Rudimentary stone tools 3.3 million years old from another Kenyan site may have been an Oldowan forerunner or a technological dead-end. "While some species of nonhuman primates produce technologies that assist in foraging, humans are uniquely dependent on technology for survival," Plummer said.Īll later developments in prehistoric technologies were based on Oldowan tools, making their advent a milestone in human evolution, Potts said. Other hominins existing at the time included the genus Australopithecus, known for the famous even-older fossil "Lucy." The molars represent the oldest-known fossils of Paranthropus, an upright-walker that combined ape-like and human-like traits, possessing adaptations for heavy chewing, including a skull topped with a bony ridge to which strong jaw muscles were attached, like in gorillas. And except for finding fossilized hand bones wrapped around a stone tool, the originator of the early Oldowan tools may be an unknown for a long time." "When our team determined the age of the Nyayanga evidence, the perpetrator of the tools became a 'whodunit' in my mind," said paleoanthropologist and study co-author Rick Potts, director of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History's Human Origins Program. The term hominin refers to various species considered human or closely related. Perhaps not only Homo, but other kinds of hominins were processing food with Oldowan technology," said anthropologist Thomas Plummer of Queens College in New York City, lead author of the research published in the journal Science. "The association of these Nyayanga tools with Paranthropus may reopen the case as to who made the oldest Oldowan tools.
Instead, two teeth - stout molars - of a genus called Paranthropus were discovered there, an indication this prehistoric cousin of ours may have been the maker. But no Homo fossils were found at Nyayanga. Scientists had long believed Oldowan tools were the purview of species belonging to the genus Homo, a grouping that includes our species and our closest relatives.
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