WHO MADE THE EOLITHIC IMPLEMENTS

WHO MADE THE EOLITHIC IMPLEMENTS?

Even after having heard all of the arguments for eoliths being of human manufacture, arguments which will certainly prove convincing to many, some might still legitimately maintain a degree of doubt. Could such a person, it might be asked, be forgi 555t1924f ven for not accepting the eoliths? The answer to that question is a qualified yes. The qualification is that one should then reject other stone tool industries of a similar nature. This would mean rejecting many accepted industries, including the Oldowan industries of East Africa, discovered by Louis and Mary Leakey. When illustrations of the eoliths found on the Kent Plateau and in East Anglia are set alongside those of tools from Olduvai Gorge we do not notice much of a difference in workmanship.

The most reasonable conclusion is that both the European eoliths and the Oldowan tools of East Africa were intentionally manufactured. But by whom? Scientists accept practically without question that the Oldowan implements were made by Homo habilis, a primitive hominid species. It should not, therefore, be completely unthinkable for scientists to entertain the possibility that a creature like Homo habilis might also have made the eoliths from East Anglia and the Kent Plateau, some of which are roughly comparable in age to the Oldowan tools.

But there is another possibility. Mary Leakey said this in her book about the Oldowan stone tools: "An interesting present-day example of unretouched flakes used as cutting tools has recently been recorded in South-West Africa and may be mentioned briefly. An expedition from the State Museum, Windhoek, discovered two stone-using groups of the Ova Tjimba people who not only make choppers for breaking open bones and for other heavy work, but also employ simple flakes, un-retouched and un-hafted, for cutting and skinning." Nothing, therefore, prevents one from entertaining the possibility that anatomically modern humans might have been responsible for even the crudest stone tools found at Olduvai Gorge and the European eolith sites.

The standard reply will be that there are no fossils showing that humans of the fully modern type were around then, in the Early Pleistocene or Late Pliocene, roughly 1 -2 million years ago, whereas there are fossils of Homo habilis. But Homo sapiens fossils are quite rare even at Late Pleistocene sites where there are lots of stone tools and other signs of human habitation.

Furthermore, as described in Chapters 7 and 12, fossil skeletal remains of human beings of the fully modern type have been discovered by scientists in strata at least as old as the lower levels of Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania. Among them may be numbered the fossil human skeleton discovered in 1913 by Dr. Hans Reck, in Bed II of Olduvai Gorge, and some fossil human femurs discovered by Richard Leakey at Lake Turkana, Kenya, in a formation slightly older than Bed I at Olduvai.

It is, therefore, not correct to say that there is no fossil evidence whatsoever for a fully human presence in the lower levels of Olduvai Gorge. In addition to fossil evidence, we have a report from Mary Leakey about a controversial circular formation of stones at the DK site in lower Bed I. She suggested that "they may have been placed as supports for branches or poles stuck into the ground to form a windbreak or rough shelter."

"In general appearance," she wrote, "the circle resembles temporary structures often made by present-day nomadic peoples who build a low stone wall round their dwellings to serve either as a windbreak or as a base to support upright branches which are bent over and covered with either skins or grassy For illustration, Mary Leakey provided a photograph of such a temporary shelter made by the Okombambi tribe of South West Africa (now Namibia).

Not everyone agreed with Leakey's interpretation of the stone circle. But accepting Leakey's version, the obvious question may be raised: if she believed the structure resembled those made by present-day nomadic peoples like the Okombambi, then why could she not assume that anatomically modern humans made the Olduvai stone circle 1.75 million years ago?

Interestingly enough, there is evidence that some of the tools from Olduvai Gorge were quite advanced. J. Desmond Clark wrote in his foreword to the 1971 study by Mary Leakey: "Here are artifacts that conventional usage associates typologically with much later times (the late Paleolithic or even later)-diminu­tive scraper forms, awls, burins ... and a grooved and pecked cobble." We note, however, that tools of the type found in "the late Paleolithic and even later" are considered by modern scientists to be specifically the work of Homo sapiens rather than Homo erectus or Homo habilis. Advanced stone tools also turn up in the European eolith assemblages. We might thus entertain the possibility that ana­tomically modern humans were responsible for some if not all of the Oldowan and Eolithic tools.

Louis and Mary Leakey also found in Bed I of Olduvai Gorge bola stones and an apparent leather-working tool that might have been used to fashion leather cords for the bolas. Using bola stones to capture game would seem to require a degree of intelligence and dexterity beyond that possessed by Homo habilis. This concern is heightened by the recent discovery of a relatively complete skeleton of Homo habilis, which shows this hominid to have been far more apelike than scientists previously imagined.

So where does this leave us? In today' s world, we find that humans manufacture stone tools of various levels of sophistication, from primitive to advanced. And as described in this chapter and the next two chapters, we also find evidence of the same variety of tools in the Pleistocene, Pliocene, Miocene, and even as far back as the Eocene. The simplest explanation is that anatomically modern humans, who make such a spectrum of tools today, also made them in the past. One could also imagine that such humans coexisted with other more primitive humanlike crea­tures who also made stone tools.