UConn Researcher Helps Unearth New Information on Early Humans

STORRS, CT — An international team of anthropologists, including UConn researcher David Leslie, has discovered that early humans in East Africa had begun trading – by about 320,000 years ago, much earlier than previously thought – with distant groups, using color pigments, and manufacturing more sophisticated tools than those of the Early Stone Age.

The newly discovered activities, reported March 15 in the journal Science, occur tens of thousands of years earlier – verified using radiometric dating – than previous evidence has shown in eastern Africa, and approximately date to the oldest known fossil record of Homo sapiens.

“The innovation to create these new tools and adapt these new suites of behaviors is likely driven by the changes in the environment these people were adapting to,” says Leslie, a research scientist in the Department of Anthropology at UConn, whose expertise in stone tools helped with the research.

“Developing new tools to extract more resources from the environment is a particularly human characteristic, he added.”

To read more, visit UConn Today. To read the full publication, visit Science.

Photo Credit: Chris Dehnel