologist says, the Arabian Peninsula was not covered by deserts, but by river valleys and savannas, on whose territory the first people who left Africa lived.
Saffakah was one of the largest "colonies" of Homo erectus outside the "cradle of mankind" - on its territory scientists have found about eight thousand artifacts, including a huge number of tools.
If the mountain does not go to Mohammed …
Visiting this site, Shipton drew attention to one interesting pattern. All the tools found on its territory by Arabian anthropologists were made of andesite, a solid and dense rock that is difficult to process.
Cobblestones and other large, but low-quality pieces of andesite, as noted by the scientist, were found in large numbers in the territory of Saffakah. Most likely, they were washed out by rivers from the nearby mountains and ended up on the plains where ancient people lived.
This led him to believe that Homo erectus could periodically visit these mountains and collect there smaller, but high-quality samples of andesite, more suitable for the manufacture of complex tools. Much to his surprise, his team could not find a single trace of the ancient Arabians visiting these mountains and using them as "quarries".
Comparing tools from different parts of Saffaqah, Shipton and his colleagues noticed that their number and size were not random - they depended on how far they were from rivers and the degree of destruction of nearby andesite deposits.
At the same time, all the tools were made in the same way and hardly differed from each other. All this suggests that bipedal people did not invest much effort in the manufacture of tools and the search for raw materials for its production.
“Right next to the point in Saffakah that we studied, there were hills where you could find quality stones. But these people, apparently, were “too lazy” to walk in their direction, and they were content with what the river brought. Their laziness and conservatism appear to have contributed to the extinction of this group of Homo erectus at a time when Arabia began to turn into a desert,”Shipton concludes.
