Nearly 3 million years ago, hominids employed stone toolkits to butcher hippos and pound plants along what’s now the shores of Kenya’s Lake Victoria, researchers say.
Evidence of those food preparation activities pushes back hominids’ use of these toolkits, known as Oldowan implements, by roughly 300,000 years, say paleoanthropologist Thomas Plummer of Queen’s College, City University of New York and colleagues. That makes these finds possibly the oldest known stone tools.
Several dating techniques place discoveries at the Kenyan site, known as Nyayanga, at between around 2.6 million and 3 million years old. Based on where artifacts lay in dated sediment layers, these finds are probably close to about
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