Stone tools from about 2.9 million years ago have been found in Africa.
. But claims that these finds, which include some sharp edges, represent the oldest known stone tools are controversial.
Similarities of the Nyayanga artifacts to those found at sites dating to as late as around 1.7 million years ago “reinforce the long trajectory of Oldowan technology in the early stages of human evolution,” says archaeologist Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo of Rice University in Houston and the University of Alcalá in Madrid. He did not participate in the new study.
Skeletal remains of at least three hippos unearthed near a total of 56 stone artifacts at Nyayanga display butchery marks, the investigators say. Wear patterns on another 30 stone tools from Nyayanga indicate that these items were used to cut, scrape and pound animal tissue and a variety of plants. And antelope fossils found at Nyayanga display damage from hominids removing meat with sharp stones and crushing bones with large stones to remove marrow.
Stone artifacts unearthed in the same sediment as fossil hippo skeletons, such as this one, indicate that hominids used tools to butcher large animals at least 2.6 million years ago, around 600,000 years earlier than previous fossil evidence of massive creatures being cut apart with stone implements.These discoveries are among 330 Oldowan artifacts and 1,776 animal bones unearthed at Nyayanga from 2015 through 2017.
Whoever wielded stone tools at the Kenya site close to 3 million years ago “had access to a well-balanced diet for hunter-gatherers,” says coauthor Rick Potts, a paleoanthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
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