Stone Age To Bone Age?

Archeologists know early humans used stone to make tools long before the time of Homo sapiens. But a new discovery out this week in Nature https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08652-5 suggests early humans in eastern Africa were also using animal bones – one million years earlier than researchers previously thought. The finding suggests that these early humans were intentionally shaping animal materials – like elephant and hippopotamus bones – to make tools and that it could indicate advancements in early human cognition. Want more on early human history? Email us at [email protected]. Listen to Short Wave on Spotify https://n.pr/3HOQKeK, Apple Podcasts https://n.pr/3WA9vqh and Google Podcasts https://n.pr/3Vi9Xsm. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:15Speaker 00

  You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 0:20Emily Kwong?

  Hey, Short Wavers. Rachel Carlson here.

• 0:22Speaker 02

  And Emily Kwong.

• 0:23Emily Kwong?

  With our biweekly science news roundup, featuring the hosts of All Things Considered. And today, we have Ari Shapiro.

• 0:29Speaker 03

  Round me up.

• 0:30Emily Kwong?

  Welcome to the Short Wave rodeo.

• 0:32Speaker 03

  Here we go.

• 0:33Emily Kwong?

  Where we have for you a new flower, the woolly devil, found in a national park.

• 0:39Speaker 02

  Drinking lemonade in virtual reality.

• 0:41Speaker 03

  Yum.

• 0:41Emily Kwong?

  And how early humans may have made tools out of bone 1.5 million years ago.

• 0:47Speaker 03

  Wild.

• 0:48Emily Kwong?

  All that on this episode of Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

• 1:04Speaker 00

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• 2:08Speaker 04

  In the much-talked-about new movie, Wicker, Olivia Colman plays a woman who commissions a husband literally made of wicker. Yes, wicker. We'll tell you why the silly and bawdy new movie is also a nice cozy fall watch. Listen to Pop Culture Happy Hour via the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:30Speaker 03

  Can we start with early humans making tools out of bones? Rachel, tell us about it.

• 2:35Speaker 02

  Let's do it. So archaeologists know early humans used stone to make tools. That usually meant knocking rocks against one another to get like, sharp flakes for cutting animal carcasses or plants. And the Ashulean period, about one and a half million years ago, way before Homo sapiens showed up, was known for stone hand axes. They're sort of oval or teardrop shaped rocks with sharp points. But a new study out this week in Nature suggests early humans in Eastern Africa were also using bone to make tools like this. Two, Ignacio de la Torre is a study author and archaeologist. He works at the Spanish National Research Council, and he says this dates the production of bone tools a million years earlier than scientists thought.

• 3:16Speaker 03

  Wow, so there might be a bone age in addition to a stone age?

• 3:19Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 3:20Speaker 03

  Wow. So do the tools actually teach us anything about how smart these ancient human ancestors were, or how they lived?

• 3:28Speaker 02

  Well, Tom Plummer is a paleoanthropologist at Queens College in New York and wasn't involved in this research. But he says the paper suggests early humans were using mental imaging to make these tools, which means like, maybe they had an image in their heads of something and then used their hands to replicate that image.

• 3:44Emily Kwong?

  They're just like us, just puzzling along.

• 3:47Speaker 03

  Just more hair.

• 3:48Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, that's right. Ignacio thinks that this shows advancements in cognition, since early humans took what they knew about stone tools and how those were shaped, and then just applied it to new materials like elephant and hippopotamus bones.

• 4:02Speaker 05

  Now we have a human species here that is able to create an innovation by applying a knowledge they know, they have, or the working of stone. They're applying this to a new raw material.

• 4:16Speaker 02

  But Ignacio also noted the paper opens even more questions than it solves. So he wants to know, could they find even older bones? And why was there a million year gap between these and the previously found bone tools? So there's still a lot of questions about some of our early ancestors.

• 4:32Speaker 03

  Intriguing. Well, let's shift from our ancient past to our science fiction present. Tell me about drinking lemonade. In virtual reality, what does that mean?

• 4:40Emily Kwong?

  OK, so are you familiar with VR?

• 4:42Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 4:43Emily Kwong?

  Have you played it?

• 4:43Speaker 03

  No.

• 4:44Emily Kwong?

  Oh, well, you should because it's the super immersive gaming experience. You strap on a pair of goggles and you can see or hear another world. But Ari, imagine you could also taste another world.

• 4:55Speaker 03

  Calorie free, I would imagine.

• 4:56Emily Kwong?

  Yes, yes. What if in virtual reality, you could taste lemonade, served by someone in a kitchen on the other side of the country?

• 5:02Speaker 03

  Not just a simulation of lemonade, but actually how sweet or sour they made it specifically?

• 5:07Emily Kwong?

  Yes, yes. Not the lemonade, but a simulation that matched their recipe. Researchers have been trying to do this in all kinds of ways, and Jing Hua Li is one of them. She's a professor of materials science and engineering at The Ohio State University. Her team invented this device called eTaste and described it in the journal Science Advances.

