Headlines
World's oldest stone tools found
Washington, May 21
Scientists have found in
east Africa stone tools dating back 3.3 million years -- long before the
advent of modern humans and by far the oldest such artefacts yet
discovered.
This is the first evidence that an even earlier group
of proto-humans may have had the thinking abilities needed to figure
out how to make sharp-edged tools. The tools have been found in
northwestern Kenya.
"The tools shed light on an unexpected and
previously unknown period of hominin behaviour and can tell us a lot
about cognitive development in our ancestors that we can't understand
from fossils alone," said lead author Sonia Harmand, of the Turkana
Basin Institute at Stony Brook University in New York.
Hominins
are a group of species that includes modern humans, Homo sapiens, and
our closest evolutionary ancestors. Anthropologists long thought that
our relatives in the genus Homo -- the line leading directly to Homo
sapiens -- were the first to craft such stone tools.
But
researchers have been uncovering tantalizing clues that some other,
earlier species of hominin -- distant cousins, if you will -- might have
figured it out.
The area from where the tools were discovered
was at that time a partially wooded, shrubby environment. The tools
could have been used for breaking open nuts or tubers, bashing open dead
logs to get at insects inside, or maybe something not yet thought of.
The study appeared in the journal Nature.