Short Wave - Stone Age To Bone Age?

Episode Date: March 7, 2025

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 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 [e-mail]. Listen to Short Wave on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts.See 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

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, shortwavers, Rachel Carlson here and Emily Kwong with our biweekly Science News Roundup featuring the hosts of all things considered. And today we have Ari Shapiro. Round me up. Welcome to the Shortwave rodeo. Here we go. Where we have for you a new flower, the woolly devil, found in a national park. Drinking lemonade in virtual reality.

Yum. And how early humans may have made tools out of. Bone, 1.5 million years ago. Wild. All that on this episode of Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. Can we start with early humans making tools out of bones? Rachel, tell us about it. Let's do it.

So archaeologists know early humans use 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 Ashulian 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 tear drop-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. Wow. So there might be a bone age in addition to a stone age. Correct. Wow. So do the tools actually teach? just anything about how smart these ancient human ancestors were or how they lived? Well, Tom Plummer is a paleo anthropologist 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 use their hands to replicate that image. They're just like us. Just puzzling along. Just more hair. That's right. Ignacio thinks that this shows advanced.

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. Now we have a human species here that is able to create an innovation by applying a knowledge they know they have for the working of stone. They're applying this to a new raw material. 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. 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? Okay. So are you familiar with VR? Of course. Have you played it? No. 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. Aari, imagine, you could also taste another world. Calorie free, I would imagine. Yes. Yes.

What if, in virtual reality, you could taste lemonade served by someone in a kitchen on the other side of the country? Not just a simulation of lemonade, but actually how sweet or sour they made it specifically? 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 Lee is one of them. She's a professor of material science and engineering at the Ohio State University. her team invented this device called E-Taste and described it in the journal Science Advances. How does E-Taste work?

So there's two parts. There's a small sensor patch that researchers dipped into store-bought lemonade. 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 Jinghua's lab in Ohio. And then in a matter of seconds, the data was wireless. 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 Jinghua. The long-term goal here is for us to establish the new way for people to interact with each other.

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 e-taste recreate more complicated flavors, like, I don't know, beef bourgignon or something? So not really, unfortunately not, because, and Jinkwa is the first person to admit this, taste is not the same thing as flavor. You know this, you cook. Nemeshah Rana Singa at the University of Maine reminded me that a lot of flavor is actually

aroma. How food smells. Yeah, and then you also got foods temperature and texture. And even the background noise. and ambient lighting and our memories and experiences, there are so many other factors affecting our flavors. But Nemeshah finds e-taste super interesting and is really curious about scalability.

Will we see VR dining one day? Could there be medical applications? Maybe a version of e-taste could help doctors diagnose the loss of taste from long-coveter traumatic brain injury. 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?

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. Who discovered these little flowers? Park volunteer Deb Manley and employee Kathy Hoyt-Ronna hike in the backcountry and they spotted this star-shaped flower. They took a picture and uploaded it to I-Naturalist.

That's the online network for identifying plants and animals. And Isaac Liktor Mark, an evolutionary biologist, figured out that the flower didn't match any of the other images on I-naturalist. He told our colleague James Dubeck about this. 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 Woolley. Okay, what did team Woolly determine about this new flower? 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. 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.

This is major. Team Woolley must be thrilled. Yes, they are. But already 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. Why, it got to end on such a bummer? I know, I'm sorry.

Drink some lemonade. Ari, bummer aside, it is such a party having you on every time. I raise my glass of lemonade to you. Thanks, Ari. You can hear more of Ari Shapiro on Consider This NPR's Afternoon Podcasts about what the news means for you. This episode was produced by Mallory U and Rebecca Ramirez. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and Christopher in Taliyadh. Tyler Jones Check the Facts.

Patrick Murray and Jimmy Keely were the audio engineers. I'm Emily Kwong. And I'm Rachel Carlson. Thanks for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.