Have you ever found yourself in a museum’s gallery of human origins, staring at a glass case full of rocks labeled “stone tools,” muttering under your breath, “How do they know it’s not just any old ...

Oldowan stone tools made from a variety of raw materials sourced more than six miles away from where they were found in southwestern Kenya. In southwestern Kenya more than 2.6 million years ago, ...

The oldest stone tools discovered were found in a 3.3-million-year-old archaeological site in West Turkana, Kenya, according to findings published in 2015 in the journal, "Nature." The authors called ...

Archaeologists have uncovered a collection of bone tools in northern Tanzania that were shaped by ancient human ancestors 1.5 million years ago, making them the oldest known bone tools by about 1 ...

The Nyayanga excavation site in Kenya, in July 2025. Fossils and Oldowan tools have been excavated from the tan and reddish-brown sediments, which date to more than 2.6 million years old. T. W.

We humans are nothing if not inventive. Our innovations have come to underpin virtually every facet of daily life—from what we eat to how we communicate. This ingenuity is intrinsically linked to both ...

Oldowan stone tools made from a variety of raw materials sourced more than 6 miles away from where they were found in southwestern Kenya. The development of the Oldowan toolkit made it possible for ...

John K. Murray does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond ...

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