Scientists Find 3-Million-Year-Old Tools—But They Were Not Made by Our Ancestors

The discovery is challenging long-held beliefs about the origins of tool use and could alter our understanding of early human evolution.

TheNyayanga Site In South West Kenya. T.W. Plummer/Homa Peninsula Paleoanthropology Project | The Daily 

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Archaeologists in southwestern Kenya have uncovered stone tools that are estimated to be up to 3 million years old. These tools, which may be the oldest of their kind ever discovered, were found near fossils of Paranthropus, a distant relative of modern humans.

A Surprising Discovery in Nyayanga
The tools were found at the Nyayanga archaeological site, located near Lake Victoria in southwestern Kenya. This site, excavated between 2014 and 2022, yielded over 300 stone tools made primarily from quartz and rhyolite.

These tools are classified as Oldowan, the earliest known stone tool technology, previously thought to be linked exclusively to the genus Homo.

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New Twist in Human Origins

A study published in the journal Nature has proposed a new model for human evolution, asserting that modern Homo sapiens stemmed from multiple genetically diverse populations across Africa rather than a single ancestral population. This conclusion was reached after researchers analyzed genetic data from present-day African populations, including 44 newly sequenced genomes from the Nama group of southern Africa.

Contemporary DNA evidence suggests that humans emerged from the interaction of multiple populations living across the continent.

A new study in Nature challenges prevailing theories, suggesting that Homo sapiens evolved from multiple diverse populations across Africa, with the earliest detectable split occurring 120,000-135,000 years ago, after prolonged periods of genetic intermixing.

There is broad agreement that Homo sapiens originated in Africa. But there remain many uncertainties and competing theories about where, when, and how.


In a paper published on May 17, 2023, in Nature, an international research team led by McGill University and the University of California-Davis suggest that, based on contemporary genomic evidence from across the continent, there were humans living in different regions of Africa, migrating from one region to another and mixing with one another over a period of hundreds of thousands of years. 

This view runs counter to some of the dominant theories about human origins in Africa.

Competing theories about human origins in Africa
One theory holds that, about 150,000 years ago, there was a single central ancestral population in Africa from which other populations diverged. 

Another suggests that this central ancestral population was the result of the mixing of modern humans with a Neanderthal-like hominins (human-like beings), resulting in a leap forward in human evolution, as has been suggested took place in Eurasia.  READ MORE...