Olduwan
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Olduwan (earlier spelled Oldowan or sometimes Oldawan) is an anthropological designation for an industry of stone tools used by prehistoric hominins of the Lower Paleolithic. The Olduwan is the very first stone tool assemblage in prehistory.
Sometimes they are called "core tools", "pebble tools", "bifaces" or "choppers." These terms have generally been abandoned because they are not accurate or apply to more than one tradition. Olduwan tools are not necessarily cores, pebbles, or bifaces, and comprise more than hand-axes; moreover, those terms could apply equally to Acheulean tools. "Olduwan" is very specific and is preferable by far.
Olduwan tool use was so ancient that it probably did not begin with Homo sapiens. It spanned such a long period that its users comprised a number of species of hominidae, perhaps even more than one genus.
"Olduwan" therefore does not properly refer to a culture, as it must have included many cultures. However, they were all similar or the same and changed very slowly. Some writers do refer to "the Olduwan culture" as a common name. One should also remember that a neo-Olduwan has been created in educational circles of a far different culture than the originals.
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[edit] Sites and archaeologists
A complete catalog of Olduwan tool sites would be too extensive for listing here. Hominid populations were probably never very dense, but the span of time is immense. Moreover, the tools continue to be manufactured for purposes of education or fraud. Archaeologists of the distant future will not know the difference.
The tools are found in many geologic contexts of habitable sites: terraces or banks of rivers and lakes or pools, caves, or just lying around in large quantities on open ground. A curious folk aetiology came to be associated with them. They were called "thunderstones", the supposed results of lightning strikes, or "elfshot", missiles that the elves projected at livestock.
Some of the better known sites are as follows.
[edit] East Africa
[edit] The type site
The Olduwan industry is named after discoveries made in the Olduvai Gorge of Tanzania in east Africa by the Leakey family: primarily Mary, wife of Louis, but also Louis and their son, Richard. This is not the first location where these tools have been found. They had already been turning up in Europe and Asia for some time, under the names of Chellean and Abbevillian.
The region of the oldest tool sites is unquestionably the East African Rift system, on the sediments of ancient streams and lakes. This location is consistent with what we know of the evolution of man. Genetic studies tell us that the human line diverged from the chimpanzee line, and the native territory of the latter is the forests of Central Africa nearby. Fossil chimpanzees have been found in Kenya.
The forests of central and west Africa are a stable environment containing food in abundance. The chimpanzees must have reached an ecological balance with it. There was no need for them to evolve further. East Africa is a land of often harsh and unstable environments, where food cannot just be plucked off the bough. Any animal living there would require and use sufficient variability to evolve into more successful forms. A facility for tool using would be just the right one to vary.
[edit] Omo River basin
The eldest Olduwan comes from the Shungura formation of the Omo River basin. This formation documents the sediments of the Plio-Pleistocene and provides a record of the hominins that lived there. Olduwan begins in levels E and F at 2.4-2.3 MYA.
The tools are never found in direct association with the hominins, but it is assumed a priori that they would be the strongest candidates for tool manufacture. There are no hominins in those layers, but the same layers elsewhere in the Omo valley contain Paranthropus and early Homo fossils. Paranthropus occurs in the preceding layers. In the last layer at 1.4 MYA is only Homo erectus.
[edit] Afar Triangle
Sites in the Gona river system in the Hadar region of the Afar triangle, excavated by Helene Roche, J. W. Harris and Sileshi Semaw, yielded the oldest known Olduwan assemblages, dating to about 2.6 MYA. Recent excavations have even yielded tools in association with cut-marked bones, showing that from the beginning of the production of Olduwan tools they were used in meat processing/acquiring activities.
[edit] East Turkana
The Koobi Fora sites on the east side of Lake Turkana were excavated by Richard Leakey and Glynn Isaac. Among other important discoveries, they found Oldowan artifacts dating from 1.9-1.4 MYA, as well as Paranthropus boisei and Homo erectus from that period.
[edit] West Turkana
[edit] Olduvai Gorge
Even though it is the type site, Olduwan from here is not the oldest. It occurs in Beds I-IV. Bed I, dated 1.85 MYA to 1.7 MYA, contains Olduwan and fossils of Paranthropus boisei as well as Homo habilis, as does Bed II, 1.7-1.2 MYA. H. habilis gives way to Homo erectus at about 1.6 MYA but P. boisei goes on. Olduwan continues to Bed IV at 800,000 to 600,000 BP.
