The ancient hominid species that includes ‘Nutcracker Man’ may have made tools
Paranthropus boisei, an African hominid that lived between around 2.3 million and 1.2 million years ago, may have strong-armed its way into stone-tool making with a deft touch. That’s the implication of the first hand, arm and shoulder fossils discovered from the same P. boisei individual, say paleobiologist David Green and colleagues. The fossils suggest that this extinct species combined powerful arms suited to tree climbing with grasping hands capable of fashioning stone implements, the researchers report in the April Journal of Human Evolution. P. boisei, a distant cousin to modern humans, lacked a thick, powerfully gripping thumb characteristic of its hominid contemporary, Homo erectus (SN: 3/24/15), a prolific maker of sophisticated stone tools. But the newly described hand bones suggest that P. boisei gripped well-enough to make and use simple stone and bone tools, just as other members of the human evolutionary family may have as early as 3.3 million years ago (SN: 5/20/15). That’s long before the emergence of the Homo genus, which appeared around...