Châtelperronian
The Châtelperronian is a claimed industry of the Upper Palaeolithic, the existence of, debated. It represents both the only Upper Palaeolithic industry made by Neanderthals and the earliest Upper Palaeolithic industry in Central and Southwestern France, as well as in Northern Spain, it derives its name from the site of la Grotte des Fées, in Châtelperron, France. It is preceded by the Mousterian industry, lasted from c. 45,000 to c. 40,000 BP. The industry produced denticulate stone tools and a distinctive flint knife with a single cutting edge and a blunt, curved back; the use of ivory at Châtelperronian sites appears to be more frequent than that of the Aurignacian, while antler tools have not been found. It is followed by the Aurignacian industry. Scholars who question its existence claim that it is an archaeological mix of Mousterian and Aurignacian layers; the Châtelperronian industry may relate to the origins of the similar Gravettian culture. French archaeologists have traditionally classified both cultures together under the name Périgordian, Early Perigordian being equivalent to the Châtelperronian and all the other phases corresponding to the Gravettian, though this scheme is not used by Anglophone authors.
Large thick flakes/small blocks were used for cores, were prepared with a crest over a long smooth surface. Using one or two striking points, long thin blades were detached. Direct percussion with a soft hammer was used for accuracy. Thicker blades made in this process were converted into side scrapers, burins were created in the same manner from debitage as well; the manner of production is a solid continuation of the Mousterian but the ivory adornments found in association are similar to those made by the Aurignacian. The technological refinement of the Châtelperronian and neighbouring Uluzzian in Central-Southern Italy is argued to be the product of cultural influence from H. sapiens that lived nearby. João Zilhão and colleagues argue that the findings are complicated by disturbance of the site in the 19th century, conclude that the apparent pattern of Aurignacian/Châtelperronian inter-stratification is an artifact of disturbance. While others think the Châtelperronian itself is an artifact of disturbance.
Paul Mellars and colleagues have criticized Zilhão et al.'s analysis, argue that the original excavation by Delporte was not affected by disturbance. Paul Mellars, now has concluded on the basis of new radiocarbon dating by Thomas Higham of the decorative artifacts of Grotte du Renne "that there was strong possibility—if not probability— that were stratigraphically intrusive into the Châtelperronian deposits from.. Overlying Proto-Aurignacian levels" and that "The central and inescapable implication of the new dating results from the Grotte du Renne is that the single most impressive and hitherto cited pillar of evidence for the presence of complex “symbolic” behavior among the late Neanderthal populations in Europe has now collapsed." Subsequent research led by Jean-Jacques Hublin argues using new dates that the Châtelperronian tools were produced by Neanderthals. Unlike Higham's dates, which were taken directly from the decorative material, Hublin's were taken from associated bones. To Higham, dates taken directly from the decorative material are more convincing and should be given priority over those from associated material.
To Hublin, Higham's dates were contaminated with varnish applied to the decorative material in the 1960s. Hublin's team subsequently used proteomic evidence to support their conclusion. Author Jared Diamond argues in his 1991 non-fiction book, The Third Chimpanzee, that Châtelperron may represent a community of Neanderthals who had to some extent adopted the culture of the modern Homo sapiens that had established themselves in the surrounding area, which would account for the signs of a hybrid culture found at the site. Diamond compares these hypothetical Neanderthal hold-outs to more recent Native Americans in North and South America who adopted European technologies such as firearms or domestication of horses in order to survive in an environment dominated by technologically more-advanced competitors; the fifth book of Jean Auel's Earth's Children series, The Shelters of Stone, 2002, the sixth book The Land of the Painted Caves 2010 are set in this region of modern-day France, during this period.
