Credited to Ethiopia. Gona's tools were published as the oldest known artifacts in the world. Later finds in Kenya are older: Lomekwi tools dated to 3.3 million years, made by a cruder technique, and Oldowan tools at Nyayanga dated to 2.6 to 2.9 million years. Gona remains among the earliest securely dated Oldowan sites.
How it began
The tools were made by unknown hominins at Gona, in the badlands of Ethiopia's Awash Basin, about five miles from Hadar, where the fossil known as Lucy was found. In 1992 the Ethiopian-born paleoanthropologist Sileshi Semaw carried out the first systematic excavations there. Two sites yielded thousands of undisturbed stone tools securely dated to around 2.6 million years ago, which the Leakey Foundation describes as the earliest date for the Oldowan, the world's first stone tool technology. A paper in Nature dated the occurrences to between 2.6 and 2.5 million years.
How it works
The makers fetched cobbles from a streambed and struck them together systematically to produce sharp-edged flakes capable of cutting open a carcass. A cobble was held in one hand while flakes were struck off it with a hammerstone held in the other. Study of the ancient gravels showed that the toolmakers picked out rare, fine-grained volcanic cobbles that were easier to work and gave a sharper edge. Modern experimenters have found that it takes careful hand-eye coordination and many hours of practice to reproduce the skill visible in the debris.
Who pushed back
The claim that Gona holds the oldest tools has been overtaken. In 2011 Sonia Harmand's team found larger, less well-shaped artifacts at Lomekwi in Kenya, dated to 3.3 million years. In 2023 a team led by Tom Plummer published Oldowan tools from Nyayanga in Kenya dated to 2.6 to 2.9 million years, potentially 300,000 years older than Gona. The Nyayanga tools lay near a Paranthropus tooth, which challenged the long-held view that only the genus Homo made tools.
What changed first
Stone tools for cutting and pounding let early hominins process meat and plants more efficiently, which widened their diet. In 2000 Michael Rogers of the Gona Project found the site called OGS-7, where hundreds of tools lay with animal bone, and at nearby sites bones mixed with tools bore cut marks. These were described as the earliest stone tools definitively associated with processing animals.
What lasted
The Gona finds showed that the earliest known Oldowan tools were already well made, which raised the question of how much earlier cruder toolmaking began. The Leakey Foundation credits the work Semaw began in the 1990s with starting a broader reassessment of the origins of technology, including the possibility that more than one hominin species made tools.
