Webinar: Trash to Treasure – How Archaeologists Learn About the Past
Aired May 27, 2020
Maggy Benson:
Hey everybody. Welcome. We're so happy to have you joining us here at our Smithsonian Live video webinar programs. Welcome everyone. I'm Maggy Benson, and I'm a museum educator at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. And while our museum is closed, I have the lucky privilege to connect you to the scientists and the experts at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. Before we begin, I want to give a special thanks to our generous donors, volunteers, and other important partners who enable us here at the Natural History Museum to discover, create, and share new knowledge with the world like we're doing today and every day free of charge.
So while we wait for more of our friends to join us, take a moment and find the Q&A button. It's going to be located either on the bottom of your screen or on the top of your screen. Find that Q&A button and tell us where you're tuning in from. I'm joining you from my home in Washington, D.C. During today's program, you're going to use that Q&A button to submit questions for our experts to answer, but also to answer the questions that we ask you. We have several planned.
Now, today our program is about 45 minutes long, and we have four special guests. I'm going to introduce them in a moment, but before I do, I also want to point out one other feature of our live video webinars. We have closed captions now, so if you take a look, it should be by your Q&A button. Again, it should be on the bottom or the top. There's an icon with two Cs on it. CC, this is where you're going to find the closed captions. And it's here that you can turn them on or off.
Now, they are live captions, so they will be slightly delayed. That's normal. All right, So I'm going to take a moment and tell you were some of our friends are joining us today. All right. So Elena from Maryland, we have Arizona, Virginia, more Maryland, Nebraska, Georgia, New York, Texas, California, Belgium, New Mexico, Colorado, Indiana, Washington. Hey, we're neighbors. Florida, more Washington, D.C., Connecticut. All right. Derby, England; Clifton, Virginia. All right. We have a lot of people from Maryland, a lot of people from Virginia, Rhode Island. Awesome. Welcome everyone. We are so happy to have you here today.
And even though we can't be in our museum, it's pretty cool that we get to connect online like this with people from all over the country and today, the world. Now, you'll notice that when you enter your questions into the Q&A, you won't be able to see your other friends' responses, but don't worry, everybody here on our team at this Smithsonian can. Be sure throughout the program, to take a look at the top of the Q&A box, there should be a question. There should be a tab that says, "Answered questions in my questions." Be sure to check that to see your questions that have been submitted and the responses to some of your questions by text from two of our special experts.
So Jenny Clark and Molly Kamph are here today. They are experts at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, and they're going to be answering some of your questions directly in the Q&A. So let them introduce themselves now. Hey, Jenny. Hey, Molly.
Jennifer Clark:
Hi. Thanks everyone. It's so great to hear from you today, and I look forward to answering some of your questions. My name is Jennifer Clark. I work with the Human Origins Program at the National Museum of Natural History, and I'm a museum specialist. I help run our lab work, and I also work with Briana and Ella in the Human Origins Program. And I also do field work. And every year I go to Kenya and work at a research site camp out and dig up fossils and at a site that's about a million to half a million years old, and the name of it is Olorgesailie.
And actually, Ella may be talking a little bit more about that later in the program. No, maybe not. Anyway, I'm happy to answer questions about early humans fossils, and my special interest is studying the tiny bones of reptiles, birds, fish, mice, things like that.
Maggy Benson:
Very cool. Thanks for joining us, Jenny.
Molly Kamph:
I'm Molly Kamph. I'm a museum technician at the Natural History Museum working with the collections program, and one of my specializations is taking care of our archaeological collections and archives. So I'm so excited to talk to you guys today about archaeology and what we might have at the museum, and just how to do archaeology in general.
Maggy Benson:
Wonderful. Thank you, Molly. Thanks again, Jenny. We're really happy to have you. Now, we do have a question here about turning, hiding the closed captions. If you find that closed caption button at the bottom of your screen, there should be a tiny little arrow, and if you click that arrow, there should be a option to hide captions.
So you want to click that if you do not want to see them, there's also a caption settings button so that you can make those captions larger or smaller than what they're appearing now for you. All right. So, now I want to introduce our very special experts today, Ella, our archaeologist, Ella Beaudoin, will be our featured guest. And moderating the discussion is paleoanthropologist, Briana Pobiner. So I'm going to go behind the scenes and I'm going to hand it off to you, Briana and Ella.
Briana Pobiner:
Thank you, Maggy.
Maggy Benson:
Bye, thank you.
Briana Pobiner:
So, hi everybody. I'm Briana Pobiner, and I work with Jennifer Clark and Ella Beaudoin in the Human Origins Program at the National Museum of Natural History. I'm a paleoanthropologist, and my research specialty is on early human diets. So I study fossils of bones that were butchered by early humans and eaten a million or 2 million years ago. But I'm really here today to facilitate the discussion with Ella Beaudoin, who's going to be talking about another really important line of evidence that we used to study the past. So I'm going to let Ella take it away.
