EdEarl Posted November 29, 2013 Posted November 29, 2013 From: IFLScience.com A stone-tipped spear has been discovered - and it appears to be 85,000 years older than our entire species. This could mean that Homo sapiens evolved earlier than we first thought or humans and Neanderthals weren’t the first ones to use stone-tipped spears. Either way, the implications are huge. This announcement comes from lead author Yonatan Sahle from the Human Evolution Center at the University of California Berkeley and was published in PLoS ONE. The obsidian spear tip was discovered in Gademotta, a fossil site in Ethiopia that represents the Middle Stone Age. It has been dated as about 280,000 years old, which predates all Homo sapien fossils by about 85,000 years. While it is possible that there are earlier human fossils out there that haven’t been discovered, that is not the most likely scenario. Instead, our predecessor probably crafted the spear tips. While chimpanzees craft sticks as tools and use rocks as tools, no other modern animal, except man, combines stone and wood into a tool.
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