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3.3-million-year-old stone tools from Lomekwi 3, West Turkana, Kenya

2015; Nature Portfolio; Volume: 521; Issue: 7552 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1038/nature14464

1476-4687

Sonia Harmand, Jason Lewis, Craig S. Feibel, Christopher J. Lepre, Sandrine Prat, Arnaud Lenoble, Xavier Boës, Rhonda L. Quinn, Michel Brenet, Adrián Arroyo, Nicholas Taylor, Sophie Clément, Guillaume Daver, Jean‐Philip Brugal, Louise Leakey, Richard A. Mortlock, James D. Wright, Sammy Lokorodi, Christopher Kirwa, Dennis V. Kent, Hélène Roche,

Primate Behavior and Ecology

Human evolutionary scholars have long supposed that the earliest stone tools were made by the genus Homo and that this technological development was directly linked to climate change and the spread of savannah grasslands. New fieldwork in West Turkana, Kenya, has identified evidence of much earlier hominin technological behaviour. We report the discovery of Lomekwi 3, a 3.3-million-year-old archaeological site where in situ stone artefacts occur in spatiotemporal association with Pliocene hominin fossils in a wooded palaeoenvironment. The Lomekwi 3 knappers, with a developing understanding of stone’s fracture properties, combined core reduction with battering activities. Given the implications of the Lomekwi 3 assemblage for models aiming to converge environmental change, hominin evolution and technological origins, we propose for it the name ‘Lomekwian’, which predates the Oldowan by 700,000 years and marks a new beginning to the known archaeological record. Tool making has been considered to be an attribute of the genus Homo; this paper reports 3.3-million-year-old stone tools and the early timing of these tools provides evidence that the making and use of stone tools by hominins occurred before the evolution of our own genus. When Louis Leakey and colleagues found stone tools associated with early human fossils (now accepted to be 1.8 million years old) at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania more than 50 years ago, it was assumed that tool-making was unique to our genus. Since then the antiquity of tool-making has gone ever deeper and less exclusively associated with Homo. For a while, the earliest-known sharp-edged stone tools, at around 2.6 million years old, have been from Ethiopia. Cut marks found on animal bones from Ethiopia dated to around 3.3 million years ago were — controversially — associated with tool use among non-human hominins. This earlier beginning to the archaeological record is now affirmed by the discovery reported by Sonia Harmand et al. of the Lomekwi 3 tools, dated to 3.3 million years old, about half a million years older than the current earliest known (2.8 million years old) Homo fossils, reported a few weeks ago. The new finds differ from the 'Oldowan' tools found at Olduvai and elsewhere, and may constitute a pre-Homo tool culture, which the authors suggest calling the 'Lomekwian'.