Ella Beaudoin:
Yeah. So hi, a little bit about me. I'm an archaeologist. I work with Briana, I work with all of these amazing people. Yeah. And I'm here to talk about my favorite thing about archaeology, which is just finding trash and figuring out what it means. So I guess we can start off a little bit about me. Let me share my screen. So I am an archaeologist, and I've been fascinated by archaeology since I was really little.
So you can see here, there's a picture of me when I was about three years old with my dad. I've always loved going to museums. I loved seeing what people made, models. A picture in the middle is a Barbie that I had from when I was about 10, which I used to wrap up my Barbies, like mummies, and I put little amulets in amongst the wrappings.
And then the last picture is me at 18 on my first archaeological site. So this has been something I've been in love with for very many, many years. But a lot of it is because I love storytelling. I love listening to stories. I love reading. I love learning about the past because sometimes I think we forget that people lived in the past and had thoughts and emotions that really created the world that we live in today.
So I loved hearing those stories of how people lived in the past. And part of that is what I learned later on in life. I was like, "Okay, how do we know that people thought and felt in the past?" And so that became what I became really interested in later on, which was, how do people find out things that happened in the past? And mostly it's actually from garbage, which is really fun, and I'll talk about that in a little bit. But here's an image of what people, of one of the stories that we tell about the past.
So this is a reconstruction from the site that Jenny mentioned, Olorgesailie. But we're going to talk about it more generally than that, right? We're going to talk about how this is a story that archaeologists tell from the materials that they find. So they're finding bits and pieces and things that we can put together to be able to draw or animate something like that.
So part of what that is when we're working, or maybe when these early hominins or early humans were butchering a deer or butchering a big elephant, they were cutting something up. They wouldn't probably stay with it because it's this huge big lump of meat and stuff that other predators could come to and access. So they want to probably butcher it and then take it away.
So what they're leaving behind isn't something that's important or something that's precious. It's actually little pieces of garbage that we find, right? So I'm going to talk about what that garbage is more specifically, but that's really what archaeologists are looking at in the past, especially to find out stuff about ordinary people. So back this far, this far back in time, maybe about million years ago, we didn't have writing. We don't have a note that someone left being, like, "Killed an elephant, BRB like be right back." Cool. But what we do have is these things that were left behind that were pieces of garbage.
But this is something that archaeologists do all the way through time. So something that's a little bit more modern, right? They we'll look at something from a hundred years ago and stuff from a million years ago, and look at the garbage to reconstruct a story of the past. So I wanted to see if you guys got, if I didn't explain this well, please answer more or ask more questions. I can totally answer them. But this is a little game that I come came up with.
But if you guys could look at my trash something and try and figure out something about my life that's happened in the last month. We interested in doing that? Cool. Yay. Okay, cool. So, okay, we're going to start off with looking at some of my trash. So this is something from the trash you can see here. I bet that you guys can figure out what might have happened in my past. So what's this kind of trash that we see?
Briana Pobiner:
All right. So I'd love to get your answers in the Q&A. So what do you see in this trash that came from Ella's house? Let's see. We see Cheetos.
Ella Beaudoin:
Yes.
Briana Pobiner:
We see junk food.
Ella Beaudoin:
Yes.
Briana Pobiner:
There's some definitely... "Oh, you have good taste in Cheetos," Vin says.
Ella Beaudoin:
Thank you. Thank you. I-
Briana Pobiner:
Yeah. So you ate a snack and answered a letter. Okay, very good. That's a great observation, Lilian.
Ella Beaudoin:
Thank you.
Briana Pobiner:
Hot snacks, food, and writing items, relatives in the U.K.
Ella Beaudoin:
Also great.
Briana Pobiner:
Birthday candles. Very good observation. "Mail, food, and a list," says Jacob. Good food. Yeah.
Ella Beaudoin:
So that would-
Briana Pobiner:
And you would say am, and you can speak English. So these are good observations and-
Ella Beaudoin:
Oh, great.
Briana Pobiner:
... let's keep going. Thank you, guys. It's great.
Ella Beaudoin:
That's actually great. Yeah. Because this is exactly what archaeologists do, is we look at all of these things and we say, "Okay, what do all of these objects, what could they mean together?" So I'm going to point out a couple, I'm going to point out one. So there's cake mix here. Okay. So I heard someone else mention the other thing.
So there are candles, right? And someone else mentioned this, that I have relatives in the U.K., which is correct, and we see a card. So these are kind of three different objects that were found in my trash. Does anyone have a guess of what could have happened recently from all of these different things?