• 5:27Speaker 03

  How does eTaste work?

• 5:28Emily Kwong?

  So there's two parts. There's a small sensor patch that researchers dipped into store-bought lemonade. And that patch is attuned to recognize molecules like glucose and glutamate chemicals that represent the five basic tastes of sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami. Data from lemonade in California was sent hundreds of miles away to Jing Hua's lab in Ohio. And then, in a matter of seconds, the data was wirelessly passed to this tiny device filled with edible chemicals, which then combined into a synthetic replica of the lemonade. And that cocktail of flavors was pumped across a volunteer's tongue. And voila, someone in Ohio is tasting a glass of lemonade in California. Here's Jing Hua.

• 6:08Speaker 06

  The long-term goal here is for us to establish like the new way for people to interact with each other.

• 6:16Speaker 03

  I'm going to maintain that I would still be able to tell the difference between the chemical simulation of lemonade and actual lemon juice and sugar. But can eTaste recreate more complicated flavors? Like, I don't know, beef bourguignon or something?

• 6:29Emily Kwong?

  So not really, unfortunately not. Because, and Jing Hua is the first person to admit this, taste is not the same thing as flavor. You know this, you could. Nimesha Ranasinga at the University of Maine reminded me that a lot of flavors actually aroma.

• 6:44Speaker 03

  How food smells.

• 6:45Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, and then you also got food's temperature and texture.

• 6:48Speaker 07

  And even the background noise and ambient lighting and our memories and experiences, there are so many other factors affecting our flavors.

• 6:58Emily Kwong?

  But Nimesha finds eTaste super interesting and is really curious about scalability. Will we see VR dining one day?

• 7:04Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 7:05Emily Kwong?

  Could there be medical applications? Maybe a version of eTaste could help doctors diagnose the loss of taste from long COVID or traumatic brain injury.

• 7:12Speaker 03

  Wow. Okay, for our third and final story, Rachel, will you tell us about the woolly devil, which is neither made of wool nor a devil?

• 7:19Emily Kwong?

  No, yeah. The woolly devil is a new flower to science, found recently in the desert landscape of Big Bend National Park in Texas. It's called the woolly devil because it's covered in this whitish fuzzy fur with a hint of yellow in the middle. Some are no bigger than half an inch in size, and these little plants were camouflaged in the rocks, which probably explains why they haven't been documented before.

• 7:41Speaker 03

  Who discovered these little flowers?

• 7:43Emily Kwong?

  Park volunteer Deb Manley and employee Kathy Hoyt were on a hike in the backcountry, and they spotted this star-shaped flower. They took a picture and uploaded it to iNaturalist, that's the online network for identifying plants and animals. And Isaac Lichter-Mark, an evolutionary biologist, figured out that the flower didn't match any of the other images on iNaturalist. He told our colleague James Dubek about this.

• 8:08Speaker 03

  They took pictures, and then that kind of caused an uproar. They caused an email chain of different botanists emailing each other. And so, yeah, we called ourselves Team Woolly. Okay, what did Team Woolly determine about this new flower?

• 8:21Speaker 02

  Well, they thought it was a sunflower. And Ari, I want you to picture a sunflower in your mind's eye. It looks like a single flower to most of us, but it's actually a flower head made up of lots of tiny flowers. And then it all comes together to look like one big flower.

• 8:36Emily Kwong?

  This new plant had the same feature, so it was giving sunflower in its own woolly way. And after looking at the DNA and its physical features in a scanning electron microscope, researchers were surprised to find that the woolly devil was not only a new species, but it was one rank higher than that. It represents a whole new genus within the larger family that contains sunflowers.

• 8:58Speaker 03

  This is major. Team Woolly must be thrilled.

• 9:00Speaker 02

  Yes. They are. But Ari, these flowers have only been found in a few places in Big Bend, which has had a drought in recent years. So the researchers say even though sunflowers are known to be resilient in lots of different kinds of climates, this new genus of plant could have a rough road ahead.

• 9:17Speaker 03

  Why'd it gotta end on such a bummer?

• 9:18Speaker 02

  I know. I'm sorry.

• 9:19Speaker 03

  Drink some lemonade.

• 9:20Speaker 02

  Ari, bummer aside, it is such a party having you on every time.

• 9:24Speaker 03

  I raised my glass of lemonade to you.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  Thanks, Ari.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  You can hear more of Ari Shapiro on Consider This, NPR's afternoon podcast about what the news means for you.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  This episode was produced by Mallory Yu and Rebecca Ramirez. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and Christopher Intagliata.

• 9:46Emily Kwong?

  Tyler Jones checked the facts. Patrick Murray and Jimmy Keely were the audio engineers. I'm Emily Kwong.

• 9:52Speaker 02

  And I'm Rachel Carlson. Thanks for listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

• 10:07Speaker 03

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