Franco-Cantabrian region Picture Gallery of the Paleolithic, Libor Balák at the Czech Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Archaeology in Brno, The Center for Paleolithic and Paleoethnological Research
Stone tool
A stone tool is, in the most general sense, any tool made either or out of stone. Although stone tool-dependent societies and cultures still exist today, most stone tools are associated with prehistoric cultures that have become extinct. Archaeologists study such prehistoric societies, refer to the study of stone tools as lithic analysis. Ethnoarchaeology has been a valuable research field in order to further the understanding and cultural implications of stone tool use and manufacture. Stone has been used to make a wide variety of different tools throughout history, including arrow heads and querns. Stone tools may be made of either ground stone or chipped stone, a person who creates tools out of the latter is known as a flintknapper. Chipped stone tools are made from cryptocrystalline materials such as chert or flint, chalcedony, obsidian and quartzite via a process known as lithic reduction. One simple form of reduction is to strike stone flakes from a nucleus of material using a hammerstone or similar hard hammer fabricator.
If the goal of the reduction strategy is to produce flakes, the remnant lithic core may be discarded once it has become too small to use. In some strategies, however, a flintknapper reduces the core to a rough unifacial or bifacial preform, further reduced using soft hammer flaking techniques or by pressure flaking the edges. More complex forms of reduction include the production of standardized blades, which can be fashioned into a variety of tools such as scrapers, knives and microliths. In general terms, chipped stone tools are nearly ubiquitous in all pre-metal-using societies because they are manufactured, the tool stone is plentiful, they are easy to transport and sharpen. Archaeologists classify stone tools into industries that share distinctive technological or morphological characteristics. In 1969 in the 2nd edition of World Prehistory, Grahame Clark proposed an evolutionary progression of flint-knapping in which the "dominant lithic technologies" occurred in a fixed sequence from Mode 1 through Mode 5.
He assigned to them relative dates: Modes 1 and 2 to the Lower Palaeolithic, 3 to the Middle Palaeolithic, 4 to the Advanced and 5 to the Mesolithic. They were not to be conceived, however, as either universal—that is, they did not account for all lithic technology. Mode 1, for example, was in use in Europe. Clark's scheme was adopted enthusiastically by the archaeological community. One of its advantages was the simplicity of terminology; the transitions are of greatest interest. In the literature the stone tools used in the period of the Palaeolithic are divided into four "modes", each of which designate a different form of complexity, which in most cases followed a rough chronological order. KenyaStone tools found from 2011 to 2014 at Lake Turkana in Kenya, are dated to be 3.3 million years old, predate the genus Homo by half million years. The oldest known Homo fossil is 2.8 million years old compared to the 3.3 million year old stone tools. The stone tools may have been made by Australopithecus afarensis —also called Kenyanthropus platyops— the species whose best fossil example is Lucy, which inhabited East Africa at the same time as the date of the oldest stone tools.
Dating of the tools was by dating volcanic ash layers in which the tools were found and dating the magnetic signature of the rock at the site. EthiopiaGrooved and fractured animal bone fossils, made by using stone tools, were found in Dikika, Ethiopia near the remains of Selam, a young Australopithecus afarensis girl who lived about 3.3 million years ago. The earliest stone tools in the life span of the genus Homo are Mode 1 tools, come from what has been termed the Oldowan Industry, named after the type of site found in Olduvai Gorge, where they were discovered in large quantities. Oldowan tools were characterised by their simple construction; these cores were river pebbles, or rocks similar to them, struck by a spherical hammerstone to cause conchoidal fractures removing flakes from one surface, creating an edge and a sharp tip. The blunt end is the proximal surface. Oldowan is a percussion technology. Grasping the proximal surface, the hominid brought the distal surface down hard on an object he wished to detach or shatter, such as a bone or tuber.