Briana Pobiner:
There are several people saying, A birthday. A birthday, your birthday.
Ella Beaudoin:
Correct. It was my birthday this month, which thank you. So it was my birthday this month. So this is an example of what archaeologists are doing all the time, is we're looking at the things that were left behind that might have been thrown away to reconstruct a moment in the past. So what's really cool about this too, is that if we just found say, a cake box, right? And we found a cake box with a bag of Cheetos, you might just think she just really loves junk food, which would be correct, but isn't a great story, isn't an interesting narrative, and doesn't tell us a lot about me, right?
But it's all of these different things together that make us understand what's happening in a moment in time. And so this is an example of more modern day stuff. So this is, again, some archaeologists do this less than a hundred years ago. There are historical archaeologists that are looking at stuff that's a little bit more like this kind of material. Maybe glass bottles or beads or porcelain or pottery, all sorts of stuff like that. But what I do is I actually look at the same kind of thing, trash, but very long time ago. So let's look at what trash looked like in our past.
Briana Pobiner:
So I'm going to pause and just let you know that lots of people are wishing you a happy birthday, Ella.
Ella Beaudoin:
Oh.
Briana Pobiner:
And ask one question before we start. So Steven wants to know, "Do archaeologists look at garbage because it gives a better idea about people from the past? Or is there just more of it to find?" And maybe you'll get to that.
Ella Beaudoin:
That is an excellent question. So both. So trash, we have a thing in the past which is called bias, that often happens. So often, really fancy people, very rich people have stuff that's written about them or things that are saved about them. If you go to a very fancy manor house, for example, that's being preserved through time.
And often the objects inside of it, is being preserved through time. So we can then tell a lot of things about a very rich person in the past, but we don't do the same kind of thing and preserve some other things for more ordinary people. So trash lets us get a sense of the lives of more ordinary people and further back in time when we don't have the things that are getting preserved.
Briana Pobiner:
That's awesome. So it's an equalizer to help us look deeper in the past. So let's do that. Let's talk about what's on your screen.
Ella Beaudoin:
Yeah, exactly. So an equalizer for stuff that's in the past is our early ancestors, which are called hominins, often made stone tools. Now, this is really important because stone tools preserve through time. They're made of rock. And so they're able to last for really, really long periods of time, which is super-important because like you asked before, then we have a lot of these left, versus maybe other things that might have disintegrated through time.
So humans will make stone tools, use them and often then throw them away. So in the second kind of picture, you see a lot of these pieces of rock that are all over the place. So those are what stone tools look like. They often look like pieces of rock that were broken off and potentially used and thrown away. So an example that might be also that's really important about why stone tools are important in the past is, remember that Cheetos bag?
Briana Pobiner:
Yes.
Ella Beaudoin:
Cool.
Briana Pobiner:
Yeah. People notice a Cheetos bag, definitely.
Ella Beaudoin:
Oh, which is great because it is the best kind of Cheetos. But say you were in the forest and you came across a Cheetos bag lying on the ground, you would then know that you weren't the first human to walk in that place because someone's left behind this piece of garbage. So you know that someone must have come there and left that before you were there. Stone tools are the same. Yeah.
Briana Pobiner:
So it's a trace of where people were, even if you don't find their remains.
Ella Beaudoin:
Exactly, exactly. Yeah. So it's this moment that we can say, "Okay, oh we know. And early in, one of our early ancestors was here at the site." So that's why stone tools are more generally important. But what's also really important for archaeologists is to understand how they're made, because then that can tell us how they might be used. And then if we know how they're used, we can then build that picture of the past. Similar to if we know how to make a cake, we then are potentially know how the cake is used or in what scenarios the cake is used? And then we can start saying, "Oh, it was her birthday."
Briana Pobiner:
Oh.
Ella Beaudoin:
Okay, so great. Let's talk about, or let's see how some stone tools are used or how stone tools are made. So this is an example of something called flint knapping. And I'm going to show you this quick video of how do you make of stone tool. Awesome. So what he's doing right now is he's using a hammer stone or a harder piece of rock to hit the edge of a piece of another rock, breaking off or removing something that's called a flake.
So often these are very sharp. This also leaves a mark on the other side of the rock. So this is a way to hit this rock so that you get thin sharp pieces instead of just breaking it in half. And you'd often do this over and over again and removing it. And you can see on the ground there, that's what we're finding at different sites is all this evidence that someone was sitting there and making something.
We also see the distinctive pattern that's left by making these thing called flakes, which are very different than the rock that's just there, very smooth. And we can now, because we've made the stone tool and we see how sharp it is, we can start to think, okay, how are these used? Maybe they were used for cutting meat or the bigger pieces were used to breaking break open bones to get that juicy marrow on the inside, which I'm a vegetarian, so that, no thank you. But our early ancestors loved it so that's super important. Oh, yeah.
