Wrong Turn Leads to Discovery of Oldest Stone Tools - NatGeo

[WillyT]

Wrong Turn Leads to Discovery of Oldest Stone Tools
3.3-million-year-old artifacts reveal that our ancestors were shaping rocks into tools far earlier than thought.
By Nadia Drake, for National Geographic
PUBLISHED May 20, 2015

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On July 9, 2011, Sonia Harmand took a left turn instead of a right among the dry riverbeds that substitute for roads on the western shore of Kenya’s Lake Turkana, and promptly got lost.

“I accept responsibility for that,” says Jason Lewis, a paleoanthropologist at Rutgers University, who—with the help of a geological map and GPS—was supposedly playing the role of navigator. He and Harmand, an archaeologist at Stony Brook University, were spearheading a team hunting for traces of human ancestral behavior in sediments millions of years old.

The misdirection led to an enormous payoff: a discovery that pushes the date of the earliest known stone tools back by some 700,000 years, according to a report published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

The serendipity began when Harmand steered their 1989 SUV straight into a dead-end riverbed. Rather than simply turn around, the team hopped out to survey the area—a shadeless, Badlands moonscape where the wind felt like a blast from a blow dryer. After about an hour, Harmand’s walkie-talkie crackled. Sammy Lokorodi, a sharp-eyed native of the Turkana area, had found some curious rocks on the next hill over.

Perched on the otherwise fine-grained surface, the large stone hunks bore fracture marks that to a trained archaeologist’s eye appeared to be caused by purposeful manipulation, rather than natural forces. While most of the fractured rocks were on the surface, a trio of partially buried ones suggested that the surface finds were eroding out of the sediments—and that more artifacts might be hidden just below.


One of the nearly 150 stone tools found at Lomekwi 3, on the western shores of Lake Turkana. The stones showed clear signs of having been deliberately fractured by human ancestors. - Photograph by Sonia Harmand, National Geographic Creative

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More: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/05/150520-oldest-stone-tools-discovery-harmand-archaeology/

[smiley]

1. how ironic

I just finished reading a friend's article in the New Yorker covering the same exact topic. I was going to post it here on DU and the first posting I see is yours about the the Nat Geo article.

[link:http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/which-came-first-humans-or-tools|

enjoy

[pscot]

2. How cool!

[Thespian2]

3. K & R

Amazing how much intelligent people are still learning about earth and its history...