Advanced 2.5 Million-Year-Old Tools May Rewrite Human History
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After a decade-long excavation at a remote site in Kenya, scientists have unearthed evidence that our early human relatives continuously fashioned the same tools across thousands of generations, hinting that sophisticated tool use may have originated much earlier than previously known, according to a new study in Nature Communications.
The discovery of nearly 1,300 artifactsâwith ages that span 2.44 to 2.75 million years oldâreveals that the influential Oldowan tool-making tradition existed across at least 300,000 years of turbulent environmental shifts. The wealth of new tools from Kenyaâs Namorotukunan site suggest that their makers adapted to major environmental changes in part by passing technological knowledge down through the ages.
âThe question was: did they generally just reinvent the [Oldowan tradition] over and over again? That made a lot of sense when you had a record that was kind of sporadic,â said David R. Braun, a professor of anthropology at the George Washington University who led the study, in a call with 404 Media.
âBut the fact that we see so much similarity between 2.4 and 2.75 [million years ago] suggests that this is generally something that they do,â he continued. âSome of it may be passed down through social learning, like observation of others doing it. Thereâs some kind of tradition that continues on for this timeframe that would argue against this idea of just constantly reinventing the wheel.â
Oldowan tools, which date back at least 2.75 million years, are distinct from earlier traditions in part because hominins, the broader family to which humans belong, specifically sought out high-quality materials such as chert and quartz to craft sharp-edged cutting and digging tools. This advancement allowed them to butcher large animals, like hippos, and possibly dig for underground food sources.
When Braun and his colleagues began excavating at Namorotukunan in 2013, they found many artifacts made of chalcedony, a fine-grained rock that is typically associated with much later tool-making traditions. To the teamâs surprise, the rocks were dated to periods as early as 2.75 million years ago, making them among the oldest artifacts in the Oldowan record.
âEven though Oldowan technology is really just hitting one rock against the other, there's good and bad ways of doing it,â Braun explained. âSo even though it's pretty simple, what they seem to be figuring out is where to hit the rock, and which angles to select. They seem to be getting a grip on thatânot as well as later in timeâbut they're definitely getting an understanding at this timeframe.â
The excavation was difficult as it takes several days just to reach the remote offroad site, while much of the work involved tiptoing along steep outcrops. Braun joked that their auto mechanic lined up all the vehicle shocks that had been broken during the drive each season, as a testament to the challenge.
But by the time the project finally concluded in 2022, the researchers had established that Oldowan tools were made at this site over the course of 300,000 years. During this span, the landscape of Namorotukunan shifted from lush humid forests to arid desert shrubland and back again. Despite these destabilizing shifts in their climate and biome, the hominins that made these tools endured in part because this technology opened up new food sources to them, such as the carcasses of large animals.
âThe whole landscape really shifts,â Braun said. âBut hominins are able to basically ameliorate those rapid changes in the amount of rainfall and the vegetation around by using tools to adapt to whatâs happening.â
âThat's a human superpowerâitâs that ability we have to keep this information stored in our collective heads, so that when new challenges show up, there's somebody in our group that remembers how to deal with this particular adaptation,â he added.
Itâs not clear exactly which species of hominin made the tools at Namorotukunan; it may have been early members of our own genus Homo, or other relatives, like Australopithecus afarensis, that later went extinct. Regardless, the discovery of such a long-lived and continuous assemblage may hint that the origins of these tools are much older than we currently know.
âI think that we're going to start to find tool use much earlierâ perhaps âgoing back five, six, or seven million years,â Braun said. âThatâs total speculation. I've got no evidence that that's the case. But judging from what primates do, I don't really understand why we wouldn't see it.â
To that end, the researchers plan to continue excavating these bygone landscapes to search for more artifacts and hominin remains that could shed light on the identity of these tool makers, probing the origins of these early technologies that eventually led to humanityâs dominance on the planet.
âIt's possible that this tool use is so diverse and so different from our expectations that we have blinders on,â Braun concluded. âWe have to open our search for what tool use looks like, and then we might start to see that they're actually doing a lot more of it than we thought they were.â
Early Oldowan technology thrived during Pliocene environmental change in the Turkana Basin, Kenya - Nature Communications
Here, the authors present archaeology of the Namorotukunan site in Kenyaâs Turkana Basin that demonstrates adaptive shifts in hominin tool-making behaviour spanning 300,000 years and increasing environmental variability.Nature
A New Discovery Might Have Just Rewritten Human History
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Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week.For more than a million years, early humans crafted stone tools as part of the Oldowan tradition, which is the oldest sustained tool-making industry in the archaeological record. Now, scientists have discovered that Oldowan tool-makers who lived in Kenya at least 2.6 million years ago transported high-quality raw materials for tools across more than seven miles to processing sites.
