Fossil hand bones point to tool use outside the Homo lineage

Newly discovered African fossils lend a hand to suspicions that an ancient hominid outside our own genus, Homo, made and used stone and bone tools.

Partial remains of a roughly 1.5-million-year-old Paranthropus boisei individual, including hand and wrist bones, indicate that this extinct hominid species could have made basic cutting and pounding implements, say paleoanthropologist Carrie Mongle of Stony Brook University in New York and colleagues. Thumb and finger sizes and length proportions, as well as wrist features, indicate that P. boisei possessed a humanlike grip, the researchers report October 15 in Nature.

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