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The skull of a 3.3-million-year-old hominin, Kenyanthropus platytops, was found in 1999 about a kilometer from the tool site. But earlier finds suggest a possible answer. The researchers admit they can't say for sure who made the tools. These are some the stone tools found in Kenya and have since been dated to 3.3 million years. "The whole site's surprising, it just rewrites the book on a lot of things that we thought were true," said geologist Chris Lepre of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Rutgers University, a co-author of the paper who precisely dated the artifacts.
STONE TOOLS MADE BY EARLY MAN HOW TO
The tools "shed light on an unexpected and previously unknown period of hominin behavior and can tell us a lot about cognitive development in our ancestors that we can't understand from fossils alone," said lead author Sonia Harmand, of the Turkana Basin Institute at Stony Brook University and the Université Paris Ouest Nanterre.Ĭalling the discoveries at the archeological site named Lomekwian 3 a "new beginning to the known archeological record," the researchers detailing the findings Wednesday in a Nature study suggest this would be first evidence that an even earlier group of proto-humans may have had the thinking abilities needed to figure out how to make sharp-edged tools. They are much simpler than the more modern stone tools, which had a much broader range of uses. The collection of razor-edged and round rocks the size of softballs and even bowling balls pushes the known date of such tools back by 700,000 years and would suggest that our ancestors were converting them into pounding or cutting tools long before our genus homo appeared. Scientists working in a remote region of Kenya have found stone tools dating back 3.3 million years, making them the oldest ever used by our human ancestors.