A scientific discovery in Kenya, first reported in April, challenges conventional wisdom about human history, say the scientists who made the discovery and are now releasing the details. The scientists say the collection of stone tools they turned up near Lake Turkana were made long before the first humans are thought to have evolved.
This week the scientists unveil the details of their discovery in the journal Nature. What’s remarkable about the find is that, up until now, scientists widely believed that humans invented stone tool making. In fact, anthropologists call the earliest humans Homo habilis, meaning handy man. The toolmaking technique associated with humans involves whacking rocks together in just the right way to fashion sharp tools. Until recently, the evidence, fossil bones and very old tools, has suggested this talent emerged about 2.5 million years ago. But a team led by scientists from New York’s Stony Brook University discovered stone tools that are much older than that, in a desert area west of Kenya’s Lake Turkana. The tools are now in a museum in Nairobi.
Within an hour, Dr. Harmand and Jason E. Lewis, co-leaders of the project, traced the source of the artifacts scattered in a dry riverbed to datable volcanic sediments at the top of a nearby hill. The stones showed that at least some ancient hominins — the group that includes humans and their extinct ancestors — had started intentionally knapping stones, breaking off pieces with quick, hard strikes from another stone to make sharp tools sooner than other findings suggested..
