Scientists Discover World's Oldest Stone Tools

The Earth Institute ^ | 2015-05-20 | The Earth Institute

[OK Sun]

Finds Challenge Ideas about Who Were the First Toolmakers

Scientists working in the desert badlands of northwestern Kenya have found stone tools dating back 3.3 million years, long before the advent of modern humans, and by far the oldest such artifacts yet discovered. The tools, whose makers may or may not have been some sort of human ancestor, push the known date of such tools back by 700,000 years; they also may challenge the notion that our own most direct ancestors were the first to bang two rocks together to create a new technology.

The discovery is the first evidence that an even earlier group of proto-humans may have had the thinking abilities needed to figure out how to make sharp-edged tools. The stone tools mark “a new beginning to the known archaeological record,” say the authors of a new paper about the discovery, published today in the leading scientific journal Nature.

“The whole site’s surprising, it just rewrites the book on a lot of things that we thought were true,” said geologist Chris Lepre of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Rutgers University, a co-author of the paper who precisely dated the artifacts.

The tools ”shed light on an unexpected and previously unknown period of hominin behavior and can tell us a lot about cognitive development in our ancestors that we can't understand from fossils alone,” said lead author Sonia Harmand, of the Turkana Basin Institute at Stony Brook University and the Université Paris Ouest Nanterre.

Hominins are a group of species that includes modern humans, Homo sapiens, and our closest evolutionary ancestors. ...

[OK Sun]

Another article, with more information and illustrations: Oldest known stone tools found in Kenya.

[editor-surveyor]

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>> “If the universe is 10,000 years old, how come they keep finding these millions of years old objects?” <<

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Arbitrary, and capricious at best.

Anyway, the universe is not yet 10,000 years old, nor will it ever get that old. It is scheduled for demolition in about another thousand.
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[editor-surveyor]

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This is a “science” thread?

LOL!
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[editor-surveyor]

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I have a pile of “stone tools” like those in my back yard.

They were designed to scare off stray cats and dogs.
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[editor-surveyor]

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>> “I really feel sorry for these people.” <<

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Its OK, they get orgasmic over their own ignorance. It may be their only pleasure.
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[editor-surveyor]

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You got it!

Just about any pile of random gravel will exhibit the same variations.
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[editor-surveyor]

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>> Does that make us “we”? <<

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Do you have a frog in your pocket?
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[JimSEA]

“Lepre said a layer of volcanic ash below the tool site set a “floor” on the site’s age: It matched ash elsewhere that had been dated to about 3.3 million years ago, based on the ratio of argon isotopes in the material. To more sharply define the time period of the tools, Lepre and co-author and Lamont-Doherty colleague Dennis Kent examined magnetic minerals beneath, around and above the spots where the tools were found.

The Earth’s magnetic field periodically reverses itself, and the chronology of those changes is well documented going back millions of years. “We essentially have a magnetic tape recorder that records the magnetic field … the music of the outer core,” Kent said. By tracing the variations in the polarity of the samples, they dated the site to 3.33 million to 3.11 million years.”

It seems that the article has a very clear and understandable explanation of how the site was dated. Now, unless, of course you reject physics, geology and biology, the article makes a great deal of sense.

[OK Sun]

Proverbs 15:1.

May we get back to science?

[editor-surveyor]

You have to get to it before you can get back to it.

[Fungi]

Hogwash. One after another premise that have never been proven. Nonsense. Copernicus revisited.

[editor-surveyor]

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>> “The Earth’s magnetic field periodically reverses itself” <<

That’s an idiot’s explanation for something much more sensible: Pieces get fractured off and rotated in tectonic fissures resulting in variation in magnetic orientation.

But some like fairy tales better than reality.

[Krosan]

Next to the stone tools was a strange black monolith of unknown material.

[OK Sun]

Proverbs 6:14.

[Fungi]

One more point please. Have you ever done the math on human reproduction in a 3 million year time frame? Try it, it does not make sense to put it lightly, to put it more truthfully and bluntly, it is nonsense from a scientific viewpoint. Use a base of two children per couple and a 25 year generation period. Do the math and get back to “us.” Thank you.

[JimSEA]

The evidence is in the polarity of the ocean floor. It is well supported by tectonic observations of the ocean bed. It’s in the rocks.

[JimSEA]

I see, do you have an article on plate tectonics that explains this and the observation behind it?

[catnipman]

I wonder if they looked anything like this:

[onedoug]

The Bible and science. God has given us the keys.

[Fungi]

"The evidence is in the polarity of the ocean floor. It is well supported by tectonic observations of the ocean bed. It’s in the rocks."

There have been numerous studies on the phialides of Penicillium and their relation to abaxial sporogenesis and the imminent collapse of the northern rockie mountain newt with regard to testicular cancer. It’s in the newt. Hey, I can spew out nonsense too.