Humans probably didn't inherit their questionable treatment of the environment from caveman, according to a worldwide conference this week titled, "The Origins of Recycling". Then again, our ancestors only had to worry about reusing, reducing, and recycling primitive tools, The Associated Press reported.
The conference, which took place over four days in Tel Aviv, drew around 50 scholars from 10 different countries in discussion of how early humans recycled, as per the AP.
Mostly, primitive man recycled every day tools. For example, a dig site in Rome uncovered bone tools thought to be recycled some 300,000 years ago,ABC News reported.
"We find several levels of reuse and recycling," said Giovanni Boschian, a geologist from the University of Pisa, of the Rome discovery."The bones were shattered to extract the marrow, then the fragments were shaped into tools, abandoned, and finally reworked to be used again."
Some scientists have pointed to instances of recycling from over a million years ago, but those cases are less certain than Boschian's example, according to ABC News.
Other examples from 300,000 years ago and earlier included blades and scrapers converted from hand-axes and discarded flint flakes. Caveman were so resourceful they re-purposed the "flakes that flew off the stone during the knapping process", ABC News wrote.
"For the first time we are revealing the extent of this phenomenon, both in terms of the amount of recycling that went on and the different methods used," said Ran Barkai, an archaeologist and one of the organizers of the four-day meeting at Tel Aviv University.
A cave patrolled by Avi Gopher, a Tel Aviv University archaeologist, revealed that 10 percent of the tools had been recycled.
"It was not an occasional behavior; it was part of the way they did things, part of their way of life," Gopher said.
The reasons early humans recycled are for the most part obvious and survival-based, but important nonetheless. Recycling demonstrates resourcefulness by humans even early in their development. The phenonmenon is also useful in tracking early humans.
According to Norm Catto, a geography professor at Memorial University in St John's, pre-historic recycling "could give clues on trading links and how much time people spent at one site," ABC News reported.
Still, researchers don't go as far to attribute a sense of environmental responsibility to prehistoric humans.
"It is very useful to think about prehistoric recycling," said Daniel Amick, a professor of anthropology at Chicago's Loyola University. "But I think that when they recycled they did so on an 'ad hoc' basis, when the need arose."
