Oldest stone tools

Published in the journal Nature in 2015, compelling evidence has been presented of stone tools that date back as much as 3.3 million years – some 700,000 years earlier than previous examples from the so-called Oldowan era (2.6–1.7 MYA). The range of stone flakes, cores and anvils were unearthed by archaeologist Sonia Harmand of Stony Brook University and her team at the Lomekwi 3 site, near Lake Turkana in Kenya in 2011.

This discovery predates the emergence of the Homo genus by several hundred thousand years, suggesting that earlier hominins, such as Australopithecus, also made use of tools from their environment.