Indiana University Bloomington

Stone Age Institute

Transcript

  "The Stone Age Institute" Produced by Chris Meyer.  Stone Age Institute Co-Director Nicholas Toth:  Our research center is devoted to Stone Age archaeology.  So, we're looking at the origins of human culture and technology,  starting two and a half million years ago.  And most people don't realize it, but 99.5% of human  technological history took place in the Stone Age.  So, what we are as a species -- biologically, psychologically --  is a product of that Stone Age past.  Stone Age Institute Co-Director Kathy Schick:  And people often ask us, "Why Bloomington, Indiana?"  and it's because we already had a strong association  with a major research university: Indiana University.  So, we had the strong affiliation, a very good relationship,  and it allowed us to really build the research team  of our institute and of Indiana University at the same time.  Toth:  We have a number of projects.  We have Sileshi Semaw, who works in Ethiopia.  He has the oldest archaeological sites in the world,  going back to over two and a half million years ago;  Mohamed Sahnouni, who works at Ain el-Hanech in Algeria;  Parth Chauhan, who works in the Narmada Valley of India  and also works in Yemen.  And, Kathy and I have been heavily involved recently on teaching  modern pygmy chimpanzees to make and use stone tools as well.  This is in an experimental setting in Des Moines, Iowa.  OK, by two and a half million years ago, our ancestors learned that  you needed a sharp edge on a piece of stone to knock a flake off.  (Toth knocks flakes off of a stone with another stone.)  Like that.  These are razor-sharp pieces of stone.  This is the core and the flake that was struck off of it.  And, they would just go around in a sequence here.  (Toth continues to hit the stone core with the other stone.)  And I think these were the key for our ancestors.  You can't find sharp things in nature.  But, in a split second, you can knock off one of these bits  and these are sharp enough to even cut up an elephant with.  We've done this experimentally on elephants that have died  of natural causes in the wild.  Schick:  So, we do a lot of experiments making stone tools and using them.  And this involves both the human element here, the human researchers,  but also investigating what our closest living relatives --  the apes, the chimpanzees -- their stone tool-making abilities.  Toth:  We have one of the best libraries in the world for  Paleolithic archaeology and human evolutionary studies.  In the room we're sitting in, we have over 40,000 books and articles on the subject.  So, that is an incredible resource for our researchers to be able to use.  In this library and great room, we inherited our professor's collection of books,  Desmond Clark from the University of California,  who was the world's expert on African archaeology.  So. we wanted this to become the centerpiece of the building,  so we put a lot of time and effort into designing this room,  for seminars as well as research.  And throughout this library, above the bookcases,  we have casts of fossil skulls of ancient humans,  going from about six million years ago to modern times,  as well as a range of casts of fossil animal skulls, as well.  All of the originals are in the museums around the world where they're housed;  but, it's a great place to look at the scope of human evolution  over the last six million years.