The earliest known Oldowan tools yet found date from 2.6 million years ago, during the Lower Palaeolithic period, have been uncovered at Gona in Ethiopia. After this date, the Oldowan Industry subsequently spread throughout much of Africa, although archaeologists are unsure which Hominan species first developed them, with some speculating that it was Australopithecus garhi, others believing that it was in fact Homo habilis. Homo habilis was the hominin who used the tools for most of the Oldowan in Africa, but at about 1.9-1.8 million years ago Homo erectus inherited them. The Industry flourished in southern and eastern Africa between 2.6 and 1.7 million years ago, but was spread out of Africa and into Eurasia by travelling bands of H. erectus, who took it as far east as Java by 1.8 million years ago and Northern China by 1.6 million years ago. More complex, Mode 2 tools began to be developed through the Acheulean Industry, named after the site
Clactonian
The Clactonian is the name given by archaeologists to an industry of European flint tool manufacture that dates to the early part of the interglacial period known as the Hoxnian, the Mindel-Riss or the Holstein stages. Clactonian tools were made by Homo heidelbergensis, it is named after 400,000-year-old finds made by Hazzledine Warren in a palaeochannel at Clacton-on-Sea in the English county of Essex in 1911. The artefacts found there included flint chopping tools, flint flakes and the tip of a worked wooden shaft along with the remains of a giant elephant and hippopotamus. Further examples of the tools have been found at sites including Barnfield Pit and Rickson's Pit, near Swanscombe in Kent and Barnham in Suffolk; the Clactonian industry involved striking thick, irregular flakes from a core of flint, employed as a chopper. The flakes would have been used as crude scrapers. Unlike the Oldowan tools from which Clactonian ones derived, some were notched implying that they were attached to a handle or shaft.
Retouch is uncommon and the prominent bulb of percussion on the flakes indicates use of a hammerstone. An "Egyptian verson" of the Clactonian industry was proposed in 1972, based on excavations on the banks of the Nile River, at the 100 foot terrace; the Clactonian industry may have co-existed with the Acheulean industry, which used identical basic techniques but which had handaxe technology. The justification for considering "Clactonian" as a tradition distinct from Acheulean has been called into question in a 1994 article; the Clactonian industry may in fact be the same thing as the Acheulean and only assessed as being different due to its tools being Acheulean ones made by individuals who had no need for handaxes on the occasion that they made them. Differences in environment and the availability and quality of local raw materials may account for the differences between the two industries, which, at one point it was inferred, were only perceived by modern archaeologists. However, the 2004 excavation of a butchered Pleistocene elephant at the Southfleet Road site of High Speed 1 in Kent recovered numerous Clactonian flint tools but no handaxes.
As a handaxe would have been more useful than a chopper in dismembering an elephant carcass it is considered strong evidence of the Clactonian being a separate industry. Flint of sufficient quality was available in the area and it is that the people who carved up the elephant did not possess the knowledge to make the more advanced bifacial handaxe. Proponents of the Clactonian as an independent industry point to the lack of concrete evidence in favour of it being an anomalous Acheulean industry; the precise provenance of the few attributed. The traditional chronology of Clactonian being followed by Acheulean is being challenged since finds of Acheulean tools were made at Boxgrove in Sussex and High Lodge in Suffolk; these finds came from deposits connected with the Anglian Stage, the glaciation that preceded the Hoxnian Stage and therefore would have preceded the Clactonian. Whether or not they are separate industries it would seem that the'Clactonian' and'Acheulean' stone tool makers would have had cultural contact with each other.
Acheulean Butler, C, Prehistoric Flintwork, Tempus: Strood, 2005 Drawings of Clactonian tools "Stone Age elephant remains found"
Upper Paleolithic
The Upper Paleolithic is the third and last subdivision of the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age. Broadly, it dates to between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago, according to some theories coinciding with the appearance of behavioral modernity and before the advent of agriculture. Anatomically modern humans are believed to have emerged out of Africa around 200,000 years ago, although these lifestyles changed little from that of archaic humans of the Middle Paleolithic, until about 50,000 years ago, when there was a marked increase in the diversity of artefacts; this period coincides with the expansion of modern humans from Africa throughout Asia and Eurasia, which contributed to the extinction of the Neanderthals. The Upper Paleolithic has the earliest known evidence of organized settlements, in the form of campsites, some with storage pits. Artistic work blossomed, with cave painting, petroglyphs and engravings on bone or ivory; the first evidence of human fishing is found, from artefacts in places such as Blombos cave in South Africa.
