Human Evolution: Early Humankind'S Stone Tools And Food (The Hunter Gatherer Era)

Throughout the evolution of humankind, there was increased progress of Stone Age technology and hunter gathering. The crucial part of life, food, cannot only exist but it must be retrieved. Therefore, if it wasn't for the technology and the evolution of hunter gathering, then humankind wouldn't exist. There is plenty of evidence to show how the advancement of gathering food was allowed by the existence of certain stone tools and by the realization to gather food.

Paleoanthropologists have done great amounts of research to find out the different stones tools that were used by mankind and to prove their reasons for each. For Orangutan's, we can clearly see that there was no use for stone tools because of their physical characteristics. The foods that they needed were attainable simply by use of their hands and could be eaten by using their teeth and jaws. By studying the skulls of the extant hominoids, we find that they had large nuchal areas and large canines. This means that their jaw and their teeth were their tools in breaking hard bone materials and eating any vegetation. It seems that as the hominids evolved, there was a need to get a greater caloric and protein intake. Therefore, skull sizes changed because bovine or other large grazing animals have walls far too thick for even the great bone-crushing ability of the jaws of the largest and strongest predators, and they needed to find a new way to get meat. Therefore, their skulls changed dramatically to include a higher cranial capacity. By having an increased cranial capacity, this allowed for the more evolved hominids to gain a more advanced understanding of their environment and the foods that could be edible. Additionally, the later hominids wouldn't need to use their jaws to cut into food so their jaw size decreased. Along with their jaw size, their nuchal and canine regions lowered as well.

As the hominids evolved further, they strived to find ways of getting the bone marrow out, and that is how Stone Age technology advanced. Bone marrow was a necessity because the later hominids' diet demanded large quantities of fat and protein. Additionally, the unique packaging of the marrow allowed drawing out the marrow and keeping it for a much longer time. In order to do this, the later hominids created useful stone tools. The hominids used stones such as flint, chert, jasper and obsidian which are all as hard as glass. These stones are not found in surplus everywhere and the hominids wouldn't hand out their tools willy-nilly; therefore, they would manufacture whatever they could from their deposits and attain whatever they couldn't through trade systems within their social structure. Another stone tool was the dawn stone. This was a small tool that had a sharp size and a rough side, needing either to crush the bone or cut the meat. After creating their tools, the next step was to create a flaked edge. This would be done by using a finger shaped bone or antler. Additionally, latter hominids created other tools such