TRENDING SCIENCE: We’ve found the oldest stone tools, but they were not made by humans

There’s a new mystery in science! Archaeologists have discovered 330 stone tools used to butcher animals and pound plant material for food. Published in the journal ‘Science’, a study led by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and Queens College of the City University of New York (CUNY) claims that they were made about 2.9 million years ago. However, Homo sapiens – our species – didn’t appear until around 300 000 years ago. What’s more, two big fossil teeth unearthed at the excavation site belong to Paranthropus, a distant cousin of humans who had big teeth and small brains.The artefacts represent the oldest-known examples of a revolutionary Stone Age technology called the Oldowan toolkit. Scientists believed these tools were only used by ancestors of H. sapiens. However, no fossils were discovered for H. sapiens. The tools consisted of hammerstones and stone cores to pound plants, bone and meat, and flakes to cut meat. The food prepared with these tools was eaten raw because fire had not been harnessed yet.

“The assumption among researchers has long been that only the genus Homo, to which humans belong, was capable of making stone tools,” senior author Rick Potts, the National Museum of Natural History’s Peter Buck Chair of Human Origins, commented in a Smithsonian news release.

“With these tools you can crush better than an elephant’s molar can and cut better than a lion’s canine can,” Prof. Potts explained. “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.”

“This is one of the oldest if not the oldest example of Oldowan technology,” added lead author Thomas Plummer, professor of anthropology at Queens College CUNY and research associate in the scientific team of the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program. “This shows the toolkit was more widely distributed at an earlier date than people realized, 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.” Hominins are various species considered human or closely related.So, will the real toolmakers ever be known? “Those teeth open up an amazing whodunit — a real question of, well, who were these earliest toolmakers?” Prof. Potts told the ‘Associated Press’.

“While some species of nonhuman primates produce technologies that assist in foraging, humans are uniquely dependent on technology for survival,” Prof. Plummer told ‘CNN’. “But the evolutionary origins of this reliance on technology for survival is shrouded in mystery.”