New Delhi, Dec. 27: Archaeological excavations in Israel have thrown up evidence hinting at sophisticated thinking capabilities in stone-age ancestors of modern humans, similar to observations from Karnataka’s Hunsgi valley eight years ago.
The excavations at a site named Gesher Benot Ya’aqov on the shores of an ancient lake suggest that its inhabitants had divided their living space into a dining zone and a work zone about 790,000 years ago. Until now, scientists had believed that the capacity for organising living and work space — a key element of human intelligence — emerged only about 100,000 years ago.
Researchers from Israel, Germany and the US have said the open-air encampment at Gesher Benot Ya’aqov shows that early humans had used the site to make stone tools, butcher animals and control fire.
Scientists can’t be sure about the identity of the stone-age people but one possibility is Homo erectus, a species that reigned from about 1.8 million years ago to about 160,000 years ago when Homo sapiens appeared.
The clustering of the tools and remains of fish, crab and edible plants around two distinct zones in the encampment suggests that they carried out distinct activities at different locations — with the processing of food around a hearth. They fashioned their tools of limestone and basalt a short distance away. The findings have appeared in the US journal Science.
“It’s no big deal for you or me to organise our space, nor was it a problem for people living about 100,000 years ago. But our knowledge of life and ways of people from 790,000 years ago is fragmentary,” said Gonen Sharon, an archaeologist team member at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem.
“We do not know if these people had a language and what else they were capable of doing. But the new evidence from Gesher Benot Ya’aqov shows they inhabited a single space for some time, executing different types of activities restricted to a specific zone,” Sharon told The Telegraph. “This is modern behaviour.”
Scientists trying to probe the lives of the Homo erectus — the earliest human ancestor that learnt to use fire about 1.4 million years ago — are impressed by the findings.
“This is an extraordinary archaeological site,” said Michael Petraglia, at the School of Archaeology in the University of Oxford, who was not associated with these findings, but has explored Homo erectus tool-making sites in Karnataka.
The concentration of food remains such as crab or fish bones around a hearth clearly shows what these early humans were consuming, Petraglia said. “The assertion that this is evidence for advanced cognitive abilities in early humans is reasonable.”
The evidence from Israel is somewhat similar to what Petraglia and his colleagues from India had discovered at Isampur in the Hunsgi valley of Karnataka which is almost of the same age.
The site contained discrete stone tool clusters that archaeologists believe represented the activities of individuals working on stone in different parts of the site. Petraglia’s team had suggested in 2002 that early humans in Isampur had advanced thinking abilities similar to what Sharon and his colleagues have now observed at Gesher Benot Ya’aqov.
The high density of fish remains at Gesher Benot Ya’aqov also provides one of the earliest evidence for the consumption of fish by prehistoric people anywhere in the world, according to Sharon and his colleagues. “We were surprised to see the intensive consumption of fish when the use of marine resources has generally been assigned only to modern humans — about 40,000 years ago,” he said.
The Gesher Benot Ya’aqov gives the earliest evidence of fire outside Africa.
