From Brian Handwerk:
”A nearly three-million-year-old butchering site packed with animal bones, stone implements and molars from our early ancestors reignites the debate”
The dead hippo represented a stroke of luck to our early human ancestors. Three million years ago, such a huge animal promised an enormous amount of fat-rich food to the group living along the shores of Africa’s Lake Victoria. And the hungry crew knew exactly how to take advantage. Armed with a prehistoric stone tool kit they’d made by hand, they went to work on the beast. They likely cut meat from bone, broke those bones to consume the rich marrow within, and—since the site predates the regular use of fire by some two million years—may have sliced up and pounded the meat into a type of hippo tartare…
And two molars from the extinct hominin genus Paranthropus at the site present a mystery: Just who made and used these tools? The advanced Oldowan tool kit is typically associated with our own genus Homo, the ancestors of modern humans. But the find suggests that our big-toothed, smaller-brained Paranthropus cousins just might have crafted rocks for their use, or co-opted them from Homo contemporaries who also lived in East Africa during this key evolutionary period when the two lineages diverged. – February 9, 2023
The basic difference between any type of human and other animal life forms seems to have been evident three million years ago.
Evident and obviously inconvenient for theory.
The molars?
“It’s weird how Paranthropus keeps rearing its head, or its teeth, wherever there is Oldowan technology,” Potts adds. “What in the world are these Paranthropus teeth doing at the site? We don’t know the answer, and that’s bound to reopen the question of who was the earliest toolmaker.”
Maybe some unfortunate diners lost the teeth to tough meat/bones?
Anyway, the Darwinism on display is amazing: “Common scientific thinking suggests that because Homo had small teeth, they turned to making tools to enhance their ability to process various foods. After all, Homo is the group that ultimately grew bigger brains and became the prehistoric world’s primary stone toolmaker. Paranthropus, on the other hand, used a different method to expand their diet. They developed big teeth and muscular jaws to grind tougher foods like nuts or roots into palatable forms. The two lineages look so different after their split, it seems unlikely that they occupied the same ecological niche. Of course, none of that precludes Paranthropus from also making tools.”
Like Neanderthal Man, Paranthropus is obliged to be stupid for the cameras?
You may also wish to read:
From Frontiers Science News: Neanderthals ate crabs too We are all expected to be slack-jawed in amazement when what we might have expected – that is, if we didn’t buy into that Darwinian Ascent of Man stuff – turns out to be true. We are paying more for Darwinism than we might sometimes think.