TECHNOLOGY × HUMAN EVOLUTION

Lomekwi: the Oldest Stone Tools

~3.3 million years ago

Phanerozoic · Cenozoic · Neogene · Pliocene

The cores and flakes of Lomekwi 3, in Kenya, blocks of stone and the sharp pieces struck from them, are the oldest known stone tools, 3.3 million years old, and their makers already combined two ways of striking stone.

The Lomekwi 3 tools, found in Kenya and dated to 3.3 million years ago, are cores and flakes, and the oldest known stone tools. This industry, or set of tools, has been named the Lomekwian. The makers, or knappers, understood the fracture of stone well enough to combine two techniques. In free-hand percussion, the block is struck with a hammerstone, a stone used as a hammer. In the anvil technique, the block is struck against a fixed stone. The makers did not belong to Homo, our genus: the tools precede the appearance of Homo by half a million years. Researchers therefore attribute them to an australopith, an earlier member of the human lineage, or to Kenyanthropus, another fossil genus. The site was woodland, and not savannah.

Why it matters

The Lomekwi discovery calls into question two hypotheses that researchers had long held. Stone knapping predates the genus Homo, so tools existed before the genus long identified as their maker. And the tools were made in woodland, whereas researchers had long explained the need for tools by the open savannah environment.

Dating & uncertaintyDisputed

Researchers have questioned whether the knapping at Lomekwi 3, the shaping of stone by blows, was intentional. The cut-marked bones from Dikika, in Ethiopia, bones with marks attributed to stone tools, are older, dated to 3.39 million years ago, and are disputed for the same reasons. The antiquity of the first tools rests on these two discoveries.

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