Lomekwi 3: the oldest known stone tools, before the genus Homo
- Date
- c. 3.3 million years ago
- Category
- Science, technology & invention
- Region
- East Africa (Kenya)
- Era
- Prehistory
- Significance
In 2011 researchers working at Lomekwi 3, on the western shore of Lake Turkana in Kenya, recovered deliberately struck stone artefacts that excavation and dating placed at about 3.3 million years old.
Announced in Nature in 2015, these tools — heavy cores and flakes bearing the marks of intentional knapping and battering — predate the previously oldest-known Oldowan industry by some 700,000 years and predate the earliest fossils of the genus Homo by roughly half a million years. Their makers were therefore not Homo but an earlier hominin such as Australopithecus or Kenyanthropus, overturning the long-standing assumption that toolmaking began with, and even defined, our own genus. The distinctive techniques led researchers to name a new, more primitive technology, the 'Lomekwian.' If confirmed, Lomekwi pushes the origins of technology deep into the australopithecine world and reframes stone-tool manufacture as a behaviour that emerged in small-brained hominins long before large brains. The find is among the most consequential — and scrutinised — discoveries in the study of human technological origins.
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Related science, technology & invention events
- The Nariokotome (Turkana) Boy and the modern human body planc. 1.6 million years ago
- Australopithecus afarensis ('Lucy' and relatives)c. 3.9–2.9 million years ago
- Discovery of the Denisovans and archaic-modern interbreedingc. 100,000 – 40,000 years ago (interbreeding); identified 2010
- Domestication of maize from teosinte in Mesoamericac. 7000 BCE (c. 9,000 years ago)
- Domestication of rice in the Yangtze River basinc. 8000–6000 BCE
- Domestication of the dog, humanity's first domesticated animalc. 16,000 – 14,000 years ago
Further reading
The wider story
A Little History of Science
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