•They said the pair of massive molars belonging to the human species’ close evolutionary relative Paranthropus is the oldest fossilized remains yet found.
• Scientists said the analysis of wear patterns on 30 of the stone tools found at the site showed that they were used to cut, scrape, and pound both animals and plants.
Image: The Smithsonian's Human Origins Program.
Anthropologists have dug up some of the oldest stone tools ever to be found.
Two big teeth and tools were found at an extinct human cousin site called ‘Paranthropus.’
According to a study published Thursday in the journal 'Science', the teeth and the tools were found at a place called Nyayanga in western Kenya.
Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program director Rick Potts said the new evidence showed that humans' direct relatives in the Homo lineage may not have been the only tech-savvy creatures during the Stone Age.
Potts said a large natural amphitheatre found at the site was filled with stone tools that are mostly made from rocks such as quartz and rhyolite and the fossilised bones of animals eaten by early hominins.
"Using multiple dating techniques, including the rate of decay of radioactive elements & the presence of certain fossil animals, the research team dated the items recovered from Nyayanga to between 2.58 and 3 million years old, most likely ~2.9 million," Potts said.
He said the tools include sharp pieces for chopping and scraping; the stone cores, or source material, they were flaked from; and the hammerstones used to strike the cores.
The study’s lead author is Thomas Plummer of Queens College.
Researchers from Queens College, the National Museums of Kenya, Liverpool John Moores University and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History also participated in the study.
The scientists said the Nyayanga deposits expand the geographic range of the earliest Oldowan by more than 1,300km and the range of Paranthropus by approximately 230km to southwestern Kenya.
“Archeological findings demonstrate that hominins used tools to butcher a variety of animals, including megafauna, and process diverse plants at the Oldowan’s inception,” the study says.
Nyayanga is an archaeological and paleontological locality on the western shoreline of the Homa Peninsula.
The peninsula is located on the southern margin of the Winam Gulf of Lake Victoria, within the east-west–oriented Nyanza Rift between the two main branches of the East African Rift System.
It is dominated by the Homa Mountain carbonatite complex, which on its flanks bears alluvial, fluvial and lacustrine sediments.
Sediments at Nyayanga are exposed in a 40,000 m2 amphitheatre and a gully that can be traced for 500m upslope.
Excavations and surface collection focused on the top half of the oldest bed, which yielded Oldowan artefacts, Paranthropus sp fossils and faunal fossils in overbank deposits from a westward-flowing paleochannel.
Scientists said in excavation five, 39 hippopotamid bones, likely from a single individual, were found spatially associated with 14 artefacts.
“One cluster of bones consisted of girdle elements (scapula, innominate), appendicular elements (proximal half of tibia, calcaneum), a flake, and a split cobble with percussion damage,” the study said.
The anterior tuberosity of the tibia has a series of four short, parallel cut marks.
They said a second cluster of bones, located two metres away, consists of a broken humerus, a flake and a rib fragment.
Scientists said the study presents what is likely to be the oldest examples of an important Stone Age innovation known as the Oldowan toolkit—which included hammerstones, cores, and flakes—as well as the oldest evidence of early humans consuming very large animals.
They said the pair of massive molars belonging to the human species’ close evolutionary relative Paranthropus is the oldest fossilised remains yet found.
Scientists said the analysis of wear patterns on 30 of the stone tools found at the site showed that they were used to cut, scrape and pound both animals and plants.
“Because fire would not be harnessed by early humans for another 2 million years or so, these stone toolmakers would have eaten everything raw, perhaps pounding the meat into something like a hippo tartare.”