Homo Habilis as a species lived from about 2.8 - 1.5 million years ago. They are best known for the vast quantity of stone tools found with their fossils, and according to Cat Bohannon, "associated intelligent sociality". Old, sexist, white male anthropologists associated the development of tools with men's needs during the hunt. However, based on primatology studies, that theory seems unlikely to be correct. In modern chimpanzees (with whom we share 99 percent of our DNA), females are three times more likely than males to hunt with spears. Female chimps are also more adept than males at using stones to crack nuts.
In Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Millions Years of Human Evolution, Cat Bohannon discusses how female chimps use sticks to stab sleeping bush babies (nocturnal squirrel-like creatures). Using sticks while hunting allows her to keep her distance, which is important, since she's often carrying her offspring while hunting. Male chimps are bigger and don't carry their offspring around. They don't have as much need of spears when hunting. Primatologist Adrienne Zihlman reports that female chimpanzees uses sticks for hunting about three times as often as males.
Jane Goodall has also weighed in on male vs female tool use in primates. She has observed that female chimpanzees are more skilled at using simple tools and cracking nuts with hard shells than males are.
In Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong--and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story, Angela Saini writes, "While chimpanzees tend to pick and eat their food alone and on the spot, at some point in history humans began to gather and bring it back home to share. They would have needed containers to hold all this food, as well as slings to carry their babies while they gathered--and both probably before anyone created stone hunting tools. These are likely to have been the earliest human inventions...and they would have been used by women. One of the earliest tools, meanwhile would have been the 'digging stick'....female gatherers to this day use digging sticks to uncover roots and tubes and kill small animals."
Cat Bohannon has dubbed Homo Habilis the Eve of Tool Usage, because while earlier primates also used tools, Homo Habilis is found with a great abundance of stone tools. These stone tools may have been used to butcher meat, scrape hides, and crack nuts. Reconstructions of Homo Habilis often show men as the primary tool users, although at least one more recent reconstruction has a female with a tool -- although she appears to have used it to cut herself, which confuses me. Inspired by Eve, by Cat Bohannon, as part of my Eve series, I made a painting of Homo Habilis, based on several 3D reconstructions in museums, and 2D reconstruction drawings. The reconstructions varied in how hairy they made Homo Habilis, from apelike to our current naked mole rat status.
Our great great Homo Habilis grandmother had environmental pressures acting upon her, surviving while caring for her offspring. She had to use her brain. Letting the diorama males butcher the dead hippo while she keeps watch and eats a hippo steak. Her sister meanwhile picking fruits while scaring away vultures and holding her child, waiting for her share of the meat. Sure, that's smart. She was one of the first major tool users.
Even today, IQ one of the best predictors of life span, and studies of twins have shown that this is mainly related to genetics (Source)
Building such an intelligence led to our large brains in relationship to our body size. Our large brains make reproduction difficult. Cat Bohannon hypothesizes that in addition to tool usage, Homo Habilis also used her large brain for advances in gynecology. She took control of her own reproduction out of necessity, as selective pressures slowly made her babies' brains more difficult to squeeze out of her womb. Bohannon suggests that as early as Homo Habilis, in addition to the use of midwives in delivery, our ancestors were using pharmacological birth control methods...more about this in a future post.
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