Archaeologists have revealed what could be the oldest stone tools ever found, and they think someone other than our closest Homo ancestors may have made them.
The Nyayanga site expands the known geographic range of the earliest Oldowan tools by more than 1,300 kilometers to the southwest. It also pushes their emergence back to roughly 2.9 million years ago, a result the researchers produced after narrowing their age estimates using a combination of dating techniques.
"What's really interesting is that here at this site you have some of the earliest evidence of butchery of megafauna, even before the advent of the use of fire,"That's not all.
One of the teeth was found in close association with the Oldowan artifacts, leading the researchers to suggest that perhaps these hominins made or were at least using the stone tools, not our more direct ancestors from theOldowan tools are often attributed to the genusand now these two teeth suggest thatOf course, the true makers of these tools will never be known, with any claims on their creators' identity likely to come under much scrutiny by other scientists or with new finds.
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