WASHINGTON, May 20 (Reuters) – Our ancestors began to make stone tools, fundamental cognitive leap in human progress, much earlier than expected, and well before the appearance of the first known representative of the genus Homo.
Scientists announced Wednesday in an article published by the journal Nature the discovery of stone tools shaped there 3.3 million years in desert areas near Lake Turkana in north-western Kenya. Among them were sharp objects that could be used to remove meat on animal carcasses and rudimentary hammers have been used to open nuts.
These tools from rocks Volcanic are 700,000 years older than the stone tools of mankind hitherto known and predate 500,000 years to the oldest fossilized remains unearthed of the genus Homo.
Our species, the Homo sapiens appeared there are about 200,000 years. The earliest members of the genus Homo lived there 2.8 million years.
These tools have been dated by geologist Chris Lepre, the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University .
Those who made these tools may belong to three possible species, said Jason Lewis, a paleontologist at the Turkana Basin Institute at Stony Brook University in New York: the Kenyanthropus platyops (3.5 to 3, 2 million years), Australopithecus afarensis (4.1 to 3 million years), two species of hominids that have both human and ape-like traits or traits to be a member of a very ancient species chain Homo undiscovered.
A skull Kenyanthropus platyops was discovered near the site of fossil in 1999. The most famous fossil of the species Australopithecus afarensis is Lucy, discovered in Ethiopia in 1974.
“The transition between the exclusive use of natural tools, as do chimpanzees, and the intentional creation of a particular stone tool represents a breakthrough in cognitive ability of our ancestors” underlines the French archaeologist Sonia Harmand Turkana Basin Institute. (Will Dunham; Danielle Rouquié for the French service)
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