[edit] South Africa
[edit] Swartkrans
The Swartkrans site is a cave filled with layered fossil-bearing limestone deposits. Olduwan is found in Members (layers) I-III, 1.8-.5 MYA, in association with Paranthropus robustus and Homo habilis. The Member I assemblage also includes a shaft of pointed bone polished at the pointed end.
Noticing that Member I contained a high percentage of primate remains compared to other animal remains, which is something of a paradox if you are hypothesizing that H. habilis or P. robustus lived in the cave, C. K. Brain conducted a more detailed study and discovered the cave had been the abode of leopards, who preyed on the hominins.¹
[edit] Sterkfontein
Another site of limestone caves is Sterkfontein, not far from Swartkrans. Member (layer) 5 there, dating from 2 MYA to 1.5 MYA, contains fossils of Homo habilis as well as Olduwan tools.
[edit] The East
Olduwan tools have been found at sites in south west Asia.
[edit] Riwat, Pakistan
Tools from 2 MY BP.
[edit] Kashafrud, Iran
Tools from Late Pliocene-Early Pleistocene.
[edit] el'Ubeidiza, Jordan river valley
Tools from 2 MY BP.
[edit] Europe
[edit] Italy
[edit] Former Czechoslovakia
Tools in ancient lake deposits at Przeletice and a cave site at Stranska Skala, dated no later than .5 MYA.
[edit] Hungary
Tools at a spring site at Vertesszllos, .5 MYA.
[edit] Germany
Tools in river gravels, Karlich, .5 MYA.
[edit] France
Abbeville, 1-.5 MYA. Vallonet cave, Riviera. Soleihac, open-air site in Massif Centrale.
[edit] Dates and ranges
Clearly identified Olduwan tools should not be regarded as evidence of the first use of tools in any way. Many animals use tools, including many of the primates. If you consider the lower animals, it would be very hard indeed to establish a date for "first tool use."
Moreover, the manufacture of stone tools implies a stage in which unmodified stones were used. These also would be difficult to identify; nevertheless, a quasi-tradition of "Eoliths" ("dawn stones") exists for stones thought to have been in this category.
The first clearly manufactured Olduwan tools are dated to as early as 2.6 million years ago in East Africa. Layers from that age can only be dated very roughly; consequently, the 2.6 should be regarded as a rough guideline. The start could have been later, or more probably earlier, nor, unless new techniques of dating are found, is a precise date ever likely to be established.
There is a floruit of Olduwan tools in East Africa, spreading to South Africa, between 2.4 and 1.7 MY. At 1.7 MYA the evidence becomes paradoxical to the previous world view of Stone Age archaeology. The first Acheulian appears at about then. Moreover, it continues on in parallel to Olduwan, sometimes in sites near each other. Acheulian had been supposed to follow Abbevillan. African Acheulian precedes European Abbevillian and there is certainly no sequence of replacement.
A number of solutions are possible and have been offered as explanation. Perhaps different hominins used the two traditions, or the same hominins for different purposes, or the same hominins with access to different stone.
The problem has not been resolved, but it shouldn't concern us too greatly. There are parallel circumstances in the transition to metal, when some people in mining regions used almost all metal implements, while their neighbors in poor regions continued on in the stone age. Tool use is not as simple as a progression of replacements.
At about that time, 1.7 MYA, Homo erectus left Africa and spread to Asia. There is no evidence that such a coincidence indicates the superiority of the hominin or that it was the special bearer of rationality. By that time the other hominins had nearly disappeared, but others were to follow, who would take up both the Olduwan and Acheulian traditions.
At between 1 MYA and .5 MYA Homo erectus entered Europe with Olduwan tools. By .5 MYA, the tradition had been fairly well distributed over the eastern hemisphere. When it stopped being used is unclear. Discounting neo-Olduwan, it is probably safe to say it was mainly gone by .25 MYA.
[edit] The tools
[edit] Manufacture of the tools
To obtain an Olduwan tool, a roughly spherical hammerstone is struck on the edge, or striking platform, of a suitable core rock to produce a conchoidal fracture with sharp edges useful for various purposes. The process is often called lithic reduction. The chip removed by the blow is the flake. Below the point of impact on the core is a characteristic bulb with fine fissures on the fracture surface. The flake evidences ripple marks.
