Making silent stones speak : human evolution and the dawn of technology

Two anthropologists explain how they learned to make and use Stone Age tools and how their research opens up startling new theories about the key role of toolmaking in human evolution. 30,000 first printing. Tour.

"Tools are us," assert the authors, anthropologists at Indiana University, referring to the pivotal role that tool making and tool use played in transforming apelike hominids into modern humans. In East Africa, Schick and Toth learned to duplicate and use Stone Age-like tools for woodworking, animal butchery and other tasks. Drawing on this experimental fieldwork and on the fossil record, they conclude that approximately two million years ago, early hominids turned to flaked stone tools as part of a decisive adaptive shift stressing deliberate planning and manipulation of the environment. This development, they argue, set in motion a "circular feedback loop," with advantageous tool use favoring a large brain to plan even more tool use, which in turn fostered social interaction and intelligence. Illustrated with 100 photographs and drawings, this lucid primer is an exciting exploration of the world's most ancient technologies, of human origins and of controversies in paleoanthropology. BOMC, QPB and History Book Club alternates.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From the codirectors of Indiana University's Center for Research into the Anthropological Foundations of Technology: a weighty report on paleoanthropological technology--the study of our earliest ancestors and their use of tools. What Schick and Toth don't know about ancient tools isn't worth knowing: These intrepid researchers have even spent time at bone-dry East African archaeological sites, butchering elephant carcasses with ultra-primitive stone flakes (``imagine cutting through a car tire with a razor blade'') that they fashioned themselves. From such gritty fieldwork and a hundred years of laboratory investigations, anthropologists have pieced together a solid portrait of early humans as ``profoundly technological creatures.'' Schick and Toth survey all the major controversies, including the key question of when tools first appeared (about 2.4 millions years ago) and whether Australopithecus robustus (a line that expired) or Homo habilis (which evolved into us) originated tool-use (the authors plump for Homo habilis). In lively textbook style, Schick and Toth cover the discovery of the Stone Age by 19th-century scientists; outdated theories about Stone Age people (Raymond Dart's killer-ape hypothesis); the dating of fossils; how to differentiate early stone tools from natural products; the nature of Stone Age sites (home base? scavenger camps?); the use of early tools (for hide-working, nut-cracking, bone-breaking, and all manner of hyphenated activity); even the future of technology (is ``self-induced extinction'' our inevitable fate?). What makes us human, the authors assert, is not tool-making per se--mud wasps, sea otters, and chimps make tools, albeit dinky ones--but the interplay of technology and culture, so that, unlike all other creatures, we can truly say that ``tools are us.'' Much like life at a paleoanthropological site: dry and dusty, with sudden eruptions of serendipity. For buffs of early human life, a gift. (One hundred illustrations.) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The authors, codirectors of the Center for Research into the Anthropological Foundations of Technology at Indiana University, Bloomington, display their expert knowledge of stone tools in this account of the origins of the human species. The ability to master stone technology, they argue, was the key factor in the evolutionary success of our hominid ancestors. The authors' interpretations of early hominid tool use are based largely on experiments they performed, including making stone tools with million-year-old techniques, skinning animal carcasses, and leaving tools exposed in the environment for years to observe how they become buried. This book will appeal to nonarchaeologists who wonder just how one can make conclusions on ancient beings' lifestyles based on only a few old stones and bones. Some 100 black-and-white photographs and line drawings illustrate the authors' points. Recommended for academic and large public science and anthropology collections.
- Eric Hinsdale, Trinity Univ. Lib., San Antonio
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.