Lower Paleolithic

• 1. Introduction

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  The Lower Paleolithic is the earliest subdivision of the Paleolithic, or Old Stone Age. It opens with a single act repeated across deep time: a hominin striking one stone against another to make a tool. The earliest evidence for that act in the current archaeological record reaches back around 3.3 million years ago. The subdivision runs from that moment until around 300,000 years ago. Inside this enormous span, the human story is barely recognizable at first. The toolmakers are not yet our species. Their diet, their brains, and their range across the planet all change shape over the course of these millions of years. How did scavengers of carrion become active hunters living in large groups? Why did the human brain triple in size? And how did a flake of stone in East Africa end up shaping settlements as far away as southern Europe and southeast Asia? Those are the questions this period answers, one stone tool at a time.

• 2. The First Tools

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  Lomekwi 3, a single site in Kenya, holds tools dated to as early as 3.3 million years ago, discovered in 2015. These finds predate the Pleistocene and fall instead into the late Pliocene, specifically the Piacenzian, pushing the deep edge of human technology far earlier than scholars once assumed. The technology associated with that horizon is called Lomekwian.

  For a long time the oldest type of lithic industry was thought to be the Oldowan, or Mode 1. The Oldowan is now considered to have developed from about 2.6 million years ago, at the beginning of the Gelasian. It was once tied to the emergence of Homo habilis around 2.8 million years ago, but finds of the early 2000s pushed that picture back. The earliest toolmakers may even have been australopithecine forebears of the genus Homo, such as Australopithecus garhi.

  The Oldowan industry remained dominant for nearly a million years, from about 2.5 to 1.7 million years ago. Across that long stretch the early members of Homo produced primitive tools and used them in modest ways. Homo habilis is assumed to have lived primarily on scavenging, using its tools to cleave meat off carrion or to break bones and extract the marrow. That marrow, locked inside bone and reachable only with a sharp edge, hints at how much these crude implements unlocked for their makers.

• 3. Climate And Diet

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  Climate changes in East Africa, tied to the Quaternary glaciation, help explain why early humans changed what they ate. Decreasing oceanic evaporation produced a drier climate. Savannah expanded at the expense of forests, and the fruits that had fed earlier hominins grew scarcer.

  Australopithecus had eaten a mostly frugivorous or omnivorous diet. The shift toward the carnivorous scavenging lifestyle of early Homo followed the shrinking of the forests. Reduced availability of fruits stimulated some proto-australopithecines to search out new food sources in the drier savannah ecology.

  Derek Bickerton, writing in 2009, assigned to this period a turning point in how hominins communicated. He argued that they moved from the simple animal communication systems found in all great apes toward an earliest form of symbolic communication. This new system was capable of displacement, meaning it could refer to items not currently within sensory perception. The driving need, in Bickerton's account, was practical: to recruit group members to help process large carcasses out on the savannah.

• 4. Out Of Africa

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  Homo erectus appeared by about 1.8 million years ago, arriving through the transitional variety Homo ergaster. With it came a decisive change in subsistence. Homo erectus moved from scavenging to hunting and developed the hunting-gathering lifestyle that would remain dominant throughout the Paleolithic and into the Mesolithic.

  Hunting reshaped the body and the social world. The new niche drove behavioral and physiological changes leading to Homo heidelbergensis by some 800,000 to 600,000 years ago. Homo rose to the ranks of omnivorous predators, possibly becoming hypercarnivores before Homo sapiens later shifted back toward a hypocarnivorous diet. As active hunters they came into opposition with other, quadruped predators, and they began living in large groups.

• 5. Flakes And Hand Axes

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  In Europe the Oldowan tradition, known there as the Abbevillian, split into two parallel lines. One was the Clactonian, a flake tradition. The other was the Acheulean, a hand-axe tradition. The Levallois technique for knapping flint also developed during this time.