More complex social groupings emerged, supported by more varied and reliable food sources and specialized tool types. This contributed to increasing group identification or ethnicity; the peopling of Australia most took place before c. 60 ka. Europe was peopled after c. 45 ka. Anatomically modern humans are known to have expanded northward into Siberia as far as the 58th parallel by about 45 ka; the Upper Paleolithic is divided during about 25 to 15 ka. The peopling of the Americas occurred during this time, with East and Central Asia populations reaching the Bering land bridge after about 35 ka, expanding into the Americas by about 15 ka. In Western Eurasia, the Paleolithic eases into the so-called Epipaleolithic or Mesolithic from the end of the LGM, beginning 15 ka; the Holocene glacial retreat begins 11.7 ka, falling well into the Old World Epipaleolithic, marking the beginning of the earliest forms of farming in the Fertile Crescent. Both Homo erectus and Neanderthals used the same crude stone tools.
Archaeologist Richard G. Klein, who has worked extensively on ancient stone tools, describes the stone tool kit of archaic hominids as impossible to categorize, it was as if the Neanderthals made stone tools, were not much concerned about their final forms. He argues that everywhere, whether Asia, Africa or Europe, before 50,000 years ago all the stone tools are much alike and unsophisticated. Firstly among the artefacts of Africa, archeologists found they could differentiate and classify those of less than 50,000 years into many different categories, such as projectile points, engraving tools, knife blades, drilling and piercing tools; these new stone-tool types have been described as being distinctly differentiated from each other. The invaders referred to as the Cro-Magnons, left many sophisticated stone tools and engraved pieces on bone and antler, cave paintings and Venus figurines; the Neanderthals continued to use Mousterian stone tool technology and Chatelperronian technology. These tools disappeared from the archeological record at around the same time the Neanderthals themselves disappeared from the fossil record, about 40,000 cal BP.
Settlements were located in narrow valley bottoms associated with hunting of passing herds of animals. Some of them may have been occupied year round, though more they appear to have been used seasonally. Hunting was important, caribou/wild reindeer "may well be the species of single greatest importance in the entire anthropological literature on hunting."Technological advances included significant developments in flint tool manufacturing, with industries based on fine blades rather than simpler and shorter flakes. Burins and racloirs were used to work bone and hides. Advanced darts and harpoons appear in this period, along with the fish hook, the oil lamp and the eyed needle; the changes in human behavior have been attributed to changes in climate, encompassing a number of global temperature drops. These led to a worsening of the bitter cold of the last glacial period; such changes may have reduced the supply of usable timber and forced people to look at other materials. In addition, flint may not have functioned as a tool.
Some scholars argue that the appearance of complex or abstract language made these behavior changes possible. The complexity of the new human capabilities hints that humans were less capable of planning or foresight before 40,000 years, while the emergence of cooperative and coherent communication marked a new era of cultural development; the climate of the period in Europe saw dramatic changes, included the Last Glacial Maximum, the coldest phase of the last glacial period, which lasted from about 26.5 to 19 kya, being coldest at the end, before a rapid warming. During the Maximum, most of Northern Europe was covered by an ice-sheet, forcing human populations into the areas known as Last Glacial Maximum refugia, including modern Italy and the Balkans, parts of the Iberian Peninsula and areas around the Black Sea; this period saw cultures such as the Solutrean in Spain. Human life may have continued on top of the ice sheet, but we know next to nothing about it, little about the human life that preceded the European glaciers.