The materials of the tools were for the most part quartz, quartzite, basalt, or obsidian, and later flint and chert. Any rock that can hold an edge will do. The main source of these rocks is river cobbles, which provide both hammer stones and striking platforms. The earliest tools were simply split cobbles. It is not always clear which is the flake. Later tool-makers clearly identified and reworked flakes.
The Olduwan tradition is the first known regular human exploitation of the sharp edge. Complaints that artifacts could not be distinguished from naturally fractured stone helped spark a careful study of the technique. It has been duplicated many times by moderns, making misidentification less likely. Unfortunately clandestine studies had already been undertaken by persons intent on fraud, such as the British swindler, Edward Simpson, or "Flint Jack."
Use of the point is also known from Swartkrans, as a bone shaft with a polished point was discovered there in Member (layer) I, dated 1.8-1.5 MYA. The Osteodontokeratic industry hypothesized by Raymond Dart is less certain.
As to whether these tools can be called "rude" or "crude" is a matter of the archaeologist's value system. Archaeologists of the 19th and early 20th century tended to interpret with some prejudice, as is evidenced by their language. For example, one might have chosen the words "elegant" or "natural" with equal validity. The words "simple" or "complex" can be used with more objectivity, as there is a gradual but clear tendency toward increasing complexity. At the end of the Stone Age, the supposedly primitive stone tools were so fine that they were imitated in metal.
[edit] Shapes and uses of the tools
Mary Leakey classified the Olduwan tools as Heavy Duty, Light Duty, Utilized Pieces and Debitage, or waste. Heavy-duty tools are mainly cores. A chopper has an edge on one side. It is unifacial if the edge was created by flaking on one face of the core, or bifacial if on two. Discoid tools are roughly circular with a peripheral edge. Polyhedral tools are edged in the shape of a polyhedron. In addition are spheroidal hammer stones.
Light-duty tools are mainly flakes. There are scrapers, awls (with points for boring) and burins (with points for engraving). Some of these functions belong also to heavy-duty tools. For example, there are heavy-duty scrapers.
Utilized pieces are tools that began with one purpose in mind but were utilized opportunistically.
Olduwan tools were probably used for many purposes, which have been discovered from observation of modern apes and hunter-gatherers. Nuts and bones are cracked by hitting them with hammer stones on a stone used as an anvil. Battered and pitted stones testify to this possible use.
Heavy-duty tools could be used for wood-working, in the function of an axe. Both choppers and large flakes were probably used for this purpose. Once a branch was separated, it could be scraped clean with a scraper, or hollowed with the pointed tools. Such uses are attested by characteristic microscopic alterations of edges used to scrape wood.
If stone tools were valuable for working wood, they were invaluable for preparing hide. The hide must be cut by slicing, pierced and scraped clean of residues. Hides could be used for clothing, shelters or containers. The rest of the animal also had to be butchered, for convenience in carrying and distributing the meat. Flakes are most suitable for the purpose.
In addition, pointed bones or sticks were probably used for digging for roots and tubers. Wood branches were probably used for missiles and clubs. Branches were woven into shelters or sleeping nests.
Hypotheses on Olduwan tool use have gone past the point of mere guess-work. Lawrence Keeley, following in the footsteps of Sergei Semenov, conducted microscopic studies (with a high-powered optical microscope) on the edges of tools manufactured de novo and used for the originally speculative purposes described above. He found that the marks were characteristic of the use and matched marks on prehistoric tools. Studies of the cut marks on bones using an electron microscope produce a similar result.
[edit] The Acheulian equivocation
The French anthropologists who initiated the study of prehistoric tools defined the Abbevillian stage to precede the Acheulian. Tools were vaguely defined by type, such as "handaxe". With the discovery of an increasing variety of primitive tools, a certain difficulty in defining them appeared. What was the difference between Abbevillian and Acheulian? Scientists were not sure any more. The reader may find considerable verbal backtracking and hunting about in the literature. Anthropologists of the times tended to use date to label an artifact. Early Paleolithic implied Olduwan; middle, Acheulian.
In the late 20th century, discovery of the discrepancies in date caused a crisis of definiton. If Abbevillian did not necessarily precede Acheulian and both traditions had flakes and bifaces, how was the difference to be defined? It was in this spirit that many artifacts formerly considered Abbevillian were labeled Acheulian. In consideration of the difficulty, some preferred to name both phases Acheulian. When the topic of Abbevillian came up, it was simply put down as a phase of Acheulian. Whatever was from Africa was Olduwan, and whatever from Europe, Acheulian.
