Lucy and her fellow australopithecines may have created and used tools more than 3 million years ago, a new study of hand muscles suggests. The finding provides further evidence that tool use started long before the Homo genus emerged.
"While we can't definitively say that these early humans crafted stone tools, our findings demonstrate that their hands were frequently used in ways that closely align with the actions necessary for human tool manipulation," study co-author Fotios Alexandros Karakostis, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany, told Live Science in an email.