In the early part of the period, up to a
Natufian culture
The Epipaleolithic Natufian culture existed from around 12,000 to 9,500 BC or 13,050 to 7,550 BC in the Levant, a region in the Eastern Mediterranean. The culture was unusual in that it supported a sedentary or semi-sedentary population before the introduction of agriculture; the Natufian communities may be the ancestors of the builders of the first Neolithic settlements of the region, which may have been the earliest in the world. Natufians founded Jericho; some evidence suggests deliberate cultivation of cereals rye, by the Natufian culture, at Tell Abu Hureyra, the site of earliest evidence of agriculture in the world. The world's oldest evidence of bread-making has been found at Shubayqa 1, a 14,500 year old site in Jordan's northeastern desert. In addition, the oldest known evidence of beer, dating to 13,000 BP, was found at the Raqefet Cave in the Mount Carmel near Haifa in Israel, in which it was used by the semi-nomadic Natufians for ritual feasting. Though, Natufians exploited wild cereals.
Animals hunted included gazelles. According to Christy G. Turner II, there is archaeological and physical anthropological evidence for a relationship between the modern Semitic-speaking populations of the Levant, Persian Gulf and the Natufians. Archaeogenetics have revealed derivation of Levantines from Natufians, besides substantial admixture from Chalcholithic Anatolians. Dorothy Garrod coined the term Natufian based on her excavations at Shuqba cave located in the western Judean Mountains; the Natufian culture was discovered by British archaeologist Dorothy Garrod during her excavations of Shuqba cave in the Judaean Hills. Prior to the 1930s, the majority of archaeological work taking place in British Palestine was biblical archaeology focused on historic periods, little was known about the region's prehistory. In 1928, Garrod was invited by the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem to excavate Shuqba cave, where prehistoric stone tools had been discovered by a French priest named Alexis Mallon four years earlier.
She discovered a layer sandwiched between the Upper Palaeolithic and Bronze Age deposits characterised by the presence of microliths. She identified this with the Mesolithic, a transitional period between the Palaeolithic and the Neolithic, well-represented in Europe but had not yet been found in the Near East. A year when she discovered similar material at el-Wad Terrace, Garrod suggested the name the Natufian culture", after Wadi an-Natuf that ran close to Shuqba. Over the next two decades Garrod found Natufian material at several of her pioneering excavations in the Mount Carmel region, including el-Wad and Tabun, as did the French archaeologist René Neuville establishing the Natufian culture in the regional prehistoric chronology; as early as 1931, both Garrod and Neuville drew attention to the presence of stone sickles in Natufian assemblages and the possibility that this represented a early agriculture. Radiocarbon dating places the Natufian culture at an epoch from the terminal Pleistocene to the beginning of the Holocene, a time period between 12,500 and 9,500 BC.
The period is split into two subperiods: Early Natufian and Late Natufian. The Late Natufian most occurred in tandem with the Younger Dryas; the Levant hosts more than a hundred kinds of cereals, fruits and other edible parts of plants, the flora of the Levant during the Natufian period was not the dry and thorny landscape of today, but rather woodland. The Natufian developed in the same region as the earlier Kebaran industry, it is seen as a successor, which evolved out of elements within that preceding culture. There were other industries in the region, such as the Mushabian culture of the Negev and Sinai, which are sometimes distinguished from the Kebaran or believed to have been involved in the evolution of the Natufian. More there has been discussion of the similarities of these cultures with those found in coastal North Africa. Graeme Barker notes there are: "similarities in the respective archaeological records of the Natufian culture of the Levant and of contemporary foragers in coastal North Africa across the late Pleistocene and early Holocene boundary".
According to Isabelle De Groote and Louise Humphrey Natufians practiced the Iberomaurusian and Capsian custom of evulsing the maxillary central incisors. Ofer Bar-Yosef has argued that there are signs of influences coming from North Africa to the Levant, citing the microburin technique and "microlithic forms such as arched backed bladelets and La Mouillah points." But recent research has shown that the presence of arched backed bladelets, La Mouillah points, the use of the microburin technique was apparent in the Nebekian industry of the Eastern Levant. And Maher et al. state that, "Many technological nuances that have been always highlighted as significant during the Natufian were present during the Early and Middle EP and do not, in most cases, represent a radical departure in knowledge, tradition, or behavior."Authors such as Christopher Ehret have built upon the little evidence available to develop scenarios of intensive usage of plants having built up first in North Africa, as a precursor to the development of true farming in the Fertile Crescent, but such suggestions are considered speculative until more North African archaeological evidence can be gathered.
