Oldest Stone Tools Discovered in Kenya
Friday, April 17th, 2015April 17, 2015.
Archaeologists—scientists who study the past remains of human cultures—who were working in northern Kenya discovered evidence of the world’s oldest human technology. Technology is defined as human inventions, and the term includes tools, techniques, and processes that humans use to survive and prosper. The Kenyan technology found is in the form of 3.3 million-year-old stone tools. Sonia Harmand of Stony Brook University in New York described the discovery this week at the annual meeting of the Paleoanthropology Society in San Francisco. The discovery raises interesting questions about the origins of human technology.
Lake Turkana, in northern Kenya, a site that was peopled by by early humans.
Credit: © Christophe Cerisier, iStockphoto
Harmand and her team discovered the stone tools at a site called Lomekwi, on the western side of Lake Turkana in northern Kenya. The tools were large and crudely made by chipping sharp-edged stone flakes off a large rock using another stone as a hammer. The Lomekwi stone tools are similar to others found at sites in Africa, including Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, where anthropologists Louis and Mary Leakey discovered the first known fossils of an early human ancestor called Homo habilis. This species is considered by most anthropologists to be one of the earliest types of human beings.
What distinguishes Lomekwi from all other sites is its age. The stone tools discovered at Lomekwi are more than 1 million years older than the tools at Olduvai and they are at least 700,000 years older than stone tools from the site of Gona in Ethiopia, discovered in 1996. The 2.6 million-year-old stone tools from Gona had been the oldest known technology until now.
However, scientists point out that he oldest known fossils of Homo habilis are only 2.4 to 2.8 million years old. This suggests that the Lomekwi stone tools were made by an earlier, prehuman ancestor such as Australopithecus afarensis. American anthropologist Donald Johanson discovered fossils of this species in 1974 at Hadar, Ethiopia. Johanson found a partial skeleton of an adult female, the famous “Lucy,” in deposits dating to about 3.2 million years ago. Scientists think that human beings developed from an Australopithecus ancestor. However, they are not sure whether it is A. afarensis or another species that is the direct ancestor of the first humans.
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