A pair of hands belonging to an enigmatic ancient hominin that lived around 1.5 million years ago has been found for the first time, revealing that they had gorilla-like strength alongside the dexterity to make tools.
Paranthropus boisei was first discovered by archaeologist Mary Leakey in 1959 at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania. The skull was found alongside a type of stone tool known as Oldowan and it was claimed the species was the oldest known maker of stone tools. But because no hand fossils had been found, anthropologists couldnāt be sure that P. boisei had made them.
Now, Leakeyās granddaughter , a palaeontologist at Stony Brook University in New York, and her colleagues have reported the discovery of a partial skeleton of a P. boisei individual from a site near Lake Turkana, Kenya. It includes a pair of hands, a skull and some feet bones from an individual thought to be male.
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Compared with earlier hominin species, this hand has more human-like proportions and straighter fingers, says team member , also at Stony Brook University. The hand is pretty āsimilar in size to my own, but much more robustā, she says.
It has features similar to both modern humans and gorillas: for example, the thumb and finger bones are similarly proportioned to our hands, whereas other parts of the hand have much more robust bones, indicating the strength of a gorilla.
āShaking hands with this individual would have been noticeably different than shaking hands with your average human,ā says Mongle. āThey would have been much stronger.ā
It is now known that earlier hominins made tools, meaning P. boisei wasnāt the earliest. But Mongle says there has always been hesitation to attribute any Oldowan tools to Paranthropus because the remains of Homo habilis, a closer relative of modern humans, are often found in the same area.
āWhile we donāt have any tools from this new site, the hand shows Paranthropus boisei could have formed precision grips similar to ours,ā she says.
at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, says the find helps fill in some of the many holes in our knowledge of the anatomy of ancient hominins in general, and Paranthropus in particular. He says the most surprising aspect of the discovery wasnāt the similarity to human hands, but the parts of the fossil that were similar to gorilla hands.
āBehaviourally, they must have had some parallels with gorillas, but obviously also retaining some of our own behaviours,ā says Louys.
āGetting a fairly complete hand of a hominin is incredibly rare. The evidence suggests that Paranthropus likely used tools, or at least had the right hardware to use tools, which isnāt too unexpected,ā he says.
āIām sure some people will continue to argue that only our own genus was capable of making more sophisticated lithics [stone tools], and short of finding a hand of Paranthropus clutching an Oldowan artefact, the debate will likely continue,ā says Louys.
together as tools, says at the Australian Museum in Sydney, so it is no surprise that P. boisei appears to have been capable of this. The more important question is whether stone tool-making was part of their behavioural repertoire, she says.
āWhat we can say at this stage is that itās theoretically possible they did perform freehand percussion [hitting stones together],ā she says.
Nature
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