ARCH 131 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Homo Habilis, Foramen Magnum, Phalanx Bone

• School: Simon Fraser University
• Department: Archaeology
• Course: ARCH 131
• Professor: Dennis Sandgathe

Document Summary

Homo habilis seems to be the best candidate for the first stone tool maker since they both seem to appear about the same time in east africa. If this species was the first to be manufacturing stone tools it would have been doing so for perhaps hundreds of thousands of years and so this behaviour would have been subject to natural selection. Consider how you might compare their skeletal morphology to earlier hominids who we know didn"t make stone tools and later hominins who we know did. The ability to manufacture and use different stone tools requires the user to have very particular morphological traits that could facilitate this new learned behavior. If the homo habilis was truly the first species to create and use tools, their bone structure would have very important changes including evidence of bipedalism, and the physiological ability to perform tasks with their hands.