Research: The oldest stone tools discovered weren’t made by humans!
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Archaeologists have unearthed what may be the oldest stone tools ever found, and they believe they were made by someone other than Homo’s immediate ancestor.
The ancient tools were discovered in 2016 in Nyayang, Kenya, on the shores of Lake Victoria, and match the design of the Oldowan tool group, the name given to the oldest type of humanoid-made stone tool.
Dating estimates suggest that the newly discovered tools were made between 2.6 and 3 million years ago before being buried for many eons in mud and sand. In total, 330 artifacts were found among 1776 fossilized animal bones with traces of butchering.
Study suggests the oldest stone tools ever found were not made by human hands https://t.co/vYC8bhgFjh
— ScienceAlert (@ScienceAlert) February 9, 2023
Prior to this, the oldest known Oldowan tools date back to 2.6 million years ago.
And while the era of the newly discovered tools could be improved upon, their creation coincides with a time when the ancestors of Homo sapiens roamed along with other early humans, indicating a huge technological milestone for their makers—whatever.
“The Olduvian technology was like the sudden development of a whole new set of teeth outside of your body, exposing our ancestors to a new variety of foods on the African savannah,” says Rick Potts, a paleoanthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. History that was part of the study.
Hammer heads and sharp-edged core flakes have been recovered, as well as fragments of ribs, leg bones, and shoulders of ungulate ruminant mammals called bovids (such as antelopes) and hippopotamuses.
The bones have deep cuts where craftsmen carved flesh from bone. Evidence suggests that they even crushed some bones to extract the marrow and used tools to grind plant matter.
These tools were so effective that the technology spread across Africa for thousands of years. The newer Oldowan sites, which are two million years old, have been found from north to southern Africa in both grassy and forested habitats.
But so far, the oldest Oldowan sites have been limited to the Afar Triangle in Ethiopia, in two regions about 50 kilometers (31 miles) apart.
The Nyayanga site expands the known geographic range of the oldest Oldowan tools by more than 1,300 km to the southwest. It also pushes back its reappearance by about 2.9 million years, which the researchers arrived at after narrowing down their age estimates using a range of dating methods.
“It is very interesting that here, at this site, there is some of the oldest evidence of a mass extermination of megafauna from before the fire,” says Julian Lowes of the Australian Research Center for Human Evolution at Griffith University.
And that is not all. Along with the bones and tools, a team led by anthropologist Thomas Plummer of the City University of New York found two teeth — a left upper and lower molars, one broken in half and one nearly intact — that the researchers identified as Paranthropus teeth.
One of the teeth was found in close association with an ancient artifact, leading researchers to hypothesize that these hominids may have made or at least used stone tools rather than our more direct human ancestors.
Of course, the true creators of these tools will never be known, as any claims about the identity of the creators are likely to come under scrutiny from other scientists or new discoveries.
The study is published in the journal Science.
Source: Science Alert