  Homo erectus was undoubtedly the carrier species from Africa to Europe, and it is more clearly linked to the flake tradition. That flake tradition spread across southern Europe, through the Balkans, and appeared relatively densely in southeast Asia. Many later Mousterian finds of the Middle Paleolithic were knapped using a Levallois technique, which suggests that Neanderthals evolved from Homo erectus, or perhaps from Homo heidelbergensis.

  Monte Poggiolo, near Forli in Italy, preserves an Acheulian littoral handaxe industry dating from 1.8 to 1.1 million years ago. The two traditions did not always stay apart. Flakes and axes coexisted in Europe, sometimes turning up at the very same site, a sign that toolmaking was never a single tidy line of progress.

• 6. The Growing Brain

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  The transition to group hunting and gathering pushed the brain to expand. The advent of technology, together with both verbal and non-verbal communication, enlarged the parts of the brain tied to those skills, and greater cognition followed because they were interlinked.

  Uncertain food distribution forced new mental work. Hominins had to find and secure food and remember where it could be found. Behavioral adaptations to social life and to ecological changes brought about by Homo expanded the brain in areas of problem-solving and memory. Over time this produced great behavioral flexibility, highly efficient communication, and the ecological dominance of humanity.

  The scale of the change is striking. The biological pre-adaptations of the great apes and earlier primates allowed the brain to expand threefold within just 2 to 2.3 million years of the Pleistocene. That growth answered increasingly complex societies and changing habitats, and it set the stage for varieties of Homo more capable than any before them.

• 7. Toward The Middle

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  Homo heidelbergensis appeared about 600,000 years ago, and its arrival heralded new varieties such as Homo rhodesiensis and Homo cepranensis around 400,000 years ago. Homo heidelbergensis is a candidate for first developing an early form of symbolic language. Whether the control of fire and the earliest burials belong to this period or only to the Middle Paleolithic remains an open question.

  In Europe, a type of human appeared that was intermediate between Homo erectus and Homo sapiens, sometimes grouped under archaic Homo sapiens. It is typified by fossils found at Swanscombe, Steinheim, Tautavel, and Vertesszollos, the last known as Homo palaeohungaricus. The hand-axe tradition originates in the same period. Homo heidelbergensis is held responsible for improved Mode 2 Acheulean tool types in Africa after 600,000 years ago. The axe tradition spread east into Arabia and India, but it does not appear in southeast Asia.

  From about 300,000 years ago, technology, social structures, and behaviour grow more complex. Prepared-core technique lithics appear, along with the earliest instances of burial and changes to hunting-gathering subsistence. Homo sapiens first appeared about 300,000 years ago, evidenced by fossils found at Jebel Irhoud in Morocco. The Middle Paleolithic that followed would record the more advanced prepared-core technologies such as the Mousterian.

• 8. Evidence In India

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  Attirampakkam, once part of the Madras Presidency, gives its name to the Madrasian culture, a prehistoric culture of the Indian subcontinent dated to the Lower Paleolithic. The Madrasian belongs to the Acheulian industry, and some scholars now consider the distinction between the Madrasian and the broader regional Acheulian tradition defunct. It is characterized by bifacial handaxes and cleavers, but it also includes flake tools, microliths, and other chopping tools, most of them made from quartzite.

  Robert Bruce Foote, a British archaeologist and geologist, discovered the Madrasian sites in 1863, including Pallavaram near the city of Madras, now renamed Chennai, in the state of Tamilnadu. The oldest tools at Attirampakkam have been dated to 1.5 million years ago using cosmic-ray exposure dating.

  Guy Ellcock Pilgrim, a British geologist and palaeontologist, found 1.5 million-year-old human teeth and part of a jaw in the Pinjore region near Chandigarh. The find points to intelligent hominins of the Acheulean period living there as far back as 1,500,000 years ago. Quartzite tools of the Lower Paleolithic were excavated across a stretch reaching from Pinjore in Haryana to Nalagarh in the Solan district of Himachal Pradesh. Further south, the lands of Gujarat have been continuously inhabited from the Lower Paleolithic, around 200,000 BP, with Stone Age habitation found in the riverbeds of the Sabarmati, the Mahi, and the lower Narmada rivers.