Briana Pobiner:
No, go ahead.
Ella Beaudoin:
Yeah, so that's super-important to know. So, oh nope, we're not going to play that twice. Awesome. So I have one more kind of game that I was wondering if you guys could help me with, which I think is really fun and important. How can you tell just a rock from an ordinary stone tool?
Briana Pobiner:
This is great because Jacob actually asked that question, What happens if you confuse a rock for a stone tool? So let's figure it out.
Ella Beaudoin:
Awesome. Exactly. So archaeologists are trained, especially archaeologists like me, which are paleolithic, which means old stone. Archaeologists are trained like we're going to train ourselves now on how do identify stone tools and then we can then tell a story about the past. So characteristics of rocks. Rocks are kind of rough on the outside when they break, there isn't like that nice pattern. So you saw the pattern before. There are these overlapping pieces, right? When you just break a rock open, it doesn't really do that. So you could go throw a rock outside and it would just break. It wouldn't have a nice pattern on it. So got that.
Briana Pobiner:
Got it. So rough on the outside doesn't break with a nice pattern.
Ella Beaudoin:
Exactly.
Briana Pobiner:
Okay.
Ella Beaudoin:
So stone tools on the other hand, it's because of the specific way that you're breaking it, the angle at which you're hitting the rock, it breaks off these smooth, sharp pieces, right? So here you can see there's both these drawings I did by myself, so I hope you like them. And one is the flake that comes off and one is the core, which is the main part of the stone tool. And it has those removals, we call them off of it for where the flakes came off. All right.
Briana Pobiner:
So stone tools have the core, has those specific removals and the flakes have certain patterns.
Ella Beaudoin:
Exactly.
Briana Pobiner:
Okay.
Ella Beaudoin:
So now that we get a little bit of the sense, I want to see how well you guys would do in identifying a stone tool versus a rock. And this is something that's super-important. So when we are trying to identify sites out in northern Kenya, which is where I've worked before, is we walk along the landscape and we're looking for stone tools. And if we find a lot of stone tools on the surface, that might be a place that we could excavate to dig and find out more about that site. It's because they erode or the soil on top breaks away. That's the word, breaks away and reveals all of these tools underneath. Okay, y'all ready?
Briana Pobiner:
All right, let's do it. So-
Ella Beaudoin:
Awesome. So here's the first one. We're starting off a little bit easy. Which one A or B, do you think is a stone tool? Yeah, which one is a stone tool A or B?
Briana Pobiner:
Okay. So let's see your answers. Looks like a lot of A, I think everybody that's putting an answer so far is answering A.
Ella Beaudoin:
This is awesome. This is awesome. I need more people with me in the field finding stone tools. So this is great. You all have jobs. Basically, it's a little bit easy. I will say my colleague is actually pointing to where those removals were taken off. So that is exactly, that's the pattern, the flake scar that has come off, which is awesome. And B is a rock.
Briana Pobiner:
Got it.
Ella Beaudoin:
Okay, so the next one.
Briana Pobiner:
Good job, everybody.
Ella Beaudoin:
Perfect. The next one is a little bit harder. So which one is the stone tool? This one's a little bit harder because they both have a little bit more texture, trying to figure that out.
Briana Pobiner:
Right. I'm seeing a lot of Bs in the chat. It looks, I mean, the Q&A, it looks like there's an A, but most people are saying B.
Ella Beaudoin:
Okay. This one is a lot harder. Okay. So people who said B, you are 100 percent correct. You can see those removals and those ripples that were taken when someone was hitting it to break it apart into a really specific shape. So that one is harder too because A, you can see that there are patterns in it, but that's actually from fossils inside of the rock itself.
Briana Pobiner:
That's right. Somebody noticed that there was a fossil in there. Good eyes.
Ella Beaudoin:
Yeah.
Briana Pobiner:
Right.
Ella Beaudoin:
Which you need to be an archaeologist. Awesome. Okay, so the last one is a little bit harder. So these are two rocks that I picked up when we were walking. Which one do you think is a stone tool?
Briana Pobiner:
All right, this is the hard one.
Ella Beaudoin:
The hard one.
Briana Pobiner:
People think I see B, A, A, none. Ooh.
Ella Beaudoin:
Okay.
Briana Pobiner:
A, B. So there's a mix. I would say there's probably a good mix between people saying A and B or both or none.
Ella Beaudoin:
Perfect. So that's a great answer. So when I first picked these up, I got it wrong. This was when I was first out in the field, I got really confused. I was like, "Oh, this has a pattern." This must have been broken by humans. No, it wasn't. So A is actually what happens when ... So these are both eroded. They were on the surface of the grounds that they were on the top of the earth for a really long time.
