Scans push back origins of tool use

摘要

Members of the human evolutionary family possessed hands capable of making tools at least 200,000 years before the earliest evidence of stone implements. Fossil hand bones of Australopithecus africanus, dating to as early as 2.8 million years ago, display an inner structure associated with grips needed for wielding tools, anthropologist Matthew Skinner of the University of Kent in England and his colleagues report in the Jan. 23 Science. A. africanus lived in South Africa from roughly 3 million to 2 million years ago.