Researchers who stumbled upon stone tools in Kenya in 2011 revealed in a new paper that they are now considered the oldest ones ever found.
The discovery in West Turkana—after researchers apparently took a wrong turn—was chronicled in the journal Nature by co-authors Jason Lewis and Sonia Harmand of Stone Brook University. The paper explains that the tools are about 3.3 million years old, or 700,000 years older than ones that researchers had previously discovered, making them some half-a-million years older before the known emergence of modern humans.
“It just rewrites the book on a lot of things that we thought were true,” Chris Lepre, a geologist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Rutgers University who dated the tools, told the Guardian. Alison Brooks, an anthropology professor at George Washington University who examined some of the tools, told the Associated Press, “It really absolutely moves the beginnings of human technology back into a much more distant past, and a much different kind of ancestor than we’ve been thinking of.”
- What a Photographer Saw in the West Bank
- The Dirty Secrets of Alternative Plastics
- Accenture’s Chief AI Officer on Why This Is a Defining Moment
- We Should Get Paid for Our Online Data: Column
- Inside COP28's Big 'Experiment'
- The 100 Must-Read Books of 2023
- The Top 100 Photos of 2023
- Want Weekly Recs on What to Watch, Read, and More? Sign Up for Worth Your Time