In fact, Weiss et al. have shown that the earliest known intensive usage of plants was in the Levant 23,000 years ago at the Ohalo II site. Anthropologist C. Loring Brace cross-analysed the craniometric traits of Natufian
Lomekwi
Lomekwi 3 is the name of an archaeological site in Kenya where ancient stone tools have been discovered dating to 3.3 million years ago, which make them the oldest found. In July 2011, a team of archeologists led by Sonia Harmand and Jason Lewis of Stony Brook University, United States, were heading to a site near Kenya's Lake Turkana near where Kenyanthropus platyops fossils had been found; the group made a wrong turn on the way and ended up at a unexplored region and decided to do some surveying. They found some stone artifacts on the site, which they named Lomekwi 3. A year they returned to the site for a full excavation. Harmand presented her findings at the annual meeting of the Paleoanthropology Society on April 14, 2015 and published the full announcement and results on the cover of Nature on May 21, 2015. Around 20 well preserved artifacts have been dug up at Lomekwi 3 including anvils and flakes. An additional 130 artifacts were found on the surface. In one instance, Harmand's team was able to match a flake to its core, suggesting a hominin had made and discarded the tool at the site.
The tools were quite large – larger than the oldest known stone tools, recovered near Gona, in the Afar Region of Ethiopia, in 1992. According to Harmand, it appeared that the tool makers had purposely selected large, heavy blocks of strong stone, ignoring smaller blocks of the same material found in the area, she ruled out the possibility that the tools were natural rock formations, saying "The artifacts were knapped and not the result of accidental fracture of rocks". Analysis suggested; the purpose of the tools found at Lomekwi 3 is unclear, as animal bones found at the site do not bear any sign of hominin activity. This is the greatest expression of late Neogene technology in human evolutionary history. Based on the buried artifacts' stratigraphic position relative to two layers of volcanic ash and known magnetic reversals and her team dated the tools to 3.3 million years ago. The finds at Lomekwi therefore represent the oldest stone tools discovered, predating the Gona tools by 700,000 years.
The date predates the genus Homo by 500,000 years, suggesting tool making arose with Australopithecus or Kenyanthropus. Evidence of stone tool use by Australopithecus has been suggested on the basis of marks on animal bones, but those findings have been hotly debated, with no scientific consensus forming on either side of the debate. Harmand said the Lomekwi 3 artifacts do not fit into the Oldowan tool making tradition and should be considered part of a distinct tradition, which she termed Lomekwian, it has been hypothesized that tool making may have aided in the evolution of Homo into a distinct genus. However, it is unclear whether the Lomekwian tools are related to those made by Homo species – it is possible the technology was forgotten and rediscovered. Independent researchers who have seen the tools are supportive of Harmand's conclusions. George Washington University anthropologist Alison Brooks said the tools "could not have been created by natural forces... the dating evidence is solid."
Rick Potts, head of the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian Institution, said the tools represented a more primitive style than known human-made tools, but something more sophisticated than what modern chimpanzees do. "There's no doubt it's purposeful" toolmaking, he remarked. Paleoanthropologist Zeresenay Alemseged, responsible for the earlier research suggesting Australopithecus had made tools backed Harmand's conclusions. University College London repository - Spoor, F. In: AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY Stone tools may have been used before our genus came on the scene, The Washington Post List of stone tools and their 3D-model
Human taxonomy
Human taxonomy is the classification of the human species within zoological taxonomy. The systematic genus, Homo, is designed to include both anatomically modern humans and extinct varieties of archaic humans. Current humans have been designated as subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens, differentiated from the direct ancestor, Homo sapiens idaltu. Since the introduction of systematic names in the 18th century, knowledge of human evolution has increased drastically, a number of intermediate taxa have been proposed in the 20th to early 21st century; the most accepted taxonomy groups takes the genus Homo as originating between two and three million years ago, divided into at least two species, archaic Homo erectus and modern Homo sapiens, with about a dozen further suggestions for species without universal recognition. The genus Homo is placed in the tribe Hominini alongside Pan; the two genera are estimated to have diverged over an extended time of hybridization spanning 10 to 6 million years ago, with possible admixture as late as 4 million years ago.
