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Human evolutionary scholarshavelong supposed thatthe earliest stonetoolswere madeby the genusHomo and thatthis 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.
Conventional wisdom in human evolutionary studies has assumed that the origins of hominin sharp-edged stone tool production were linked to the emergence of the genus Homo1,2 in response to climate change and the spread of savannah grasslands3,4. In 1964, fossils looking more like later Homo than australopithecines were discovered at Olduvai Gorge (Tanzania) in association with the earliest known stone tool culture, the Oldowan, and so were assigned to the new species: Homo habilis or 'handy man'1. The premise was that our lineage alone took the cognitive leap of hittingstones togetherto strike off sharpflakes and that this was the foundation of our evolutionary success. Subsequent discoveries pushed back thedate for thefirstOldowan stone tools to 2.6 million years ago5,6 (Ma) and the earliest fossils attributable to early Homo to only 2.4-2.3 Ma7,8, opening up the possibility of tool manufacture by hominins other than Homo9 before 2.6 Ma10-12.
The earliest known artefacts from the sites of Gona (,2.6 Ma)6,12, Hadar (2.36 6 0.07 Ma13), and Omo (2.34 6 0.04 Ma14) in Ethiopia, and especially Lokalalei 2C (2.34 6 0.05 Ma15) in Kenya, demonstrate that these hominin knappers already had considerable abilities in terms of planning depth, manual dexterity and raw material selectivity14-19. Cut-marked bones fromDikika,Ethiopia20, datedat 3.39 Ma, has added to speculation on pre-2.6-Ma hominin stone tool use. It has been argued that percussive activities other than knapping, such as the pounding and/or battering of plant foods or bones, could have been critical components of...