And that's why they have that texture on the outside. But A happens when it's really hot and it's on the surface and there's an internal flaw in the rock, they might pop apart and it's called a heat fracture so that's where you get that pop, right? But it's this perfect circle which is different than what we were seeing before with the hitting and the peeling back of flakes off of the rock. So B, you can see those curved removals on the core, which is B. So B is the stone tool.
Briana Pobiner:
Oh, got it. Thank you. So you guys did a nice job of ... And this was a tricky one.
Ella Beaudoin:
It was, and again, it stumped me the first time that I looked at them when I was a student. Awesome. So these three are the stone tools, right? And we can tell that again by the patterns that we're seeing of these removals. And all of those removals that we're seeing that have a circle of blue around them are where things called flakes, which you saw him hitting off and then using to cut in the video before came off of the stone tool.
Briana Pobiner:
Awesome. So it sounds like with the more practice that you get in seeing these things, you can see the difference a little easier.
Ella Beaudoin:
Exactly, exactly. It's all about practice. I didn't think I'd be a very good archaeologist. And it's all about time and practice and then you learn. But some of the stuff that I've done in the past has, I will look at the flakes, these bits that were broken off and we'll do experiments to try and understand how they might have been used in the past. So very similar to the video that we watched with the guy cutting the meat.
So archaeologists do real-time, real-life experiments just like any other kind of scientist to test their hypothesis. So what I will do is, I'll make stone tools or make flakes like we did before, pick them up and use them to cut meat or hammer bone and I'll look at the damage that's on the outside edge of those flakes that we used and try and compare them to ones that we found in the past to match those patterns.
So very similar to what we're doing right now, matching of patterns to try and figure out what something was. It's very similar but we use it with experimental sets or assemblages that we make. So why, I don't know, why does this all matter when it comes to storytelling and why does?
Briana Pobiner:
So let me ask a question before we get to the ... Why does it all matter when it comes to storytelling?
Ella Beaudoin:
Love it.
Briana Pobiner:
So there's a question from Joseph: "Did different rocks results in different breakages?"
Ella Beaudoin:
Guys, you guys are awesome. Yes, they do. So some rocks are much more smooth, so much more, it's about the texture, but there's only certain rocks that you can make stone tools out of. So those, they have to have an internal structure that isn't really big. So the grains inside that make up the rock can't be really big and chunky because when you hit it, the energy that's moving from your hand hitting the rock can't go all the way through it and break off a piece. If it's really chunky internal crystals, it will bounce off of them and shatter. So do you guys know what sandstone is? Or Briana, do you know what sandstone is?
Briana Pobiner:
Well, is it rocks that are made of parts of sand?
Ella Beaudoin:
Yeah, it's like sandy, if you break, if you hit that, it won't break, it will just crumble into dust. So there are certain kinds of rocks that are much better for making stone tools than there are others.
Briana Pobiner:
Awesome. Great question. All right, so let's get back to the storytelling part.
Ella Beaudoin:
Awesome. So why does it all matter? What is storytelling? So the reason that I'll bring back this picture of our hominins butchering an elephant. So this is all super-important. Why does stone tools matter in trying to tell a story here? One, finding stone tools at this site and bones with cut marks on them show us that they were eating, that they were getting food and that they were making food and eating something, which is super-important.
I don't think that's as interesting a story though as when we find stone tools, we can see how many of them there are, right? If there are tons and tons and tons of stone tools, we have to imagine that there must have be more than one person at that site, right? And also with something like an elephant one human, one early hominin can't kill an entire elephant, just can't do it. They're way too big.
So they have to work together to be able to take it down and then to get enough meat for their families. So finding sites like this and looking at the different kinds of stone tools that there are can tell us that people are working together to create something, to get food for their families. We can also test the different kinds of rock that we find to figure out, okay, how far did people travel to get these rocks? Did they go really long distances? Did the kind of materials that they were finding matter?
Which I think is a really cool story, especially when we find all this stuff together. Humans have been, are an amazing species. Human or Homo sapien are amazing species. But our ancestors are really interesting because we have a long history of working together to create really amazing things. So none of this accessing of all these resources, which is this elephant would've happened without multiple different individuals coming together and working together, which I like to think about is a super important story.
Especially right now, I wouldn't be able to be on this video webinar without, we have Jenny, without Molly, without Briana. All of these people had to come together to help figure out this thing and it was the same in the past.
Briana Pobiner:
That's awesome. So it's a lot about human cooperation. Thinking about that so-
Ella Beaudoin:
Yeah. Exactly.
