THEY may look crude, but even some of the earliest stone tools were produced with skill and technical sophistication. The finding, based on an analysis of tools found at a 2.34-million-year-old site in Kenya, suggests that early toolmakers’ abilities differed from place to place.
The earliest stone tools appear in the fossil record around 2.6 million years ago. This so-called Oldowan phase of toolmaking probably began with an early species of Homo and continued for 1.2 million years. Oldowan tools were simple, sharp-edged stone flakes that a fairly unintelligent hominid could have used for cutting meat. The assumption has been…
