Mysterious Tools That Predate The Earliest Humans Discovered In African Country

Nearly 3.3 million years ago, someone started to chip away a piece of stone by a river bank. Ultimately, the stone became a tool mainly used in meat preparation or nut cracking. Astonishingly, this technological aspect happened long before our kinds even emerged on the evolutionary scene.
And until recently, in 2015, a collection of carved tools was excavated at a Pliocene archaeological site of Lomekwi 3, Kenya, by a group of American paleontologists, dating back around the same period of time – 3.3 million years old.
The question is, of whom were these tools produced, as Homo habilis, the early hominids didn’t appear until several centuries later. This lead to experts highly expecting the discovery to possibly alter archaeology and, may furthermore, rewrite history.

Source: Nature

This has been among the latest findings that together constitute a collection of unsolved mysterious discoveries deemed impossible by archaeologists. They found up to 150 tools in place, including anvils, hammers, and carved stones, used millions of years ago to open and crack nuts or tubers, and to carve the trunks of fallen trees to find insects to feed.
With a developing comprehension of stone’s fracture properties, the users of the Lomekwi 3 knappers, including the tools above, combined core reduction with battering activities.
The name ‘Lomekwian’ is proposed, for the Lomekwi 3, supposing that the implications of its collection for models attempting to gather environmental change, hominin evolution and technological origins, predating the Oldowan by 700,000 years, marking a fresh dawn for the current acknowledged archaeological documents.

Source: Nature

Dr. Harmand, head of the research team, said, “These tools shed light on an unexpected and previously unknown period of hominin behavior and can tell us a lot about cognitive development in our ancestors that we can’t understand from fossils alone. Our finding disproves the long-standing assumption that Homo habilis was the first tool-maker.”
Meanwhile, co-leader of the archaeologists, Dr. Jason Lewis, claimed that conventional wisdom in human evolutionary studies researches since has confirmed the potential link between the emergence of stone knappers with the appearance of the genus Homo. Climate change and the spread of savannah grasslands were attributed to this technological advance.
“The premise was that our lineage alone took the cognitive leap of hitting stones together to strike off sharp flakes and that this was the foundation of our evolutionary success.”

Source: Nature

Currently, the earliest stone tools linked with Homo has been dated at 2.6 million years and originated from Ethiopian deposits near the fossil remains of the first representative of the Homo habilis, famous for their extraordinary capability of using bare hands to manufacture tools.
Being the name of this first human industry, Oldowan is also coined as the term for the first stone tool archaeological industry in prehistory. The hominids over much of Africa, South Asia, the Middle East, and Europe employed these tools during the Lower Paleolithic era, extending from 2.6 to 1.7 million years ago, and after this technical enterprise came the advanced Acheulean industry.
The discovery of the stone tools raised a huge and complex question on whether who manufactured them. For a while, our Homo genus cousins, a line that goes directly to Homo sapiens, were thought to have manufactured those tools by anthropologists.
Yet in this case, it remains unknown who actually made up these strange tools that are not supposed to exist, in accordance with current standards of archaeology. Well, let’s see if this intriguing finding could be the evidence for the so-called ‘fictional histories’ of some famous book to become reality.
H/T: www.bbc.com