The solution to the definition problem is stated in the article on Acheulian. The difference is to be defined on complexity. Simply struck tools are Olduwan. Retouched, or reworked tools are Acheulian. Retouching is a second working of the artifact. The manufacturer first creates an Olduwan tool. Then he reworks or retouches the edges by removing very small chips so as to straighten and sharpen the edge. Typically but not necessarily the reworking is accomplished by pressure flaking.
The pictures in the introduction to this article are mainly labeled Acheulian, but this is the now false Acheulian, which also includes Abbevilian. The artifacts shown are clearly in the Olduwan tradition. One or two of the more complex bifaces may have edges made straighter by a large percussion or two, but there is no sign of pressure flaking as depicted. The pictures included with this subsection show the difference.
[edit] The tool users
Current anthropological thinking is that Olduwan tools were made by both Paranthropus and Homo; in other words, all the hominins of the times. In that case, tool manufacture cannot be a genotype tied to a single species. Rather, it reflects some sort of general ability. All the hominins shared in whatever technology was available to them. The concept of general technological advance, in this view, has applications that predate modern man.
This conclusion should not be surprising. Domestic chimpanzees drink from glasses, which they obtain from cupboards, ride bicycles and motorbikes, watch TV, create oil paintings and sign to each other in sign language. If these primates share in our technology, the conclusion that ancient hominins used a common technology is to be expected.
Before sufficient evidence existed to reach the above conclusion, anthropologists tended to seek one, culture-bearing species as the sole innovater of tools. The main candidate was Homo habilis, or "early Homo", who was named "handy" for the facility. H. habilis was perceived to be a more advanced model, so to speak (an analogy with machines), which had the ability to evolve to greater things, leaving the less handy hominins to be dead-ended and extinguished.
In pursuing this track over others, earlier anthropologists were following their own cultural conditioning. One of the prevalent ideas came from rationalist predestination, the seemingly self-evident, but fallacious, idea that the ancestor of modern man was foreordained to evolve, and others were not.
In truth, during the Plio-Pleistocene, there would have been no way to single out a specific hominin as "advanced" or predict that one day his descendants would be us. Events might have turned out some other way. There is no scientific necessity for us to be here, and our being here does not require some special hominin.
The influence of early ideas on race, which spilled over into species (the ancients did not distinguish), also required the presence of a special ancestor. In the former "race" concept, a given type was endowed with inalienable characteristics that were diagnostic of the type. You could therefore identify the type from a single instance. If man is to be defined as a rational animal (and the only rational animal), and culture, including tools, is an aspect of rationality, then there must have been a single type ancestor of rationality. Whatever was not man was not rational.
It was this line of reasoning that led to the search for "the missing link", which Homo habilis was thought to be. Such a view excluded any other animal from culture and tools, but it did leave the scientists open to legitimate criticism from the opponents of evolution: if the other primates and the supposed ancestor of man were not human, they were not rational and could not have been the source of rationality.
There have been some recent controversial experiments to teach chimpanzees and gorillas, such as the celebrated Koko, to sign in American Sign Language. The results are contested. If the apes are really communicating in sign language and are not just gesturing, then they evidence conscious personality and some ability to reason. If they are not signing, there is still the question of their social behavior, which indicates consciousness and reason. Other animals, such as dolphins and elephants, have given similar indications.
There is therefore no scientific reason to deprive other animals of all rationality or to presume that Olduwan tools were the sole property of the Homo line or that the ability to produce them was the special characteristic of only our ancestors. There is reason to think that the ancestor of chimpanzees and men had a facility for tool making: an experimental subject, Kanzi was taught the art of making Olduwan tools, at which he became adept.
[edit] Olduwan Culture
Animals who live in open terrain, as did the early hominins, can be more easily seen by predators and are more subject to predation. Their main strategy of defense is grouping together. Grouped animals can watch each others' backs, sound the alarm, fight together, cause confusion together, forage together and huddle together against the cold. An animal alone doesn't survive long.
One would be hard pressed to find solitary animals on the plains, from mongooses to men. For example, at the first sign of danger, zebras may run off, or they may stand and fight in a cluster with some facing backward, a formation no different in principle from the hollow square of infantry. Nearly all the Primates live and fight in bands. It would be highly unusual if the early hominins did not.
