Scientists from the Czech Republic and the United Kingdom conducted simulations that showed that the Olduvai and Acheulean stone toolmaking techniques were probably tens of thousands of years older than previously thought.
The work was published in the Journal of Human Evolution. The Olduvai, or pebble, culture of stone processing is considered the most primitive: to obtain a sharp edge, our ancestors simply split the stone in half, without performing any additional processing. It is believed that this culture arose about 2.6 million years ago and disappeared by a million years ago. The Acheulean culture arose a little later - about 1.76 million years ago - and existed up to 150 thousand years ago. This is the first human culture to leave Africa.
Researchers from the University of Kent (UK), the Institute of Hydrobiology and the University of South Bohemia (Czech Republic) believe that these cultures appeared earlier than they thought. Their findings are important because they extend the time frame of human evolution and technology, associated changes in diet and behavior. For their research, scientists used statistical modeling methods that have recently been introduced into archaeological science.
One, Optimal Linear Scoring Modeling, was developed by two of the team's scientists and initially performed well for determining the extinction time of a species. Therefore, the researchers decided to apply it to the stone technologies of the Paleolithic. According to their estimates, the Olduvai culture is 36-63 thousand years older than it is believed.
And the authors of the work moved the appearance of Acheulean technologies 55 thousand years earlier. According to experts, this means that there are significant reserves of artifacts that are still waiting to be discovered during excavations. “We hope that our method will be widely used in archeology,” they concluded.