Article: Retooled ancestors; a group of small-brained creatures who disappeared 1 million years ago may have made and used tools before the direct ancestors of modern humans.

RETOOLED ANCESTORS

Beginning 2 million years ago, an underground cave complex in South Africa known as Swartkrans became a catch basin for dead animals whose remains washed or fell into it. Antelopes, baboons, saber-toothed cats, leopards and early species of hominids, the evolutionary family that includes modern humans, became entombed there. In excavations conducted principally from 1979 to 1983, anthropologist C.K. Brain of the Transvaal Museum in Pretoria, South Africa, and his colleagues found the remains of roughly 130 hominids in a layer of Swartkrans soil that also contained 25 to 30 bone tools and several rudimentary stone tools.

That ...

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