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Saharan ' carpet of tools  '  adalah awal dikenalnya  lanskap buatan manusia

Sebuah survei intensif baru dari lereng Messak Settafet , singkapan  batu pasir besar  di tengah gurun Sahara , telah menunjukkan bahwa alat-alat batu  " ubiquitously " di seluruh lanskap : rata-rata 75 artefak per meter persegi , atau 75 juta per kilometer persegi .......read more

Saharan 'carpet
of tools' is earliest known human-made landscape

Date:

March 11, 2015

Source:

University of
Cambridge

Summary:

A new intensive survey
of the Messak Settafet escarpment, a massive outcrop of sandstone in the middle
of the Saharan desert, has shown that stone tools occur
"ubiquitously" across the entire landscape: averaging 75 artefacts
per square meter, or 75 million per square kilometer.

.......................

A new intensive survey of
the Messak Settafet escarpment, a massive outcrop of sandstone in the middle of
the Saharan desert, has shown that stone tools occur "ubiquitously"
across the entire landscape: averaging 75 artefacts per square metre, or 75
million per square kilometre.

Researchers say the vast 'carpet' of stone-age tools -- extracted from and
discarded onto the escarpment over hundreds of thousands of years -- is the
earliest known example of an entire landscape being modified by hominins: the
group of creatures that include us and our ancestral species.

The Messak Settafet runs a total length of 350 km, with an average width of
60 km. Parts of the landscape are 'anthropogenic', or human-made, through
build-up of tools over hundreds of thousands of years.

The research team have used this and other studies to attempt to estimate
the volume of stone tools discarded over the last one million years of human
evolution on the African continent alone. They say that it is the equivalent of
more than one Great Pyramid of Giza per square kilometre of the entire
continent (2.1 x 1014 cubic metres of rock).

"The Messak sandstone, now in the middle of the vast sand seas of
Libya, would have been a high quality rock for hominins to fracture -- the
landscape is in effect a carpet of stone tools, most probably made in the
Middle and Upper Pleistocene," said Dr Robert Foley, from the Leverhulme
Centre for Evolutionary Studies at the University of Cambridge, who conducted
the research with colleague Dr Marta Mirazón Lahr.

"The term 'anthropocene' is now used to denote the point at which
humans began to have a significant effect on the environment," said
Mirazón Lahr. "The critical time may well be the beginning of the
industrial revolution about 200 years ago. Some talk of an 'early anthropocene'
about 10,000 years ago when forests began being cleared for agriculture.

"Making stone tools, however, dates back more than two million years,
and little research has been done on the impact of this activity. The Messak
Settafet is the earliest demonstrated example of the scars of human activity
across an entire landscape; the effects of our technology on the environment
may be considerably older than previously thought," Mirazón Lahr said. The
study is published today in the journal PLOS One.

The survey, conducted in 2011, involved randomly selecting plots of one
metre squared across the parts of the plateau surface. In each square, the
researchers sifted through all the stones to identify the number that showed
evidence of modification through hominin activity -- evidence such as a 'bulb
of percussion': a bulge or curved dent on the surface of a stone tool produced
by the angular blows of hominin percussion. The average number of artefacts
across all sample squares was 75.

At the simple end, large flakes of stone would have been opportunistically
hacked from boulders to be used for cutting or as weapons. At the more
sophisticated level, researchers found evidence that specific tools had been
used to wedge into the stone in order split it.

"It is clear from the scale of activity how important stone tools were,
and shows that African hominins were strongly technologically dependent,"
said Foley. "Landscapes such as these must have been magnets for hominin
populations, either for 'stone foraging trips' or residential occupation."

The researchers say that if -- as seems likely -- the success of Stone Age
communities depended significantly on tool technology, there would be enormous
advantage to knowing, remembering and indeed controlling access to areas with a
"super-abundance" of raw materials, such as the Messak Settafet.

"Hominins may well have become tethered to these areas, unable to
stray too far if survival depended on access to the raw materials for tools,
and forced to make other adaptations subservient to that need," said
Mirazón Lahr.

One way that the environmental impact of hominin tool excavation may have
been positive for later humans is through the clusters of small quarrying pits
dotted across the landscape (ranging up to 2 metres in diameter, and 50
centimetres in depth).

These pits would have retained moisture -- with surface water still visible
today after rains -- and the small pools would have attracted game. In many of
these pits, the team found 'trapping stones': large stones used for traps and
ties for game and/or cattle during the last 10,000 years.

By combining their data with previous extensive surveys carried out across
Africa, the researchers attempted to estimate roughly how much stone had been
used as tools and discarded during human evolution.

Although stone tool manufacture dates back at least 2.5 million years, the
researchers limited the estimate to one million years. Based on their and
others research, they standardised population density (based on extant
hunter-gatherers), tool volume, the number of tools used by one person in a year
and the amount of resulting debris per tool.

They estimate an average density of between 0.5 and 5 million stone
artefacts per square kilometre of Africa. When converted into an estimate of
volume, this is the equivalent of between 42 to 84 million Great Pyramids of
Giza.

Researchers say this would be the equivalent of finding between 1.3 and 2.7
Great Pyramids per square kilometre throughout Africa.







Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by University of Cambridge. The original story is licensed under a Creative
Commons Licence. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.







Journal Reference:

1.    Robert A. Foley, Marta Mirazón
Lahr. Lithic Landscapes: Early Human Impact from Stone Tool Production
on the Central Saharan Environment. PLOS ONE, 2015; 10 (3):
e0116482 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0116482

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/03/150311160254.htm

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