Ancient human relatives crafted sharp-edged tools out of animal bones around 1.5 million years ago, researchers say.
Discoveries at Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge, a famous East African fossil location, represent the oldest known evidence of systematic bone tool production by hominids, according to archaeologist Ignacio de la Torre of CSIC-Spanish National Research Council in Madrid and colleagues.
Excavations conducted from 2015 through 2022 unearthed 27 bone tools in sediment that had already been dated, the scientists report March 5 in Nature. Either of two fossil hominids known to have lived at Olduvai Gorge around 1.5 million years ago — a possible direct human ancestor called Homo erectus or a side-branch