Human societies differ from those of the other primates in being consciously elaborate; that is, in possessing social structures with recognized degrees of consanguinity and affinity. How far did Olduwan hominins go in this direction? Reconstruction over such a distance is difficult, but some evidence does exist. The basis of all mammalian grouping is the kin-selected group. The hominins must have lived and hunted with their kin, as do chimpanzees. Chimpanzees do not recognize their kin as such. The hominins probably did.
The makers of Olduwan tools were mainly right-handed. "Handedness" (lateralization) had already evolved, probably along human lines. The right hemisphere is used for timing, language and control, while the left provides manual dexterity and spatial mapping. Broca's area, where motor control of speech is processed, was more developed in Homo than in Paranthropus, indicating some kind of speech, which is believed to have evolved as a means of social communication.
The users of Olduwan tools lived in communicating bands therefore. This conclusion is supported the large number of bones at many sites, too large to be the work of one person. Nature does not long allow kin-selection for purposes of reproduction, as such practices suppress variability. All the mammals follow some device of exogamy, the seeking of mates outside the band. Bands of early hominins, like the other apes, must have exchanged individuals.
How are the common sites to be interpreted? There are a number of models. In the "home base", "camp" or "central foraging place" model, the hominins foraged by day and camped together by night, sharing out the food and taking care of social necessities. In the "scavenging station" model, they watched together for scavenging opportunities. In the "stone cache" model, they kept stones at convenient locations and retired there for manufacture.
Certain other evidence favors the home base. Heat-blackened artifacts and baked clay at the 20 east site of Koobi Fora, and fire-blackened bones at Swartkrans, both from 1.5 MYA, indicate the possible presence of the camp fire. A circle of stones at site DK in Bed I at Olduvai indicates a possible shelter.
The disposition of the bones allows some question about hominin methods of obtaining meat. That they were omnivores is unquestioned, as the digging implement and the probable use of hammer stones to smash nuts indicate. Lewis Binford first noticed that the bones at Olduvai contained a disproportionately high incidence of extremities, which are low in food substance. He concluded other predators had taken the best meat, and the hominins had only scavenged.
Anthropologists then went through a period of portraying man as scavenger, as well as a murderer, a cannibal and a purveyor of rude crude tools. Scavengers don't stand very high in our value system. Hunting is the more noble way of life. However, other theorists leaped to the defense, pointing out that scavenging is nearly unknown among any living primates. The hominins butchered the animals and probably removed the best meat for themselves. Homo erectus is known to have been a great hunter. If his ancestors scavenged, when did he switch to hunting and why, since it is so much more work? The question remains open.
The animals butchered by the tools include waterbuck, hartebeest, Springbok, pig and zebra. Some of these would be too difficult for individuals to hunt, no doubt. However, the whole point of the evidence is that hominins in action were not individuals. They must have hunted in teams, using the point for something other than digging. There is nothing unsupported about these speculations, as chimpanzees, when they hunt meat, do so in groups executing a coordinated plan, which is familiar to us, because we use it also. Beaters in front drive the prey into a previously arranged ambush.
[edit] Footnotes
- Ironically, many scientists had drawn the erroneous conclusion that Homo habilis was the predator, using Olduwan tools. The higher percentage of primate bones was interpreted as a kind of cannibalism, feeding the imagination of Raymond Dart. Brain discovered that the source of the stripping and chewing of the bones was the leopard. Evidently, the architects of the Olduwan industry were not yet a match for prehistoric predators.
[edit] Sources
- Braidwood, Robert J., Prehistoric Men, many editions.
- Domínguez-Rodrigo, M., T. R. Pickering, S. Semaw, and M. J. Rogers. 2005. Cutmarked bones from Pliocene archaeological sites at Gona, Afar, Ethiopia: Implications for the function of the world's oldest stone tools. Journal of Human Evolution 48:109-121.
- Edey, Maitland A., The Missing Link, Time-Life Books, 1972.
- Schick, Kathy D.; Toth, Nicholas, Making Silent Stones Speak', Simon & Schuster, 1993, ISBN 0-671-69371-9
- Semaw, S., 2000: The worlds oldest stone artefacts from Gona Ethiopia: Their implications for understanding stone technology and patterns of human evolution between 2.6-1.5 million years ago, Journal of Archaeological Science, 27: 1197-1214.
