The remains of a hand Paranthropus boiseidated 1.5 million years ago, revealed that These hominids had grip strength similar to that of gorillas and precision like the first modern humans, allowing them to make tools.
It is known that some hominids from this period they manufactured and used stone tools, but the lack of fossils made it difficult to determine whether P. boisei had the necessary morphological characteristics to do so.
Now, the fossil remains presented by Mongle and colleagues include, for the first time, the hand and foot bones of a P. boisei, whose skull was previously found by Mary Leakey (co-author of this new study), along with Oldowan tools.
The study concluded that the hands of these early hominids share characteristics with both modern humans and African apes.
Specifically, the proportions between The lengths of the thumb and fingers indicate that P. boisei possessed human-like grip strength or dexteritybut possibly without the precision of digital grasping. In contrast, other hand bones resemble those of gorillaswhich may have given P. boisei a powerful grip, useful for climbing.
The findings suggest that the P. boisei may have been able to make and use tools to some extentwhile their grip strength may have facilitated manual food processing (such as peeling difficult-to-eat plants to remove indigestible parts).
In a related article from News & Views, Tracy Kivellfrom the Institute Max Planck of Evolutionary Anthropology Leipzigin Germany, and Samar M. Syeda, from the Museum of Natural History in New York, report that Dozens of examples of cranial and dental remains found in the East African Rift Valley indicate that Paranthropus boisei had a robust jaw with large molar teeth.
Furthermore, P. boisei possessed “a flat face with broad cheekbones and, in some cases, pronounced bony ridges on the skull that would have allowed the insertion of powerful masticatory muscles.” These characteristics, together with the chemical signatures found in dental analyses, suggest that the P. boisei had “a specialized diet of difficult-to-process foods, such as grasses and sedges, that hominids with smaller teeth might not have been able to eat.”
However, due to the lack of fossils, “surprisingly little” is known about the appearance of the rest of the body. Therefore, the fossils presented by Mongle and colleagues are crucial not only for understanding P. boisei, but also “for the reinterpretation of other hominid fossils” that have not yet been catalogued, experts emphasize.