Researchers Discover Oldest Stone Tools, But We Don’t Know The Maker Yet

Researchers have found the world's oldest stone tools that predate humans used. The tools found in Kenya, dates back to 3.3 million years.

The findings could help rewrite the early human history, and hold promise to extend the knowledge of first toolmakers even deeper in time. The makers may or may not have been some sort of human ancestor.

"It really absolutely moves the beginnings of human technology back into a much more distant past, and a much different kind of ancestor than we've been thinking of," said anthropology professor Alison Brooks of George Washington University, who has examined some of the tools.

The authors have "opened a new window onto the human past, illuminating the work of the first tool-makers and raising as many questions as they have answered," said Eric Delson of Lehman College in New York.

Findings may challenge the notion that our own most direct ancestors were the first to bang two rocks together to create a new technology, researchers said.

"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 study.

Researchers have long believed that our relatives in the genus Homo, the line leading directly to Homo Sapiens, were the first to make such stone tools. However, recently researchers have recovered some tantalising clues that some other, earlier species of hominin, distant cousins, might have figured it out, Business Standard noted.

The study findings were released in the journal Nature.