Oldest stone tools pre-date earliest humans

[European Knight]

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-32804177

The world's oldest stone tools have been discovered, scientists report.

They were unearthed from the shores of Lake Turkana in Kenya, and date to 3.3 million years ago.

They are 700,000 years older than any tools found before, even pre-dating the earliest humans in the Homo genus.

The find, reported in Nature, suggests that more ancient species, such as Australopithecus afarensis or Kenyanthropus platyops, may have been more sophisticated than was thought.

"They are significantly earlier than anything that has been found previously," said Dr Nick Taylor, from the National Centre of Scientific Research (CNRS) in France and the University of Leiden in the Netherlands.

"It's really quite astonishing to think what separates the previous oldest site and this site is 700,000 years of time. It's monumental."

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[Prisoner Of Ice]

Australopithecus afarensis or Kenyanthropus platyops are probably nothing to do with anything. If anything, this proves they are nothing to do with modern humans. They don't really have the hands for toolmaking, and probably didn't make these tools.

Fossils get extremely rare even going back to 50k years let alone several million years, but in africa we have a partial much more humanlike hand quite a few million years ago. In italy there are some arboreal apes with extremely human hands, but they are supposedly a side branch of humanity.

The truth is though, there's just not enough fossils to get a good picture, but most of the 'hominid' fossils are probably nothing to do with humans today.