Stone tools that predate modern humans found

New York: In a discovery that could rewrite the early human history, archaeologists have found the world's oldest handmade stone tools in Kenya, dating back 3.3 million years, long before the advent of modern humans. 

 

The tools, whose makers may or may not have been some sort of human ancestor, push the known date of such tools back by 700,000 years. They also may challenge the notion that our own most direct ancestors were the first to bang two rocks together to create a new technology. 

The discovery is the first evidence that an even earlier group of proto-humans may have had the thinking abilities needed to figure out how to make sharp-edged tools.  The stone tools mark “a new beginning to the known archaeological record,” say the authors of a new paper about the discovery. 

 

“The whole site's surprising, it just rewrites the book on a lot of things that we thought were true,” said geologist Chris Lepre of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Rutgers University, a co-author of the paper who precisely dated the artifacts.