Why early humans radically changed their toolkits 200,000 years ago

The decline in the number of huge animals 200,000 years ago may have forced ancient humans to abandon heavy stone tools in favor of light toolkits for hunting smaller animals. That’s according to a new study that supports the idea that the shift to smaller prey may have boosted our ancestors’ intelligence.

For more than a million years, several early human species used similar types of heavy stone tools, such as axes, chisels, scrapers, and stone balls. Evidence suggests that such tools were used to kill and butcher massive plant-eating prey, or mega-herbivores, including the now-extinct relatives of the elephant, hippopotamus and rhinoceros.

Then, between 400,000 and 200,000 years ago, smaller, more sophisticated tools began to appear alongside heavy tools. our kind homo sapiens, appeared in the middle of this period.

Around 200,000 years ago, heavy tools curiously disappeared from the archaeological record in the Levant. Meanwhile, small, lightweight stone tool sets, including blades and precision scrapers, increased in sophistication and variety.

Now, Vlad Litov at Tel Aviv University in Israel and his colleagues found a link between the apparent technological shift and the dramatic decline of large plant-eating mammals at the time, which were likely decimated by overhunting.

The researchers cataloged archaeological finds from 47 known sites across the Levant in the Paleolithic, which spanned approximately 3.3 million to 12,000 years ago. When they cross-referenced all the ancient stone tool artifacts with animal remains from each site, an interesting pattern emerged.

The team found that after 200,000 years, when heavy technology disappeared from the record, there was a significant decline in the relative abundance, number of individuals and biomass contribution of megaherbivores heavier than 1000 kilograms. Meanwhile, the presence and availability of smaller prey increased along with the abundance of more sophisticated small tools.

Strengthening the link between stone tools and prey types, the team also points out that previous studies have shown that heavy tools persisted until about 50,000 years ago in other areas where large prey remained available, such as southern China.

suggested ideas In the past, technological shifts probably occurred because humans were already smarter and more innovative, perhaps due to unknown evolutionary pressures and advantageous genetic mutations. But Litov and his team think the findings support another idea they had previously proposed: that reliance on smaller prey drove the evolution of large brains in modern humans.

“With the decline of mega-herbivores, humans increasingly relied on smaller prey, which required different hunting strategies, more flexible planning, the use of lighter and more complex tool sets,” says Litov. “These challenges selected for enhanced cognitive abilities, meaning that cognition evolved as part of this new adaptive system rather than driving it from the start.”

“I would say there’s more to it than prey size,” he says Ceri Shipton at University College London. He says studies have shown that cognitive changes and more sophisticated planning were already underway in the Middle Paleolithic, with preliminary evidence of mass hunting of medium-sized ungulates, including horses and bison.

Nicolas Teyssandier at France’s National Center for Scientific Research also has reservations. “If humans adapted to the new fauna, it reflects adaptation rather than pure intelligence,” he says. “It was equally intelligent to produce and select high-performance technologies for hunting and eating large mega-herbivores.”

Litov acknowledges that his and other works point to high cognitive abilities already in the early stages of human evolution, especially in Homo erectuswhich appeared about 2 million years ago. However, he argues that the transition from large to small prey had a profound effect on humans. A single carcass of an ancient elephant could feed a group of about 35 hunters and gatherers for months. If such high-calorie resources disappeared, a shift to smaller prey would result in lower yields per animal, he says.

“Energically, they had to acquire dozens of smaller ungulates, such as fallow deer, to compensate for the loss of a single elephant,” says Litov. This may have led to a number of cognitive and behavioral changes, including increased coordinated hunting of elusive prey, the development of more complex technologies, and increased social cooperation and planning. “These requirements may have contributed to the selection for larger brains in later species, including Neanderthals and homo sapiens,” he says.

“My personal opinion is that the decline in the large prey that hominins were accustomed to may have increased competition between groups,” says Shipton. “In fact, it was probably an iterative process where the decline of larger prey led to cognitive change, which in turn allowed access to smaller prey.”

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