3.3-million-year-old stone tools from Lomekwi 3, West Turkana, Kenya

Sonia Harmand (1) , Jason E. Lewis , Craig S. Feibel , Christopher J. Lepre (2, 3) , Sandrine Prat (4) , Arnaud Lenoble (5) , Xavier Boës (6) , Rhonda L. Quinn , Michel Brenet (5, 7) , Adrian Arroyo , Nicholas Taylor , Sophie Clément (8) , Guillaume Daver , Jean-Philip Brugal (9) , Louise Laekey , Richard A. Mortlock , James D. Wright (2) , Sammy Lokorodi , Christopher Kirwa , Dennis V. Kent , Hélène Roche (1)

1 PréTech - Préhistoire et Technologie
2 Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences [Piscataway]
3 LDEO - Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
4 DEHIPE - Dynamique de l'évolution humaine : individus, populations, espèces [Paris]
5 PACEA - De la Préhistoire à l'Actuel : Culture, Environnement et Anthropologie
6 Unité de Recherche Argiles et Paléoclimats
7 Inrap - Institut national de recherches archéologiques préventives
8 Division of Clinical Pathology
9 LAMPEA - Laboratoire méditerranéen de préhistoire Europe-Afrique

Human evolutionary scholars have long supposed that the earliest stone tools were made by the genus Homo and that this technological development was directly linked to climate change and the spread of savannah grasslands. New fieldwork in West Turkana, Kenya, has identified evidence of much earlier hominin technological behaviour. We report the discovery of Lomekwi 3, a 3.3-million-year-old archaeological site where in situ stone artefacts occur in spatiotemporal association with Pliocene hominin fossils in a wooded palaeoenvironment. The Lomekwi 3 knappers, with a developing understanding of stone’s fracture properties, combined core reduction with battering activities. Given the implications of the Lomekwi 3 assemblage for models aiming to converge environmental change, hominin evolution and technological origins, we propose for it the name ‘Lomekwian’, which predates the Oldowan by 700,000 years and marks a new beginning to the known archaeological record.

Mots clés: tools; stone; Kenya

Domaines: Anthropologie biologique

Sonia Harmand, Jason E. Lewis, Craig S. Feibel, Christopher J. Lepre, Sandrine Prat, et al.. 3.3-million-year-old stone tools from Lomekwi 3, West Turkana, Kenya. Nature, 2015, pp.310-315. ⟨10.1038/nature14464⟩. ⟨hal-01159189⟩