Were Stone Age humans the first geologists?
Humans living in what is now South Africa 70,000 years ago possessed a surprisingly sophisticated understanding of the various kinds of rock that made up their world, indicates a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
Not only did hunter-gatherers of the time know how to make finely crafted stone tools, but they understood exactly which rocks would yield the best combinations of ease of shaping and wear resistance for the task at hand, said Patrick Schmidt, an archaeologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany and study coauthor.
“If you want to make something out of something, you choose the right material for it,” Schmidt said. “Those processes were already in place in the Middle Stone Age in South Africa.”
Schmidt and his colleagues looked at various physical properties to quantitatively ...
