Getting your player ready...
NEW YORK — By taking a wrong turn in a dry riverbed in Kenya, scientists discovered a trove of stone tools far older than any ever found before. Nobody knows who made them — or why.
At 3.3 million years old, they push back the record of stone tools by about 700,000 years. They are half a million years older than any known trace of our own branch of the evolutionary tree.
Scientists have long thought that sharp-edged stone tools were made only by members of our branch, whose members are designated “Homo.” The new finding, released Wednesday by the journal Nature, is a big boost to the argument that tool-making might have begun with smaller-brained forerunners instead.
