New research published in Science Advances reported that a Paleolithic community on Kenya’s Homa Peninsula collected, transported, and shaped stone tools between 3 million and 2.6 million years ago—about 600,000 years earlier than scholars had expected for such behavior.
The international team, led by archaeologists Emma Finestone and Rick Potts, excavated the Nyayanga site on the eastern shore of Lake Victoria and uncovered 401 Oldowan implements fashioned from non-local rock. Geological analysis showed that many of the stones came from a watershed roughly 13 kilometers away, revealing deliberate long-distance transport.
Popular Science noted that the cache lay beside butchered hippopotamus remains, linking the tools to meat processing at the dawn of the Oldowan industry. The revised timeline suggested early hominins mapped their surroundings and planned resource acquisition long before earlier studies proposed.
“People often focus on the tools themselves but forget that the real innovation was that people brought raw materials from one place to another,” said Potts. He added that the knowledge to carry stone to food sources appeared “at the outset of the Oldowan.”
Finestone called the discovery “surprising because the Nyayanga assemblage is early in the Oldowan, and we previously thought that longer transport distances may have been related to changes that happened in our more recent evolutionary history.” She explained that the finds hinted at “a greater diversity of hominins making early stone tools than previously thought” and cautioned that researchers cannot link the artifacts to a species “unless you find a hominin fossil actually holding a tool.”
Dental remains of Paranthropus surfaced near the artifacts, leaving open whether members of that genus, early Homo, or both fashioned the implements. If Paranthropus carried the stone, long-distance raw-material transport would not belong solely to the Homo lineage.
Oldowan hammerstones, flakes, and cores demanded hard, brittle rock; the Nyayanga hominins fetched most of it from roughly 10 kilometers away, far beyond the two-kilometer cumulative distances recorded for tool-using chimpanzees. Potts told Scientias that the earliest toolmakers’ mental maps “extended far beyond their immediate surroundings—sometimes even several kilometers.”
Finestone wrote in Science Advances that humans and their ancestors are the only mammals known to travel long distances “to acquire stone, a material with no caloric value, as a central component of their food acquisition strategy.” The study recalibrated the origin of such planning by about 600,000 years.
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