“The tools were unearthed at the site of Jebel Faya in the United Arab Emirates, a team reports in the journal Science.”
Chimpanzees
Chimpanzees are humanity’s closest living relatives, and apparently learned how to make and use tools long ago without human help, with stone hammers found at a chimp settlement in the Ivory Coast dating back 4,300 years. They are even capable of making spears to hunt other primates for meat, and are known to have developed specialized tool kits for foraging army ants.
So I guess tools are not the measure...
Michael Cremo's "Forbidden Archeology" should be required reading.