Discovery of 2.6 million-year-old stone tools suggests humans were not the first to use them

The discovery of a 3 million-year-old toolkit suggests that humans were not actually the first to craft and use utensils.

Researchers believe that an early evolutionary relative called Paranthropus used them to butcher meat 300,000 years before we did.

The stone artefacts are examples of what is known as an ‘Oldowan toolkit’, and were found at the Nyayanga archaeological site in present day Kenya.

Analysis of wear patterns on 30 of the tools showed that they had been used to cut, scrape and pound both animals and plants. 

It is believed to be one of the oldest known examples of human ancestors using tools, as well as the oldest evidence of hominins – species considered human or closely related – eating very large animals called ‘megafauna’.

Dr Thomas Plummer, the study’s lead author, said: ‘This is one of the oldest if not the oldest example of Oldowan technology.

‘This shows the toolkit was more widely distributed at an earlier date than people realised, and that it was used to process a wide variety of plant and animal tissues.

‘We don’t know for sure what the adaptive significance was, but the variety of uses suggests it was important to these hominins.’

The team were first attracted to the Homa Peninsula in Kenya by reports of fossilised baboon-like monkeys which are often found alongside evidence of human ancestors.

A series of digs at Nyayanga, beginning in 2015, unearthed 330 tool-like artefacts, 1,776 animal bones and the two hominin molars identified as belonging to Paranthropus.

The results of their analysis, led by the City University of New York (CUNY), were published yesterday in the journal Science.

The items were dated to between 2.58 and three million years, and are most likely about 2.9 million years old.

Among them were what appeared to be hammerstones, cores and flakes – the three types of stone tool in an Oldowan toolkit.

The former two were both used to pound up edible materials, while the latter had a sharp cutting edge for chopping. 

Senior author Dr Rick Potts, from the Smithsonian Institution Museum of Natural History, said: ‘With these tools you can crush better than an elephant’s molar can and cut better than a lion’s canine can.

‘Oldowan technology was like suddenly evolving a brand-new set of teeth outside your body, and it opened up a new variety of foods on the African savannah to our ancestors.’

Today, the Nyayanga site sits on the western side of the Homa Mountain, and borders Lake Victoria.

But at the time when the stone artefacts were fashioned, there was plenty of woodland, grasses and a lengthy stream to attract a host of animals.

Wear patterns on the tools and animal bones suggests the former were used on various materials and food – including plant material, meat and even bone marrow.

Bones from at least three individual hippos were among the animal remains found at the site, some of which showed cut marks that suggest butchery.

Antelope bones also showed marks that suggest stone flakes had been used to slice at their flesh, or that they had been crushed with hammerstones to extract marrow. 

The team explained that the toolmakers would have eaten everything raw because fire would not be harnessed by hominins for another two million years.

They suggest that the human ancestors pounded the meat into something like a ‘hippo tartare’ to make it easier to chew.

The massive Paranthropus molars that were excavated are the oldest that have ever been found.

Their presence throws the currently accepted timeline of human history into question, suggesting that indirect human ancestors were also handy with tools.

Dr Potts said: ‘The assumption among researchers has long been that only the genus Homo, to which humans belong, was capable of making stone tools.

‘But finding Paranthropus alongside these stone tools opens up a fascinating whodunnit.’

However, we cannot yet be sure whether these ancient cousins used the tools, or just died next to them.

The oldest tools ever discovered are 3.3 million years old, long before our own Homo ancestors appeared, and were found at another site in Kenya.

However, experts say the newly-discovered ones are a ‘significant upgrade’.

As a result, Dr Plummer, said that they are ‘clearly part’ of the stone-age technological breakthrough that was the Oldowan toolkit.

Prior to this discovery, the oldest known examples of Oldowan tools were 2.6 million years old and found at Ledi-Geraru in Ethiopia – 800 miles from Nyayanga.

These sophisticated tools were useful in East Africa as it was susceptible to downpours and droughts, providing hominins with a ‘diverse, ever-changing menu of foods’.

Dr Potts said: ‘Oldowan stone tools could have cut and pounded through it all and helped early toolmakers adapt to new places and new opportunities, whether it’s a dead hippo or a starchy root.’

Over time, these utensils spread throughout Africa and as far as present-day Georgia and China, and weren’t replaced until around 1.7 million years ago.