Briana Pobiner:
So awesome. So Ella, thanks for teaching us about how you're able to tell stories from stone tools as an archaeologist. And I'm wondering before we move on to get to some of the other questions that have come in, if you have advice for students who might want to study archaeology or learn more about early humans?
Ella Beaudoin:
Yeah. Of course. So thankfully our website, the Smithsonian has an amazing resources for people wanting to learn about more. So if you go to the Human Origins website, we have resources for college students to look for field schools. We also have teaching guides if you guys aren't in school right now, but are itching to learn or look at lesson plans, there's places for that and we can answer a lot of our questions online on that website. That's a great website for learning about human origins more specifically.
Briana Pobiner:
And that website is humanorigins.si.edu. Great.
Ella Beaudoin:
Yes.
Briana Pobiner:
Excellent. Thank you.
Ella Beaudoin:
Yeah.
Briana Pobiner:
So I have a couple questions now that have come in. I'm going to start with a few questions from AJ who asked, "How did early humans make stone tools sharp enough to cut through thick elephant skin? And also did all of our ancestors use tools to butcher animals?"
Ella Beaudoin:
I love this. Oh, I love this. You guys have such great questions. Yes. So not all of our ... We don't really know if all of our ancestors use stone tools that we see it evolving through time. We see more and more ancestors learning how to use stone tools. We do have things like some primates will use tools but not in the same way that we see what both patterns, right? They might use a rock to break open a nut or a stick to pull something to pull ants out of a termite mound.
But it's not the same kind of pattern that we're seeing with our ancestors. Our ancestors had an amazing capability of creating, of knowing what they wanted, like making a sculpture. You imagine what you want and you look at your material and you're able to hit it in a certain way to create the thing that you would like.
This of course, very early on, and I know Briana can jump in with some of, didn't necessarily happen. This took a really long time to develop. But once we figured out how to do it, we started using it all the time. So how do you make tools sharp enough to cut through an elephant skin? Great question. Actually. When you're hitting the stone, when you're breaking off those flakes, the edges are really, really sharp.
So they're sharp as a knife, they're sharp as any knife. Depending on the material, they could be even sharper. So there's a thing called obsidian, which is this black, almost glass kind of rock. When you break that and you see that only much later on, you don't see that in a million years, I think, I'm pretty sure,
Briana is nodding. So I'm thinking I'm on the right track. That's much, much sharper than some of the steel knives that we have in our homes. So it depends on the rock but also on how often you use it. Because it can break and get dull but then you just make another one.
Briana Pobiner:
Yeah. So it sounds like back to that earlier question about does the kind of rock use make a difference? It seems to, and it also gets to another question from AJ. "Are some stone tools unique to some species of early humans? Like Neanderthal tools different from Homo sapiens tools?"
Ella Beaudoin:
More generally like yes and no. I mean, when we get early later on and closer to Homo sapien, things start to change a lot. And that's because we start developing really complex culture potentially. So you can tell that stone tool might be more "advanced." So it was made later. But also the stone tools that I was showing you have been the same kind of stone tools all the way through time. So it's called Oldowan. So Oldowan tools are the first tools that we started making and using.
Briana Pobiner:
Wonderful because Mason just asked that question, "What was the first stone tool we used?" So perfect.
Ella Beaudoin:
Awesome. So exactly the stuff that I was showing you. So those were some of the first stone tools that we started using. So we would make things very roughly, we'd hit them and break them. But here's the example I like to use with stone tools to more pinpoint your question is, it's very similar to how we invented the pencil, right? We invented the pencil and people were writing with pencils and then we invented the typewriter and people were using typewriters to write and then we invented the computer.
All those things, they're different proportions of them through time. So when it was just the pencil, all people were using were pencils when it was just the typewriter, people were using typewriters a ton, but they were still using pencils. And today we don't use typewriters very often. We mostly use computers but we still use a pencil the whole time. So sometimes some of the most simple things that we're making last all the way through time.
So we find Oldowan-type tools, really simple core and flake tools, which is what that's called all the way through time. They do get a little bit more advanced like a typewriter to a computer. So you can tell maybe what ancestor made them because of what time period they were found in, but they're not specific to a type of early hominin.
Briana Pobiner:
Got it. So that's why the answer is sort of yes and no.
Ella Beaudoin:
Yes.
Briana Pobiner:
Sorry, I think that makes sense. No, absolutely. So we have a question from Ellis, "How long does it take to make a stone tool and why did they throw them away instead of keeping them for later use?"
Ella Beaudoin:
Oh, okay. Great question. Great question, Ellis. So it doesn't actually take, it depends on how good you are. So for me, I'll make stone tools but I'm not that good. So it might take me a while to get a really nice big sharp flake, but if you're really good, boom, boom, boom, you can make a ton really fast. So again, this is a very yes no, yes and no kind of question. So probably these early humans we're probably learning to make stone tools from a very early age.
