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Palaeoanthropology

Stone legacy of skilled hands

Nature volume 399, pages 24–25 (1999)Cite this article

Subsequent work complicated this picture. Experiments in tool manufacture and use showed that the Oldowan tool kit was less organized than the original scheme implied3. There are now at least two other hominid species contending for the title of producers and users of the Oldowan tools, and the case has been made that none of these contenders currently assigned to the genus Homo is enough like us to merit the name4. However, new findings of very early stone tools west of Lake Turkana in Kenya, described by Roche et al.5 on page 57 of this issue, show that their makers — whoever they were, and whatever name we give them — had surprisingly good control over their raw materials.

In 1991, the first late-Pliocene archaeological site at Lokalalei (Lokalalei 1), also dated to 2.34 ± 0.05 Myr, was excavated as part of the same programme6. Analysis of the stone tools found at Lokalalei 1 suggested they had been made by relatively unskilled hands. A plausible inference at the time was that these tools had been made at the very dawn of a tradition of flaked stone tool making6, perhaps predating H. habilis7.

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Figure 1: Absolute ages of the archaeological sites described in the text, and of the hominid species extant in East Africa 3.5-1.5 million years ago (Myr).

H. ROCHE/MPK

Figure 2: ‘Refit’ from Lokalalei 2C.

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  1. James Steele is in the Department of Archaeology, University of Southampton, Highfield, SO17 1BJ, Southampton, UK

    James Steele

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Steele, J. Stone legacy of skilled hands. Nature 399, 24–25 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/19869

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