IMHO, there is still an awful lot we don't know. For example, cooking and other forms of food processing goes back a lot further than what is considered conventional wisdom. I point to jaw size and its associated muscle groups. That started to shrink by Australopithecus afarensis. Now it may be possible that Lucy and her ilk had discovered easy to chew vittles that no other animal managed to discover then or since, but...
I think cooking goes back further than is recognized. It is just that instead of building their fires in handy caves and doing it in the same place over a long period of time, the fires were built in the open. Those wouldn't preserve very well, if at if they moved their site often.
And, as has recently been reported, monkeys can knap flint. That probably isn't a recent development. Now they don't seem to use those flakes, it seems to be a dietary thing, but it isn't a huge step from there to having knives. All it takes is some cuts when handling them and realizing the importance of that. So tool use, over and above throwing a handy rock, may have been earlier than we suspect also. We know that rock throwing goes way back. Our shoulders are heavily optimized for that task. Look at chimps. Despite their superior strength and all, they throw like girls. Ok, I suppose for knocking over lizards and birds, but for things more substantial, not so much.
It looks like Neandertals were able to vocalize just as well as we can. That means it is almost certain that some form of vocal communication preceded Homo. That implies a great deal of social integration, more than has been assumed. So sometime after we split with chimps, but before we split from Neandertals, we developed the basics of vocal communication.
Point being, there is a lot of clues that haven't been incorporated into the theories. It is assumed that a lot of brain power was needed before basic developments happened. That probably wasn't the case. |
