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Early humans who made some of the oldest known stone tools might have traveled miles to secure the best materials for their construction, new research suggests.
Archaeologists traced the origins of rocks used to make some of the earliest known Oldowan tools, the oldest widespread form of stone technology. To their surprise, they found that the toolmakers at the Nyayanga archaeological site in Kenya transported stones up to eight miles more than 2.6 million years ago—though the exact early human species that created these aMore...rtifacts remains a mystery. The findings were published this month in the journal Science Advances.
“Prior to our study, we did not know that even the oldest known toolmakers had the mental prowess to know and remember the locations of the highest-quality rocks,” says Rick Potts, a paleoanthropologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and senior author of the study, in an email to Smithsonian magazine.
“People often focus on the tools themselves, but the real innovation of the Oldowan may actually be the transport of resources from one place to another,” Potts adds in a statement.
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