So they were probably very good at making them, so they could probably make tons if they wanted to. And the reason they would throw them away is they're rock, they're not as durable or as strong as something like steel, right? Or metal. So when they're using it to cut up that tough elephant hide, probably they'd have to go through a bunch of them because they'd get dull basically after using them to cut. So they'd throw it away and they'd make another one that was sharp again.
Briana Pobiner:
Got it. And so here's a good related question from AJ again. "Do you collect everything in the garbage from archaeological sites and stored in the museum or maybe just some things?"
Ella Beaudoin:
That's a great question. So what we try to do is we try to keep everything from an archaeological site if we can. When we're digging in a place like Kenya or Northern Kenya, we'll do an excavation and we'll mark every tiny piece of rock that we find. And that's because ... So imagine if we go back to my garbage example and we found, and we took away the birthday card and we took away the candles. If we brought all of that back to the museum to study, and we only had the cake, we wouldn't necessarily know that there woulda been a birthday. We just knew about the cake.
So it's very similar with archaeological sites. We want to try and record as much about the site, as much information about the site as possible. Because the minute that we stop recording something, we lose a little bit of information that could tell us what happened. So it's a lot of writing. It's a lot of writing and taking photos.
Briana Pobiner:
That's a really good point. So we have another question from Sue. "Do you know whether early hominins tended to live near where the source of the better stones were for tools?" Or maybe did they have to go far, I'm adding this part to the question? Did they have to go far to get really nice rock, that kind of thing?
Ella Beaudoin:
That's again a great question and we're figuring that out. It changes through time. So for a long time hominins would probably live near resources and they would use stuff and they throw it away and they wouldn't move really far to get different resources. But as we evolved and as more different hominins were on the landscape, they started moving further field and going farther places and going to search for better materials.
We do know that that early humans really did know what kind of rocks made the best stone tools. So they did pick the rocks that they liked the most, but sometimes, yeah, so some yes and no. So early on primarily they would live closer. And we can tell that by looking at the amount of material that we're finding and we're trying to figure out, often we can look at the damage patterns and the flaking that's happened on a rock.
We can see okay, how much of this is removed? How much of this is flint knapped? Did someone go to that spot, take a piece of rock, sit down and then take away some of it and go take it somewhere else? Or did they take a whole rock? Because that's also important because that could tell us if they're traveling longer distances. Because you don't want to carry an enormous rock with you, right? You might just want to get some flakes off and take those flakes. But if you're really interested in getting the right amount of material then that's important.
Briana Pobiner:
And so there was a question that was a little bit I think later in time than some of the things you addressed about how can you tell whether trading happened. And I think it has to do with some of those things about whether you carry a big chunk of rock and that rock moves a long distance as opposed to a little bits of material that are moving long distances.
Ella Beaudoin:
Exactly.
Briana Pobiner:
We have about five more minutes for a few more questions and so here's two questions that I'm going to combine together. So Ryan asked if you've found any arrowheads from early human spearheads, but Sharon just asked more generally, what's the coolest thing that you've found?
Ella Beaudoin:
Ooh, both are great questions. So what we like to call, we don't call them arrowheads, so we often call them projectile points. So at least in where I do work, and that's because we don't really know whether they were shot from an arrow or whether they were put on the top of a sphere. So I've never found any projectile points because often that's also a technology that came much later in time.
So I work a little bit with stuff that's a little bit too old before people figured out that they could strap a piece of rock to the top of something. So I've never found them, but I have found something, this relates to some of the cooler things that we found, is things called hand axes or bifacial cores. So bifacial just means knapped on or hit on both sides. And I think those are really pretty.
So that's one of the things that I've looked at, that I think are really cool. But trying to think, the coolest thing that I've ever found is more about the stories that a site can tell. You find out, you excavate, and you find all this material and you take it back and you analyze it. And it's really that part which makes it all become so exciting because you're like, "Oh wait, I was at this site where people were butchering an elephant and they worked together to make this thing or do this thing or get resources." And that's what starts to be really exciting, more than just finding the one object.
Briana Pobiner:
So it's really about putting those different pieces of evidence together to paint that picture.
Ella Beaudoin:
Exactly.
Briana Pobiner:
Awesome. So Joey had asked what kinds of tools would they make other than knives or choppers. And I know you've talked a little bit about hand axes and those sorts of things and then Pablo asked what did they use to hit the obsidian or what are hammer stones made of?
