From Stone Age chips to microchips: How tiny tools made us human

Tiny stone flakes such as the one above, from a site in South Africa called Boomplaas, may have helped some humans survive the last period of rapid climate change, 17,000 years ago, says Emory anthropologist Justin Pargeter.

Anthropologists have long made the case that tool-making is one of the key behaviors that separated our human ancestors from other primates. A new paper, however, argues that it was not tool-making that set hominins apart — it was the miniaturization of tools.

Just as tiny transistors transformed telecommunications a few decades ago, and scientists are now challenged to make them even smaller, our Stone Age ancestors felt the urge to make tiny tools. “It’s a need that we’ve been perennially faced with and driven by,” says Justin Pargeter, an anthropologist at Emory University and lead author of the paper. “Miniaturization is the thing that we do.”

The journal Evolutionary Anthropology is publishing the paper — the first comprehensive overview of prehistoric tool miniaturization. It proposes that miniaturization is a central tendency in hominin technologies going back at least 2.6 million years.

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