TECHNOLOGY × HUMAN EVOLUTION

Oldest Stone Tools

~3.3 million years ago

Phanerozoic · Cenozoic · Neogene · Pliocene

Cores and flakes struck at Lomekwi 3, in Kenya, 3.3 million years ago, are the oldest stone tools known. Their makers had enough grasp of how stone breaks to combine knapping with pounding, and they were not us: the tools predate our genus by half a million years, so the hand behind them was an Australopithecus or a Kenyanthropus. They were not made on a savanna either. The site was wooded.

Why it matters

The find upsets two long-standing assumptions at once. Technology is older than Homo, so the tool did not wait for the toolmaker we recognise; and it did not come out of the open grassland, long the standard explanation for why anyone would need one.

Dating & uncertaintyDisputed

Whether the Lomekwi 3 pieces were deliberately knapped has been questioned, and the cut-marked bones from Dikika at 3.39 Ma are debated on the same grounds. The earliest date for toolmaking rests on these two finds.

Sources

1. Harmand et al. (2015), Nature · 3.3-million-year-old stone tools from Lomekwi 3, West Turkana, Kenya
2. McPherron et al. (2010), Nature · Evidence for stone-tool-assisted consumption of animal tissues before 3.39 million years ago at Dikika, Ethiopia

Earth history as one day

23:58:571 min 3 s before midnight

if Earth’s 4.54 billion years were compressed into a single day