Very First Humans To Make And Use Tools Imported Their Stones 3 Million Years Ago

The very first humans to make and use stone tools may have sourced their raw materials from distant locations, demonstrating a surprisingly sophisticated resource-management strategy. Previously, it was thought that the cognitive capacity for such behaviors didn’t arise until 2 million years ago, yet evidence from a prehistoric site in Kenya suggests that our ancestors may have hit this developmental milestone up to a million years earlier.

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Researchers conducted geochemical analyses on 401 lithic artifacts found at the Nyayanga archaeological site, revealing that the tools were made from stones that came from up to 13 kilometers (8 miles) away. The ancient utensils belong to a primordial industry known as the Oldowan toolkit, which represents the earliest known human toolmaking tradition.

“We didn't tie the artifacts to definitive, specific sources, so we don't have an exact distance calculated,” said study author Dr Emma Finestone to IFLScience. “But over 10 kilometers is the conservative way to say it, and 13 kilometers is more realistic with what our raw material availability shows,” she explained. 

The implications are quite different, whether it's 2.6 or 3 million years, in terms of what's happening in the evolutionary picture of our ancestors.

Dr Emma Finestone

According to the researchers, the stones were brought to the site because they were superior toolmaking materials to the rocks found in and around Nyayanga itself. “The toolmakers at Nyayanga were processing resources in an area where the local stones that were available were comparatively soft and low quality to what Oldowan toolmakers would have typically used. So the edges of the tools would have been less sharp and they would have dulled more easily,” says Finestone.

“So it makes sense that they would have needed to travel to access these higher quality materials that are 10 to 13 kilometers away.”

Regardless of the exact distance, however, Finestone says the more pressing question concerns the age of the tools. “Nyayanga has a minimum age of 2.6 million years, but it’s probably even older than that – between 2.6 and 3 million years,” she says.

“The implications are quite different, whether it's 2.6 or 3 million years, in terms of what's happening in the evolutionary picture of our ancestors,” she continues. In a separate paper published in 2023, Finestone and her colleagues presented evidence that Nyayange may fall nearer to the older end of this age range, which suggests that these tools – and the ability to transport raw lithic materials over long distances – could predate the appearance of the Homo genus.

Even more interestingly, Nyayanga has yielded fossils belonging to a prehistoric human genus called Paranthropus, which existed before our lineage first emerged. “The fact that we have Paranthropus and not genus Homo at Nyayanga does suggest the possibility that Paranthropus might have been the toolmaker of the Nyanga assemblage,” says Finestone.

“It wouldn't surprise me if Paranthropus was capable of doing this, but as of now, there's no way to definitively know which hominin species was making the Nyayanga tools and bringing the stones from 10 to 13 kilometers away.”

The study is published in the journal Science Advances.