Prisoner Of Ice
04-20-2015, 11:44 PM
http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/archaeology/lower/harmand-lomekwi-tools-balter-2015.html
Sonia Harmand presented a talk at the Paleoanthropology Society meeting this week describing her team’s discovery of stone tools in a 3.3-million-year-old context at Lomekwi, on the west side of Lake Turkana. Michael Balter reported on the talk in a story in Science: “World’s oldest stone tools discovered in Kenya”:
In 2011, Harmand’s team was seeking the site where a controversial human relative called Kenyanthropus platyops had been discovered in 1998. They took a wrong turn and stumbled upon another part of the area, called Lomekwi, near where Kenyanthropus had been found. The researchers spotted what Harmand called unmistakable stone tools on the surface of the sandy landscape and immediately launched a small excavation.
The story discusses the contents of the talk, that the tools have been found both from surface and excavation contexts. According to the article, the artifacts show quantitative differences from known Oldowan assemblages, all of which are at least 700,000 years more recent. These differences led Harmand and colleagues to name a new tradition, which they are calling the “Lomekwian”.
I can’t really comment more informatively about this until the work is published so that I can evaluate it. The obvious implication is that stone tools were invented and used by multiple lineages of early hominins.
Sonia Harmand presented a talk at the Paleoanthropology Society meeting this week describing her team’s discovery of stone tools in a 3.3-million-year-old context at Lomekwi, on the west side of Lake Turkana. Michael Balter reported on the talk in a story in Science: “World’s oldest stone tools discovered in Kenya”:
In 2011, Harmand’s team was seeking the site where a controversial human relative called Kenyanthropus platyops had been discovered in 1998. They took a wrong turn and stumbled upon another part of the area, called Lomekwi, near where Kenyanthropus had been found. The researchers spotted what Harmand called unmistakable stone tools on the surface of the sandy landscape and immediately launched a small excavation.
The story discusses the contents of the talk, that the tools have been found both from surface and excavation contexts. According to the article, the artifacts show quantitative differences from known Oldowan assemblages, all of which are at least 700,000 years more recent. These differences led Harmand and colleagues to name a new tradition, which they are calling the “Lomekwian”.
I can’t really comment more informatively about this until the work is published so that I can evaluate it. The obvious implication is that stone tools were invented and used by multiple lineages of early hominins.