Prehistoric stone tools older than early humans discovered in Kenya

New research describes the discovery of prehistoric stone tools found in Kenya that predate the time of the first humans.

A new mystery has emerged in science. Archaeologists have discovered 330 lithic tools used to slaughter animals and grind plant material into food. Their study, published in the journal Science and led by the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History and the Queens School of the City University of New York (CUNY), says these tools were made about 2.9 million years ago. However, our species “Homo sapiens” appeared only about 300,000 years ago. Moreover, the two large-toothed fossils excavated at the archaeological site belong to the genus “Paranthropus”, a distant relative of humans with large teeth and small brains.

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The artefacts represent the oldest-known examples of a revolutionary Stone Age technology called the Oldowan toolkit. Scientists believed these tools were only used by ancestors of H. sapiens. However, no fossils were discovered for H. sapiens. The tools consisted of hammerstones and stone cores to pound plants, bone and meat, and flakes to cut meat. The food prepared with these tools was eaten raw because fire had not been harnessed yet.

“The assumption among researchers has long been that only the genus Homo, to which humans belong, was capable of making stone tools,” senior author Rick Potts, the National Museum of Natural History’s Peter Buck Chair of Human Origins, commented in a Smithsonian news release.

“With these tools you can crush better than an elephant’s molar can and cut better than a lion’s canine can,” Prof. Potts explained. “Oldowan technology was like suddenly evolving a brand-new set of teeth outside your body, and it opened up a new variety of foods on the African savannah to our ancestors.”

“This is one of the oldest if not the oldest example of Oldowan technology,” added lead author Thomas Plummer, professor of anthropology at Queens College CUNY and research associate in the scientific team of the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program. “This shows the toolkit was more widely distributed at an earlier date than people realized, and that it was used to process a wide variety of plant and animal tissues. We don’t know for sure what the adaptive significance was but the variety of uses suggests it was important to these hominins.” Hominins are various species considered human or closely related.