Our prehistoric human ancestors relied on deliberately modified and sharpened stone tools as early as 3.3 million years ago.

The ancestors of humans started making tools about 3.3 million years ago. First they made them out of stone, then they switched to bone as a raw material. Until recently, the earliest clear evidence ...

WASHINGTON (Nov. 4, 2025)--Imagine early humans meticulously crafting stone tools for nearly 300,000 years, all while contending with recurring wildfires, droughts, and dramatic environmental shifts.

In southwestern Kenya more than 2.6 million years ago, ancient humans wielded an array of stone tools—known collectively as the Oldowan toolkit—to pound plant material and carve up large prey such as ...

Oldowan stone tools made from a variety of raw materials sourced more than six miles away from where they were found in southwestern Kenya. In southwestern Kenya more than 2.6 million years ago, ...

ANTH copy has bookplate: Smithsonian Institution Libraries, Gift from the Margery Masinter Foundation Endowment for Illustrated Books. "In Stone Tools in Human Evolution, John J. Shea argues that over ...

Recent discoveries have reshaped the human evolutionary timeline, from older stone tools to newly identified human species ...

Humans are fundamentally technological creatures. We depend on the manufacture and use of tools for our survival to a degree qualitatively greater than any other species. Therefore, an understanding ...

Long before humans became master hunters, our ancestors were already thriving by making the most of what nature left behind. New research suggests that scavenging animal carcasses wasn’t a desperate ...

We humans are nothing if not inventive. Our innovations have come to underpin virtually every facet of daily life—from what we eat to how we communicate. This ingenuity is intrinsically linked to both ...

Selected microblade and microblade cores excavated from Xiqiaoshan. 1, 2, 5: Wedge-shaped core with double platforms; 3, 4, 6, 7: Wedge-shaped core; 8: irregular core; 9: Crest microblade; 10–14: ...