Leakey's Olduvai Discovery That Rewrote Human Origins
Lewis Leakey's 1931 Olduvai Gorge excavations produced the oldest human-made tools, found next to animal bones two million years old.
Leakey's discoveries proved human culture began in Africa and shifted the origin of humanity back nearly two million years.
insights INSIGHT
How A Simple Chopping Tool Fueled Bigger Brains
The Olduvai chopping tool is ergonomically shaped and weighted to fit the palm, giving force and a sharp edge for cutting meat and breaking bone for marrow.
Using marrow boosted calorie intake, supporting larger brains and starting a feedback loop of tool complexity and brain growth.
question_answer ANECDOTE
Museum Replica Proves Chopping Tool's Practical Power
The British Museum re-created an Olduvai chopping tool and used it on roast chicken to demonstrate its effectiveness for stripping meat and breaking bone for marrow.
The re-created tool fit the hand, cut meat quickly, and could split bone with a sharp blow, showing its practical versatility.
Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode
The Director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, retells the history of human development from the first stone axe to the credit card, using 100 selected objects from the Museum. In this programme, Neil goes back two million years to the Rift Valley in Tanzania, where a simple chipped stone marks the emergence of modern humans.
One of the characteristics that mark humans out from other animals is their desire for, and dependency on, the things they fashion with their own hands. This obsession has long roots and, in today's programme, Neil introduces one of the earliest examples of human ingenuity. Faced with the needs to cut meat from carcasses, early humans in Africa discovered how to shape stones into cutting tools. From that one innovation, a whole history human development springs.
Neil MacGregor tells the story of the Olduvai stone chopping tool, with contributions from Sir David Attenborough and African Nobel Prize winner Dr Wangari Maathai
