How it began
Lomekwi 3 is an archaeological site west of Lake Turkana in northern Kenya. Fieldwork by the West Turkana Archaeological Project, reported by Sonia Harmand and colleagues, found stone artifacts there lying in place in sediments dated to 3.3 million years ago, in association with Pliocene hominin fossils and in what was then a wooded environment. The team reported the discovery in the journal Nature in May 2015 and proposed the name Lomekwian for the technology.
Before it existed
Scholars had long supposed that the earliest stone tools were made by the genus Homo and that toolmaking was tied to climate change and the spread of savanna grasslands. The oldest known sharp-edged tools had been those from Ethiopia, about 2.6 million years old, and the tools Louis Leakey found at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania are about 1.8 million years old. Cut marks on bones from Dikika in Ethiopia dated to about 3.4 million years ago had been claimed as traces of tool use, but that reading was controversial.
How it works
The Lomekwi toolmakers struck flakes from stone cores and also used stones for battering, combining core reduction with pounding. Some large pieces served as anvils. The authors wrote that the knappers had a developing understanding of how stone fractures. The tools differ from the later Oldowan tools found at Olduvai and elsewhere.
What lasted
The find pushed the start of the known archaeological record back by 700,000 years before the Oldowan. The tools are also about half a million years older than the earliest known fossils of Homo, which date to 2.8 million years ago, so stone tool making began before the human genus evolved. The setting was wooded rather than open grassland, which weakened the link between toolmaking and the spread of savanna.
