Why did hominids create stone tools?
1 Answer
Hominids created tools of all kinds to help them with some task at hand. It doesn't take a big brain to do this. By using tools, they could do better and survive longer.
Even chimps use sticks to get at grubs or other foods. Some chimps use chewed leaves as a makeshift sponge in the same way. Others use rocks to hammer open nuts.
Tool use isn't even limited to apes. Monkeys, crows, sea otters and even octopuses manipulate objects to get what they want.
P. boisei and H. habilis overlapped in time (roughly 2.4/2.3 million years ago to 1.4/1.2 million years ago), so it’s been hard to definitively rule out the possibility that both types of hominids were capable of making stone tools.
The earliest ones come from 2.6 million to 2.5 million years ago perhaps by the hominid Paranthropus aethiopicus.
Even earlier findings think that tool making goes back 3.9 million years ago. And the only hominid species around at that time was Australopithecus afarensis , Lucy’s species.
