World’s Oldest Stone Tools Discovered in Kenya

Date: 22 May 2015 - 21:45

News ID: ۱۴۱۳۱

NAIROBI (Press TV) - The oldest stone tools ever, dating back to 3.3 million years ago, have been discovered in the desert of northwestern Kenya by a group of scientists.
Following further field research and laboratory analysis on the artifacts found some four years ago in the African country, a team of archeologists led by Sonia Harmand from Stony Brook University in the United States described in the journal Nature on Wednesday that they are now certain that the tools are the oldest man-made artifacts ever unearthed.
"They are significantly earlier than anything that has been found previously,” state-run BBC quoted Dr. Nick Taylor, from the National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS) in France and the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, as saying on Wednesday.
The first set of tools was found by accident in July 2011, when the archeologists, heading to a known fossil site near Kenya’s Lake Turkana, made a wrong turn and ended up at a previously unexplored site, which they named Lomekwi 3.
"It’s really quite astonishing to think what separates the previous oldest site and this site is 700,000 years of time. It’s monumental,” Taylor added.
Before the latest discovery, the oldest examples of such technology were the Oldowan tools from Tanzania, estimated to date back to some 2.6 million years ago.
A total of 149 tools, including sharp flakes of stone probably used for cutting and huge hammers and anvils, were found at the site at the end of 2012.
"The very largest one we have weighs 15 kilograms, which is massive,” Taylor added.
The scientists who made the discovery are not sure who made the tools but until recently it was thought that Homo habilis, dating back to 2.4-2.3 million years ago, was the earliest of our ancestors in the Homo genus to have used tools.
"There was a hominin called Kenyanthropus platyops, which has been found very close to where the Lomekwi 3 tools are being excavated. And that hominin was around at the time the tools were being made,” Taylor said.
"More widely in the East African region there is another, hominin, Australopithecus afarensis, which is famously known from the fossil Lucy, which is another candidate,” Taylor added.
The tools discovery suggests that our early ancestors may have been smarter than previously thought.