The find pushes the recorded timeline of this unique behavior back half-a-million years, at minimum, and reveals that hominins possessed complex cognitive capacities, like forward planning and delayed rewards, earlier than previously known, according to a study published on Friday in Science.
Hominins at this site, called Nyayanga, used their tools to pound and cut foraged plants and scavenged animals, including hippos, to prepare them for consumption. Intriguingly, the identity of the tool-makers remains unknown, and while they may have been early humans, itâs also possible that they could have been close cousins of our own Homo lineage.
âI've always thought that early tool-makers must have had more capabilities than we sometimes give them credit for,â said Emma Finestone, associate curator and the Robert J. and Linnet E. Fritz Endowed Chair of Human Origins at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, who led the study, in a call with 404 Media.
âI was excited to see that at 2.6 million years ago, hominins were making use of many different resources and moving stones over large distances,â she added.
While many animals craft and transport tools, hominins are unique in their ability to identify and move special materials across long distances, which the team defines as more than three kilometers (or 1.86 miles). This innovation reveals a capacity for forward planning, complex mental maps, and delayed payoff of food consumption.
âWhat's unique is the amount of effort put into moving resources around a landscape,â said Finestone. âThere's several steps involved, and there's also time in between these efforts and the reward. Although you see that to some extent in other animals, humans really separate themselves, especially as we get further and further in evolutionary time, in terms of the complexities of our foraging system."
Nyayanga amphitheater in July 2025. Image: T.W. Plummer, Homa Peninsula Paleoanthropology Project
Previously, the earliest record of this behavior in hominins came from a site called Kanjera South, which is about two million years old. Both sites are on the Homa peninsula, a region dominated by soft rocks that are not durable as tools; this may have prompted early hominins to search elsewhere for high-quality resources, such as quartz, chert, and granite.Given that long-distance material transport was present at Kanjera South, the discovery of similar behavior at Nyayanga was not completely unexpectedâthough Finestone and her colleagues were still surprised by the scope and variety of materials these hominins gathered.
âOften, when you're dealing with these really old archeological assemblages, it's dominated by one type of raw material that's coming from a single source, or a few sources that are really nearby,â said Finestone. âNyayanga has a lot of different raw materials, and they're using a variety of different sources, so that was surprising and exciting to us.â
Finestone and her colleagues have made many discoveries during their decade-long excavation at Nyayanga. The team previously reported that the tool-makers butchered hippopotamus carcasses which were probably scavenged rather than hunted, providing the earliest evidence of hominin consumption of large animals, according to a 2023 study led by Thomas Plummer, a professor of anthropology at Queens College, City University of New York.
That study also reported fossils from Paranthropus, a close hominin cousin of our own Homo genus, which went extinct more than a million years ago. So far, these are the only hominin remains recovered from Nyayanga, raising the possibility that the Oldowan tool-making industry was not limited to our own human lineage.
âIt is interesting because Paranthropus is not traditionally thought to be a tool-user,â Finestone said. âThere's debate over whether Paranthropus made tools or whether it was only genus Homo that was making Oldowan tools. I don't think that evidence at Nyayanga is definitive that Paranthropus was the tool maker. It's still an open question. But because we found Paranthropus remains at Nyayanga, and we haven't found anything from genus Homoâat least yetâthere's definitely reason to consider that Paranthropus might have been manufacturing these tools.â
With luck, the team may uncover more fossils from these ancient hominins that could shed light on their place in the family. Finestone and her colleagues are also working on constraining the age of the Nyayanga artifacts, which could be anywhere from 2.6 million to three million years old.
But for now, the study marks a new milestone in the evolution of Oldowan tools and their makers, which eventually dispersed across Africa and into Europe and Asia before they were succeeded by new traditions (like the one from our story last week about yet another group of ancient tool-makers with an unknown identity).
The stones once used to butcher hippos and pound tubers offer a window into the minds of bygone hominins that pioneered technologies that ultimately made humans who we are today.
âWhat's really interesting about humans and their ancestors is we're a technologically dependent species,â Finestone said. âWe rely on tools. We're obligate tool users. We don't do it opportunistically or occasionally the way that a lot of other animals use tools. It's really become ingrained in our way of life, in our survival, and our foraging strategies across all people and all cultures.â
âWhat was exciting about this study is that you see this investment in tool technology, and you see tools becoming ingrained in the landscape-scale behaviors of hominins 2.6 million years ago,â she concluded. âWe might be seeing the roots of this importance that technology plays in our foraging behaviors and also just the daily rhythms of our life.â
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