Archaeologists in Kenya have discovered some of the oldest stone tools ever used by ancient humans, dating back around 2.9 million years. Before this, the oldest known Oldowan tools dated to 2.6 million years ago.
Key points
- The tools, found at Nyayanga (Kenya), were used to butcher hippos and pound plant materials like tubers and fruit.
- It is evidence that the tools were used by other branches of early humans, not just the ancestors of Homo Sapiens.
- Two big fossil teeth found alongside the tools belong to an extinct human cousin, known as Paranthropus.
- The site in western Kenya, Nyayanga, also yielded the oldest evidence of hominins consuming very large animals, with at least three individual hippos unearthed.
- Scientists had previously thought that Oldowan tools, the name given to the earliest kinds of stone tools made by human-like hands. These were only used by ancestors of Homo Sapiens, a grouping that includes our species and our closest relatives.
- However, no Homo Sapien fossils were found at the excavation site in Nyayanga on the Homa Peninsula in western Kenya. Instead, there were two teeth – stout molars – from the Paranthropus genus that had combined ape-like and human-like traits, along with 330 stone tools.
- The association of these Nyayanga tools with Paranthropus may reopen the case as to who made the oldest Oldowan tools.
- Perhaps not only Homo, but other kinds of hominins were processing food with Oldowan technology.
- The research has been published in Science.
