Discovery at 2.9-Million-Year-Old African Site Prompts New Consideration of Who Made First Stone Tools
New research by a team of scientists reveals that early human relatives used some of the oldest stone tools ever found to both butcher hippos and to pound plant material.
The work presents what are likely to be the oldest examples of a vital stone-age innovation known as the Oldowan toolkit, as well as the oldest evidence of hominins consuming very large animals.
The tools were used along the shores of Africa’s Lake Victoria in Kenya roughly 2.9 million years ago.
Excavations at the site, named Nyayanga and located on the Homa Peninsula in western Kenya, also produced a pair of large molars belonging to the human species’ evolutionary relative Paranthropus.
The study, which appears in the journal Science and was led by researchers at the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History and the City University of New York’s Queens College, included NYU biological anthropologist Shara Bailey, whose analysis of the newly discovered molars aided in identifying the species to which the teeth belonged—they turned out to belong to the oldest Paranthropus remains yet found.
New research by a team of scientists reveals that early human relatives used some of the oldest stone tools ever found to both butcher hippos and to pound plant material. The work presents what are likely to be the oldest examples of a vital stone-age innovation known as the Oldowan toolkit, as well as the oldest evidence of hominins consuming very large animals.
The tools were used along the shores of Africa’s Lake Victoria in Kenya roughly 2.9 million years ago.
Excavations at the site, named Nyayanga and located on the Homa Peninsula in western Kenya, also produced a pair of large molars belonging to the human species’ evolutionary relative Paranthropus.
The study, which appears in the journal Science and was led by researchers at the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History and the City University of New York’s Queens College, included NYU biological anthropologist Shara Bailey, whose analysis of the newly discovered molars aided in identifying the species to which the teeth belonged—they turned out to belong to the oldest Paranthropus remains yet found.
