The earliest use of tools by our ancestors

During the ice age, much of the northern hemisphere was covered in thick sheets of ice up to 2 miles thick, and life on Earth was either in the sea or in the warmer areas in the south. The earliest part of the planet to thaw was the equator which began around 1.5 million years ago, and during this time a thin but planet-wide circle of livable space began to form. Over the years the ice continued to retreat back to the poles, melting as it went and covering huge areas of land that were once livable in liquid water.

(Tools like these were commonly used until the end of the Stone Age, which was around 3,500 BCE in Britain)

The earliest ancestor we are believed to be directly related to is the Neanderthal which turned up around 500,000 years ago. This is also about the same time that our ancestors realized they could use tools to make their lives easier, so here’s a selection of the best examples of the earliest use of tools by our ancestors.

The sea shell tools of Grotta dei Moscerini

Located in central Italy is a coastal cave known as Grotta dei Moscerini. It is now flooded but thought to have been above sea level up to about 10,000 years ago, and would have made an excellent shelter. It was excavated in 1949 and the team found 171 tools made out of shells, mostly small blades and sharp pointed items. The interesting thing is that the shells they were made from are mostly creatures that live permanently submerged, such as oysters, which means that they possibly knew how to swim and dive short distances.

The world’s first murder weapon

In central Spain sits a mountain range called Sierra de Atapuerca, and within this mountain range is an ancient site called Sima de las Huesos, which means the “cave of bones”. It is a Paleolithic site that contains several Neanderthal bodies that appear to have been murdered and thrown down from the entrance at the top of the cave. All the bodies have been dated to about 430,000 BCE and all seem to have died similarly.

(One of the skulls from Sima de las Huesos)

There’s no way to say for sure what Earth’s first murder weapon was, but the holes in the skulls suggest they were made with a hard blunt object, which was almost certainly stone, but whatever it was appears to have been carved and shaped. This is the oldest known piece of evidence on earth that shows a case of murder.

The first use of fire

It’s one thing to grind a rock on the floor to make it nice and smooth before smashing it over someone’s head, but it’s another to work out how to create and capture a spark to start a campfire. There have been several finds dating around 100,000 years old that include burnt plant matter close to where shaped pieces of flint have also been found, suggesting that from about 100,000 years onwards, our ancestors would regularly use fire.

There is an interesting claim that is widely supported that homo-erectus were able to use fire as long ago as 1 million years ago. There haven’t been any tools found from around this time that suggest they used it often, but small areas of ash have been found beneath the soil as if the occasional campfire was used. It seems very unlikely that a small and apparently controlled fire would have started naturally so many times, which gives credit that somehow, whoever was alive 1 million years ago was smart enough to keep themselves warm.