AN international team of archaeologists – including researchers from La Trobe University – have found what is likely to be the oldest examples of a stone age innovation, in the form of a stone toolkit, as well as the oldest evidence of hominins consuming very large animals.
Researchers previously assumed that only the genus Homo, to which humans belong, was capable of making stone tools. However, along the shores of Lake Victoria in Kenya, (meaning besides man) fossils were discovered next to these stone tools at a time period when Homo is not present, opening up fascinating possibilities of another hominin species using tools.
New research published in Science reveals the stone tools were used hundreds of thousands of years earlier than previously thought, and over a larger geographic area.
Researcher at La Trobe University, and head of The Australian Archaeomagnetism Laboratory, professor Andy Herries, completed the palaeomagnetic dating on the rocks found at the African site. This process identifies magnetic changes and reversals in Earth’s magnetic field fossilised in rocks to work out their age.
“The magnetic minerals in layers in which the Paranthropus fossils and stone tools occur are pointing towards the north, as they do today, but just below this they are pointing in random directions that show the Earth’s magnetic field was going through a change from pointing south to pointing north,” said professor Herries.
“When combined with other dating methods, this suggests the fossils and stone tools date to just after three million years old, making them the oldest known of this species and industry.”