A subtribe of uncertain validity, grouping archaic "pre-human" or "para-human" species younger than the Homo-Pan split is Australopithecina. A proposal by Wood and Richmond would introduce Hominina as a subtribe alongside Australopithecina, with Homo the only known genus within Hominina. Alternatively, following Cela-Conde and Ayala, the "pre-human" or "proto-human" genera of Australopithecus, Ardipithecus and Sahelanthropus may be placed on equal footing alongside the genus Homo. An more radical view rejects the division of Pan and Homo as separate genera, which based on the Principle of Priority would imply the re-classification of chimpanzees as Homo paniscus. Prior to the current scientific classification of humans and scientists have made various attempts to classify humans, they offered definitions of schemes for classifying types of humans. Biologists once classified races as subspecies, but today anthropologists reject the concept of race and view humanity as an interrelated genetic continuum.
Taxonomy of the hominins continues to evolve. Human taxonomy on one hand involves the placement of humans within the Taxonomy of the hominids, on the other the division of archaic and modern humans into species and, if applicable, subspecies. Modern zoological taxonomy was developed by Carl Linnaeus during the 1730s to 1750s, he named the human species as Homo sapiens in 1758, as the only member species of the genus Homo, divided into several subspecies corresponding to the great races. The Latin noun homō means "human being"; the systematic name Hominidae for the family of the great apes was introduced by John Edward Gray. Gray supplied Hominini as the name of the tribe including both chimpanzees and humans; the discovery of the first extinct archaic human species from the fossil record dates to the mid 19th century, Homo neanderthalensis, classified in 1864. Since a number of other archaic species have been named, but there is no universal consensus as to their exact number. After the discovery of H. neanderthalensis, which if "archaic" is recognizable as human, late 19th to early 20th century anthropology for a time was occupied with finding the "missing link" between Homo and Pan.
The "Piltdown Man" hoax of 1912 was the presentation of such a transitional species. Since the mid-20th century, knowledge of the development of Hominini has become much more detailed, taxonomical terminology has been altered a number of times to reflect this; the introduction of Australopithecus as a third genus, alongside Homo and Pan, in the Hominini tribe is due to Raymond Dart. Australopithecina as a subtribe containing Australopithecus as well as Paranthropus is a proposal by Gregory & Hellman. More proposed additions to the Australopithecina subtribe include Ardipithecus and Kenyanthropus; the position of Sahelanthropus relative to Australopithecina within Hominini is unclear. Cela-Conde and Ayala propose the recognition of Australopithecus, Ardipithecus and Sahelanthropus as separate genera. Other proposed genera, now considered part of Homo, include: Pithecanthropus, Sinanthropus, Cyphanthropus Africanthropus,Telanthropus, Tchadanthropus; the genus Homo has been taken to originate some two million years ago since the discovery of stone tools in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, in the 1960s.
Homo habilis would be the first "human" species by definition, its type specimen being the OH 7 fossils. However, the discovery of more fossils of this type has opened up the debate on the delineation of H. habilis from Australopithecus. The LD 350-1 jawbone fossil discovered in 2013, dated to 2.8 Mya, has been argued as being transitional between the two. It is disputed whether H. habilis was the first hominin to use stone tools, as Australopithecus garhi, dated to c. 2.5 Mya, has been found along with stone tool implements. Fossil KNM-ER 1470 is now seen as either a third early species of Homo at about 2 million years ago, or alternatively as transitional between Australopithecus and Homo. Wood and Richmond proposed that Gray's tribe Hominini be designated as comprising all species after the chimpan
