Lexi Morton
Block:7
Tittle: World's oldest stone tools challenge ideas about first toolmakers
Source: ScienceDaily.com, The Earth Institute at Columbia University
Date: May 20th, 2015
APA Citation: The Earth Institute at Columbia University. (2015, May 20). World's oldest stone tools challenge ideas about first toolmakers. ScienceDaily. Retrieved May 20, 2015 from

Scientists working in the desert of northwestern Kenya have found stone tools dating back 3.3 million years, long before the advent of modern humans, and by far the oldest such artifacts yet discovered. The tools push the known date of such tools back by 700,000 years; they also may challenge the notion that our own most direct ancestors were the first to bang two rocks together to create a new technology. The tools "shed light on an unexpected and previously unknown period of hominine behavior and can tell us a lot about mental 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 and the Universite Paris Ouest Nanterre. The researchers do not know who made these oldest of tools. But earlier finds suggest a possible answer: The skull of a 3.3-million-year-old hominin,Kenyanthropus platytops, was found in 1999 about a kilometer from the tool site. A K. platyops tooth and a bone from a skull were discovered a few hundred meters away, and an as-yet unidentified tooth has been found about 100 meters away. The researchers tried knapping stones themselves to better understand how the tools they found might have been made. They