As long as 220,000 years ago—far earlier than previously thought—people quarried rocks for their tools in places they specifically sought out. An international research team led by the University of Tübingen has demonstrated this behavior at the Jojosi site in South Africa, challenging the prevailing view that Paleolithic hunter–gatherers collected their raw materials incidentally during other activities. The study is published in the journal Nature Communications.
Evidence of deliberate rock quarrying
“At Jojosi, we found numerous traces of the quarrying of hornfels—a metamorphic shale—including blocks that were tested for their quality, flakes of various sizes, thousands of millimeter-sized pieces of production waste and hammerstones,” says Dr. Manuel Will from the Department of Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology at the University of Tübingen. Hornfels is a fine-grained rock that was frequently used to produce tools in the Stone Age. “People worked cobbles on site here and knapped the material until they had achieved the desired shape from the rock—probably to make tools from it later.”
The researchers almost exclusively found “production waste” here. The absence of both the end products and other traces of activity and settlement indicate that the people of Stone Age Jojosi were solely and deliberately seeking to extract the coveted raw material. Remarkably, they were doing this for tens of thousands of years, at least until 110,000 BCE, as can be seen from the luminescence dating of the finds. Given its great age and long period of use, Jojosi adds new facets to the image of early Homo sapiens, indicating that they planned the long-term acquisition of resources much earlier than previously thought.
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