3.3 Million Year-Old Kenyan Stone Tools to Rewrite Early Human History

Scientists working in north-western Kenya have unearthed stone tools dating to 3.3 million years, pushing behind the date of tool-using capabilities among human-like species by 700,000 years.

The tools were found by accident when Sonia Harmand and Jason of Turkina Basin Institute were lost during a field survey in 2011. On their way back, they stumbled up on the artifact rich site, now named Lomekwi. The site yield 149 artifacts that helped tool-makers use stones for making hammers and anvils.

"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 Harmand.

The tools were dated using volcanic ash layer below the site and the magnetic minerals in the vicinity of the site.

The prevailing notion about tool use is that the first of tool-makers and users were earliest of Homo sapiens. The recent discovery is about to change that as the tools found predate existence of earliest humans. While researchers are unsure who the tool-makers were, their guess is it could have a distant species known as K. platyops or the more popular Australopithecus afarensis. Tool-making depicts higher intelligence.

"The capabilities of our ancestors and the environmental forces leading to early stone technology are a great scientific mystery. The newly dated tools begin to lift the veil on that mystery, at an earlier time than expected," said Richard Potts, director of the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, who was not involved in the research

"Researchers have thought there must be some way of flaking stone that preceded the simplest tools known until now. Harmand's team shows us just what this even simpler altering of rocks looked like before technology became a fundamental part of early human behavior."