Honing early skills

CHANCES ARE if a pen falls behind a bookcase, someone will use a ruler or hanger to get into the narrow space and pull the pen into a more accessible area. Animals have been known to use tools as well; for example, African chimpanzees will poke sticks into termite mounds to “fish” out the insects and feast on the snack.

Though the chimps’ use of tools can be traced back several thousand years, human use of tools has been traced back more than two and a half million years to the Paleolithic era, when stones were first shaped into sharpened implements.

Many stone tools have been found in Africa and Europe, but archeologists studying Asian sites have been puzzled by the seeming lack of sophisticated stone tools in the region. They know there were people living in Asia and Africa for more than a million years, so they aren’t sure why the groups would have different levels of tool technology.

To help answer the question, American and Chinese archeologists teamed up to find out if the more complex tools from Asia were made from less-durable permanent materials such as bamboo. While the work is still ongoing, they described the results of these early hands-on experiments conducted in a Chinese province in the journal Quaternary International.

“[Bamboo] is one of the fastest-growing plants, represented in over 1,000 species,” the team wrote in their paper, currently in press. “Warmer and wetter intervals during the Pleistocene [a time period that includes the early Stone Age and ended 12,000 years ago] could have created suitable conditions for the dispersal of bamboo through the valleys of Northern China.”

The work describes modern humans’ attempts to make sharp-edged bamboo knives the same way human ancestors might have, and then using the tools to slice meat.

“The importance of experimental archeology, of replicating the production of bamboo tools with simple stone artifacts, was needed for a long time,” said Harvard archeologist Ofer Bar-Yosef, the lead author of the paper, in a statement. “Due to successful cooperation in every stage of the experiments with our Chinese colleagues, we managed to demonstrate the potential of a simple stone tool technology to produce many different daily tools made of bamboo.”

Working with members of the Hunan Provincial Institute of Archeological and Cultural Relics in China, the American archeologists first sharpened river stones using a very old technique called “knapping,” in which sharp pieces of the material are flaked off. With some hints from local bamboo tool makers, they then used the stones to cut down bamboo stalks. The sharpened stones were used as hammers and chisels to shape bamboo knives that were then tested by slicing pork though not pig skin, and weaving baskets from bamboo strips.

In detailing their work for the journal, Bar-Yosef and his colleagues also noted the challenges they faced as people used to modern devices to first learn the art of knapping, and then learn how to use the sharpened rocks and their arms to bring down the bamboo poles for use. There’s a note of pride in the paper as they recount how they were able to make 20 bamboo knives in five hours.

Still, despite the proof of concept the archeologists demonstrated about the potential ancient use of bamboo rather than stone for making tools in Asia, some questions linger. “Preliminary examinations of the cutting effectiveness of our replicated bamboo knives seemed to show that they could not slice through thicker hides,” Bar-Yosef and his colleagues wrote. “One is left to wonder, at least for butchery tasks, why a prehistoric person would go to the trouble of producing a bamboo knife when a stone flake would certainly do the trick.”

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