The recent release of a paper about Stone Age tool development, co-authored by Francesco Berna, an SFU associate professor of archaeology, has claimed the attention of the archeological community.
The research provides evidence that overturns previous theories about the spread of technology throughout the world by our early human ancestors.
Along with an international research team, Berna found evidence of human occupation and tool use at a 325,000 year old site in Armenia called Nor Geghi 1. Accurate dating of the artifacts was made possible by the site’s location between two layers of volcanic ash.
“We used to think that lithic technology, or working with stone tools, had originated just in Africa and spread from there,” explained Berna. “But our findings show that some technological innovation occurred with different modalities, in different regions, at different times.”
Stone tool production among early humans occurred using two major technologies: the Acheulean technology came first, and entailed hammering rocks together to make a double-sided hand-axe; the later, more labour-intensive Lavellois technology was used to make smaller spear-head-like tools with a standardized pointed shape.
Berna pointed out that, until recently, the two tool varieties had been found either in different sites, or in the same site but stratigraphically separated, with the older Acheulean tools at the bottom. These findings were consistent with the notion that early humans left Africa in two major waves — the first were the Homo erectus, who ventured north into Eurasia with Acheulean tools in their hands. The second wave consisted of a more anatomically modern human, and was assumed to have brought the Lavellois technology with them.
However, the discovery of the more advanced Lavellois technology in Armenia shows that development of this ‘new’ technique had to have occurred there independently, and not simply as a result of human migration from Africa.
“What is striking in Armenia is the timing, because in Africa, their earliest Lavellois [artifact] is about 200,000 years old,” said Berna. Since the Armenian artifacts found are about 125,000 years older than this, it suggests that populations in Eurasia were experimenting with the Lavellois technique around the same time or earlier than African populations.
“There isn’t a centre of origin, or single population that innovated stone technology. It looks more multiregional,” Berna concluded, “When the data [from the site] came together, we knew we had found something important.”