Ella Beaudoin:
Great. So hammer stone, so I might have to ... Have you repeat the first question, but hammer stones are basically rocks that fit nicely in your hand and they are harder than the material that you're going to be hitting it with. So these have to be harder in order to smash the rock so that's really all they are. Hammer stones are what you use to break a slightly softer rock. And it will depend on, if I'm doing experimental archaeology, I can't have a really big hammer stone often because I can't hold it properly with my hand.
So it depends on who you are to the different kind of hammer stone. There's also different ways of using things called anvils. And an anvil is when you have a big rock that you then put another rock on top of and use that in between. So you use a hammer stone and anvil to break something. So what was the first question?
Briana Pobiner:
So actually I'm going to move on to a different question. I'm going to ask several viewers want to know, do you know how you can tell how old a tool is?
Ella Beaudoin:
That's great. So like how we talked about before, you can't really pick up a tool and say, "Oh this is really simple, it must be old." Because really simple just means really great, easy to make. So we can find stuff that's a little bit more "advanced," that has been flint knapped more, that is a little bit more complicated and we can say, "Okay, this happened closer to our time period, not as old," but we can't necessarily say exactly how old that object is from the object itself.
What we do is we take geologists into the field and they will look at the sites all around us to try and date the site. So something that we do as archaeologists is also the law of superposition, which is basically the oldest stuff is on the bottom and the newest stuff is on the top. So the further down you dig, you can assume that the further down is, the older it is.
Briana Pobiner:
Awesome. But I know that also we can. Yeah, I know absolutely. And I know that also we can use different chemical techniques to date the sediments in those layers where the tools are found, so-
Ella Beaudoin:
Yeah.
Briana Pobiner:
... where something is found is really important. And actually that leads to what I think will be our last question.
Ella Beaudoin:
Okay.
Briana Pobiner:
What would you do if you found something rare? Does that go into a museum or does it stay there and get put back into the ground?
Ella Beaudoin:
That is a great question and it changes. It very much changes. So it depends on what the object is. So one thing that's super-important is to record the location of where it is, right? You want to make sure that you know exactly where it is. But secondly, you don't want to take an object that isn't yours to take, right? So what's super-important is you have to understand there are people who live all over the world and you have to get permission from the people who live around the sites that you're working on for you to access any of those materials.
So if it's stone tools, it's really important for working in Kenya that we have partnerships with the National Museums of Kenya and they give us permits to work there. But something that you might find, say if you find something in the U.S. that you really like, often don't take it because that's not potentially part of your culture or something that you own.
It's something that's from somewhere else. So it's important to take a location if you want to tell someone to come like an archaeologist to come look at the site and potentially preserve it. It's important to take a location information about that. But don't take it, because it's probably not good for anyone. So it's better to leave something than to take it.
Briana Pobiner:
So, yeah, and it's important to know the rules of wherever you are going to visit to, if there are rules about collecting prehistoric objects or fossils or things like that. And like you mentioned, it's really important, particularly when you're in foreign countries to work hand-in-hand with the folks in the places that you're visiting and to know what those international rules, regulations, permit, and research regulations are.
Ella Beaudoin:
Exactly.
Briana Pobiner:
So I will thank you Ella, and I really want to thank all the students and other folks who were on for your wonderful questions and I think Maggy is going to join us to wrap up.
Ella Beaudoin:
Yeah. Thanks, guys.
Maggy Benson:
Ella, that was fabulous. Thank you so much for teaching us all about stone tools and I'm so happy to have a new vocabulary word paleolithic, studying old stone tools and rocks. That is very cool. And sorry viewers, we didn't get to all of your questions. They were all really wonderful. I want to encourage everyone to check out the Human Origins website as Ella and Briana mentioned, to find the answers to your questions.
You can find the Human Origins website at humanorigins.si.edu. Thank you Briana. Thank you Ella. And also thank you to Jenny and Molly who we're answering questions throughout our program in our chat. And I did want to encourage everyone to take the survey that appears once you leave this webinar, so it will appear in your Zoom window. There should be a link there and we do want to hear back from you so we can continue offering you programs that bring scientists like Ella and Briana to you.
All right, and the last thing I wanted to mention is that we do have several more programs this week, so I'm going to share my screen to find those. You can go to our Natural History website, go to naturalhistory.si.edu and you will land on our homepage. And if you scroll down, you can click on Get Schedule and you'll see the schedule for all of our live programs this week and into the future.
So tomorrow, we'll be back to learn about DNA barcoding. On Friday, we will be learning about fossils with Dr. Gene Hunt, and on Saturday, we'll have a family program about pressing plants. You can find information about all of those programs on our website at naturalhistory.si.edu. Again, thank you so much, Ella. Thank you, Briana. This was wonderful. And thank you students for tuning in. We'll see you next time.
Briana Pobiner:
Thank you. See you next time.
