Late-Miocene Homo-Pan ancestors lived in coastal forests of the ancient Red Sea,
where they probably used stone tools for opening mangrove oysters, crabs etc. Homo & Pan split 6-5 Ma, when the Red Sea opened into the Gulf
(exactly 5.33 Ma? Francesca Mansfield thinks caused by the Zanclean mega-flood):
-Pan went right -> E.Afr.coast -> Au.africanus->robustus,
-Homo went left -> S.Asian coast -> H.erectus Java etc.,
IOW, I see no reason why Au.robustus could not have used tools?!
BTW, it's not "Paranthropus" here, of course, but Australopithecus robustus:
E & S.Afr.australopiths evolved in parallel from late-Pliocene "gracile" to early-Pleist."robust",
the robusts were more gorilla/chimp-like than the graciles:
-Praeanthropus, fossil subgenus of Gorilla: afarensis -> boisei, via northern Rift //
-Australopithecus, fossil subgenus of Pan: africanus -> robustus, via southern Rift.
• “Alan [Walker] has analysed... Au.robustus teeth and they fall into the fruit-eating category... their teeth patterns look like those of chimpanzees... Then, when be looked at some H.erectus teeth, he found that the pattern changed”. Leakey 1981:
74-75
• “The ‘keystone’ nasal bone arrangement suggested as a derived diagnostic of Paranthropus [robustus] is found... particularly clearly in some chimpanzees”. Eckhardt 1987
• “P.paniscus provides a suitable comparison for Australopithecus [Sts.5]; they are similar in body size, postcranial dimensions... even in cranial & facial features”. Zihlman cs 1978
• “A.africanus Sts.5, which... falls well within the range of Pan troglodytes, is markedly prognathous or hyperprognathous”". Ferguson 1989
• In Taung, “I see nothing in the orbits, nasal bones & canine teeth definitely nearer to the human condition than the corresponding parts of the skull of a modern young chimpanzee”. Woodward 1925
• “The Taung juvenile seems to resemble a young chimpanzee more closely than it resembles L338y-6”, a juvenile boisei. Rak & Howell 1978
• “In addition to similarities in facial remodeling it appears that Taung & Australopithecus in general, had maturation periods similar to those of the extant chimpanzee”. Bromage 1985
• “I estimate an adult capacity for Taung ranging from 404-420 cm2, with a mean of 412 cm2. Application of Passingham’s curve for brain development in Pan is preferable to that for humans because (a) brain size of early hominids approximates that
of chimpanzees, (b) the curves for brain volume relative to body weight are essentially parallel in pongids & australopithecines, leading Hofman to conclude that ‘as with pongids, the australopithecines probably differed only in size, not in design’
. Falk 1987
• In Taung, “pneumatization has also extended into the zygoma & hard palate. This is intriguing because an intra-palatal extension of the maxillary sinus has only been reported in chimpanzees & robust australopithecines among higher primates”.
Bromage & Dean 1985
• “That the fossil ape Australopithecus [Taung] ‘is distinguished from all living apes by the... unfused nasal bones…’ as claimed by Dart (1940), cannot be maintained in view of the... separate nasal bones among orang-utans & chimpanzees of
ages corresponding to that of Australopithecus”. Schultz 1941
As always(?), the great anatomist Schultz was right...
For scientific & biological infm on ape & human evolution (rather than the ridiculous savanna fantasies by some people here), google
-"aquarboreal" = all Mio-Pliocene hominoids were already "bipedal" in forest swamps (e.g. google also "bonobo wading"),
-"human evolution Verhaegen" = Plio-Pleistocene Homo, see my book "De evolutie van de mens" (Acad.Uit. Eburon 2022 Utrecht NL).
_______
https://www.science.org/content/article/one-ancient-human-relative-use-early-stone-tools
As thunder boomed and dark rain clouds gathered on
the last day of the field season in Kenya in 2017,
paleoanthropologist Emma Finestone was rushing to
record the location of fossils while excavators were
hoisting an ancient hippo skeleton out of the ground.
“I was worried she would get struck by lightning
because she was on top of a hill,” says Tom Plummer,
a paleoanthropologist at Queens College who led the
excavation at Nyayanga, near Lake Victoria.
Finestone received a shock of a different kind as
the hippo was removed. Beneath it, Blasto Onyango,
head preparator of the National Museums of Kenya,
found a huge hominin molar. It lay intermingled
with hammerstones and sharp flakes that Finestone
recognized as early Oldowan tools, an ancient
technological breakthrough long thought to be a
defining hallmark of our genus, Homo. But the molar
was from a very different human relative:
Paranthropus, known for its huge teeth and crested
ape-size skull, not toolmaking skills. “When we
found the Paranthropus molar, it got really, really
exciting,” says Finestone, of the Cleveland Museum
of Natural History.
The tools, dated to about 2.8 million years ago,
are the oldest known examples of the Oldowan
toolkit. They also hint that Paranthropus, often
seen as an also-ran in the story of human
evolution, might have made or at least used tools.
...
The site of the discovery, more than 1300 kilometers
from the next oldest Oldowan tools in Ethiopia, also
shows the technology spread faster and farther than
was thought, says Mohamed Sahnouni, an archaeologist
at CENIEH who has dated other Oldowan tools to 2.4
million years ago at a site in Algeria. The real
“whodunnit” now, says co-author Rick Potts of the
Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural
History, is: Who was the toolmaker? “We’re not
claiming that Paranthropus made the tools, but I
think it could have used them,” he says.
...
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