Scientists Are Amazed By Stone Age Tools They Dug Up In Kenya
"Our ancestors in Kenya's Southern Rift Valley made some pretty innovative tools.
And they made them far earlier than previously thought."
"The oldest innovations were axes designed to be held in the palm of the hand. They were shaped like a tear drop, with a rounded end and a pointed eye. The edges were wavy and sharp. And they look as if they were great at chopping down branches — or chopping up the carcass of a large animal."
"'I think of the hand axes as the Swiss army knife of the Stone Age,' says paleoanthropologist Rick Potts, director of the Human Origins program at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History and one of the lead scientists in a new study by a team of international scientists."
"The researchers also found that the next technological revolution, marking the beginning of the Middle Stone Age happened tens of thousands of years earlier than previously thought."