In a talk at the annual meeting of the Paleoanthropology Society in Frisco, archaeologist Sonia Harmand of Stony Brook University in New York described the discovery of numerous tools at the site of Lomekwi 3, just west of Lake Turkana in Kenya, about 1000 kilometers from Olduvai Gorge. In 2011 they spotted what Harmand called unmistakable stone tools on the surface of the sandy landscape and immediately launched a small excavation.
The result: Stone flakes dated to 3.3 million years ago, 700,000 years older than the oldest-known tools to date and hundreds of thousands of years before our genus Homo even arrived.
“The artifacts were clearly knapped [created by intentional flaking] and not the result of accidental fracture of rocks,” Harmand told the meeting.
World’s oldest stone tools discovered in Kenya by By Michael Balter, Science magazine
