human evolution Tools, hands, and heads in the Pliocene and Pleistocene

Primates are hand-to-mouth feeders that pluck and catch items selectively by hand before ingesting them. Without tools, emergent hominins would have relied on the versatility and strength of their hands to collect food and on their teeth and jaws alone to process it. Unless they used tools to fashion carrying devices such as bags from animal skins, they would have needed a reliable source of water nearby, and they would also have been limited in the types and number of objects that they could transport through their range. In addition to transporting objects and water, there is the more obvious utility of animal skins in protecting against night chills, rain, and strong sunshine.

Sharp-edged stones, even small flakes, would be a boon to early hominins who learned how to select and make them for cutting hides, meat, sticks, and other plant material. Stones also would assist in pounding open hard-shelled fruits and nuts, bones for marrow, and skulls for brains. There may have been a span when early hominins used naturally occurring stones and other objects as tools and weapons, much as some wild chimpanzees do today.

Before hominins controlled fire and either built sturdy shelters on the ground or effectively defended caves and rock shelters, they may have constructed platforms in trees for daily activities as well as night lodging. Raw materials, stone hammers, cutting tools, and sticks and stones for defense could be stored in the trees to be used repeatedly. Handheld rocks, clubs, and long stabbing sticks, spears, or other missiles would constitute a formidable defense, especially if employed from the vantage of a tree platform.

By about 2.6 million years ago, some hominins were making and using simple stone artifacts in eastern Africa. A likely candidate for this practice is H. habilis, though its contemporaries P. boisei and A. garhi cannot be overruled for this distinction. Indeed, at Bouri, Ethiopia, mammalian bones that were cut and pounded by stone tools occur in 2.5-million-year-old sediments contemporaneous with those yielding A. garhi.

Because the earliest stone artifacts were of such simple construction and because chimpanzees, orangutans, and capuchin monkeys today can employ stones, stems, vines, and sticks to extract nutritious morsels from protective covers, one need not expect that early hominin toolmakers displayed modern hand structure and exquisite motor control. Nonetheless, the unique structure of the human hand is readily explained by a substantial history of producing and using increasingly complex tool kits and other artifacts. (Attributing specific advancements in artifact manufacture to the threefold increase in brain size between Pliocene hominins and Homo sapiens is a much more difficult hypothesis to support, as will be discussed later in this section.)

The features of human hands are easily distinguishable from those of the great apes, and they underpin our refined manipulatory abilities. The most complex adaptations of the human hand involve the thumb, wherein a unique, fully independent muscle (the flexor pollicis longus) gives this digit remarkable strength in pinch and power grips. The fingertips are broad and equipped with highly sensitive pads of skin. The proportional lengths of the thumb and other fingers give us an opposable thumb with precise, firm contact between its tip and the ends of each of the other fingers. A special saddle joint and associated ligaments at the base of the thumb facilitate refined rotation. Special configurations of joints at the bases of the fifth, fourth, and second fingers facilitate tip-to-tip precision grips with the thumb. Asymmetry of the heads of the second and fifth palm bones induces rotation of the articulated fingers during opposition with the thumb. Finally, numerous modifications of the small muscles in the hand are associated with fine control of the thumb and fingers.

Australopithecus afarensis is the earliest hominin species for which there are sufficient fossil hand bones to assess manipulatory capabilities. They were capable of gripping sticks and stones firmly for vigorous pounding and throwing, but they lacked a fully developed human power grip that would allow cylindrical objects to be held between the partly flexed fingers and the palm, with counterpressure being applied by the thumb. There are insufficient specimens to assess fine manipulation in Australopithecus, but there is no reason to believe that they were less capable than modern chimpanzees. Chimpanzees and other apes have remarkable precision of grip, even though the tapered thumb tip must be pressed against the side of the index finger and cannot be apposed securely to any of the fingertips.

Hand bones assigned to a 1.8-million-year-old specimen of H. habilis from Olduvai Gorge in northern Tanzania represent an advance over those of A. afarensis in features related to tool use. Tools similar to those found at Olduvai are found associated with H. habilis from other parts of eastern Africa as well. The tips of its thumb and fingers were flat, and there is evidence for a strong flexor pollicis longus muscle and a saddle joint at the base of the thumb. Hand bones arguably assigned to P. robustus or Homo from Swartkrans, South Africa, confirm that by about 1.8 mya one or more hominin species had highly developed thumbs and flat fingertips.

Hominin hand bones from 2.8–2.5-million-year-old cave deposits at Sterkfontein, South Africa, may be evidence that the hands of A. africanus were somewhat more advanced for stone tool use, but no artifact has been found in association with them. Younger Sterkfontein deposits (2.0–1.5 mya) contain stone artifacts and remains of a Homo species.

Because of an absence of fossils, it is not possible to track certain refinements in hand structure that must have evolved in conjunction with innovations in tool manufacture and use during the heydays of H. rudolfensis, H. ergaster (1.9–1.5 mya), and H. erectus (1.7–0.2 mya), as well as H. antecessor (1.0–0.8 mya) and H. heidelbergensis (600–200 kya). Only prehistoric and modern Homo sapiens and H. neanderthalensis are fully represented by hand skeletons.