Once, it was only our family that seemed special. When stone tools dating back about 1.87 million years were found associated with fossils of two early human species in Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge, it seemed pretty obvious which of the two species was responsible. To push the point home, the suspected knapper was even named Homo habilis, or ‘handy man’. It left the comforting impression that even so far back in our lineage, early humans cultivated a will and intellect fierce enough to develop stone tools, setting them apart from the remainder of the animal kingdom. The style of tools became known as Oldowan, and as they presented the earliest known examples of stone technology, their appearance ushered in the Lower Palaeolithic era. This, in turn, serves as the threshold of the familiar 19th-century ‘three age system’, based on ancient communities’ mastery of stone, bronze, and iron. Seen in this light, early humans appeared at around the same time as crude stone tools, marking the very beginning of an archaeological framework revolving around technological advances. It was a very neat model. With hindsight, it was a little too neat.
Over the years, Oldowan tool-making has been pushed progressively further back in time, with manufacturing now known to be under way 2.59 million years ago at a site in Ethiopia. This, though, is nothing compared to the bombshell dropped by a French team working at the Lake Turkana site of Lomekwi 3 in Kenya. In 2016, they published the discovery of stone tools dating back 3.3 million years. Not only are these implements getting on for a million years older than the earliest known Oldowan tools, but rather than being associated with our ancestors in the Homo genus, the Lomekwian tools were fashioned by someone else’s hands, most likely a species known as Kenyanthropus platyops. Even this precocious industry is unlikely to be the beginning of the story, though, as – despite the crudity of the Lomekwian implements – there still seems to be a clear understanding of how to make them. The tools do not look like the first ever trial-and-error experiment with stone technology. So, as these discoveries challenge what it even means to be human, the time could not be riper for two British Academy post-doctoral projects tackling aspects of stone-tool use. Tomos Proffitt at UCL is exploring why tools appeared, while Alastair Key at the University of Kent is looking at how they evolved.
Cutting-edge technology
‘The Lower Palaeolithic starts with the first modified stone technology,’ explains Alastair, ‘so as the Lomekwian tools had been intentionally changed, and if they were indeed made by Kenyanthropus, it means that the story begins with a species that may not necessarily be directly related to us. It is very exciting. Some species of Homo and australopithecine are on our direct lineage, but it is currently unclear if Kenyanthropus is. They existed around 3.5 million years ago, and while it is likely that our Homo genus evolved from a population of early humans in East Africa at this time, it does not mean that we developed from Kenyanthropus. It’s very hard to draw a direct link between them and us. The Lomekwi 3 discoveries also have an impact on how we view the intellect necessary for an ability to make tools. Kenyanthropus platyops has a brain size that is not considerably bigger than a modern chimpanzee’s. So it’s not necessarily about cranial capacity, it may be more to do with how the brain is wired, which is much trickier to identify and understand. But you clearly didn’t need a huge brain to manufacture the very earliest stone tools.’
Past masters