Reconstruction
Gona lies in the Awash basin of Ethiopia's Afar region, and systematic excavation there from 1992 produced thousands of undisturbed stone artefacts dated to approximately 2.6 to 2.5 million years ago. For two decades these were the oldest stone tools known anywhere, and they remain the oldest securely dated examples of the Oldowan, the industry of struck cores and sharp flakes that dominates the next million years of the archaeological record. Only the cruder and much older material from Lomekwi has since displaced them from first place overall. What Gona shows is competence. These are not battered lumps but properly knapped cores, reduced by someone who understood how the raw material would fracture and who selected cobbles accordingly. The concentration of thousands of pieces in undisturbed deposits also means the knapping happened there, repeatedly, rather than the artefacts washing in from elsewhere. That is a place people returned to. The food evidence is what makes the site matter here, and it comes from two nearby localities, OGS-6 and OGS-7. There the stone tools occur together with broken animal bones, and this is the oldest archaeologically documented association anywhere between artefacts and fractured faunal remains. The bones are not incidental. Read alongside the well-preserved cut-marked bones from Bouri, ninety kilometres south in the Middle Awash and dated to about 2.5 million years, the two sites answer complementary halves of the same question. Gona has the tools with the bones; Bouri has the cut marks without the tools. Between them they establish that the earliest stone technology was used to process animal carcasses for meat and for bone marrow. This is worth stating plainly because it is easy to assume and hard to demonstrate. A sharp flake could in principle be used on plants, wood or hide, and function does not follow automatically from form. At Gona and Bouri the function is evidenced rather than assumed. Marrow in particular repays the effort: it is dense in fat, it survives inside a limb bone long after other scavengers have stripped the carcass, and it is completely inaccessible to an animal without a hammerstone. A hominin with tools can therefore exploit a resource that competitors cannot reach at all, which is a different proposition from competing for the same flesh. The hominins responsible were not yet large-brained, and the encephalisation usually credited with driving technology comes later. At Gona the technology is already systematic, already repeated in one place, and already pointed at carcasses.
Historical context
Around 2.6 million years ago, the genus Homo was barely emerging and Australopithecus and Paranthropus were both present in eastern Africa. Fire was unused and remained so for more than a million years. The Awash was a river system with gallery woodland along its channels and open grassland beyond, sharing the landscape with hippopotamus, elephant, giraffids and large herds of grazing antelope, alongside sabre-toothed cats and hyaenas that competed for the same carcasses. No hominin had yet left Africa.
Evidence
Archaeological
StrongThousands of stone artefacts were excavated from undisturbed deposits at East Gona, with the assemblage fully published and technologically analysed.
Dating
StrongArgon dating and magnetostratigraphy of the enclosing sediments constrain the artefacts to approximately 2.6 to 2.5 million years.
Zooarchaeological
StrongAt OGS-6 and OGS-7 artefacts occur in direct association with broken faunal remains, the oldest such documented association. Cut-marked bones from Bouri supply the complementary evidence of tool use on carcasses.
Food identification
ModerateMeat and bone marrow are evidenced by bone fracture patterns and by cut marks at the associated Bouri site, rather than inferred from tool form alone. Specific prey taxa are less securely tied to hominin action.
Preparation method
StrongCore reduction technique is directly observable in the assemblage and indicates deliberate flake production with understanding of raw-material fracture.
Sources
- 1.Sileshi Semaw, Michael Rogers, Jay Quade, et al. (2003). 2.6-Million-year-old stone tools and associated bones from OGS-6 and OGS-7, Gona, Afar, Ethiopia. Journal of Human Evolution 45(2), 169-177. doi:10.1016/s0047-2484(03)00093-9Scientific literature
- 2.José Antonio López-Sáez, Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo (2009). Palynology of OGS-6a and OGS-7, two new 2.6 Ma archaeological sites from Gona, Afar, Ethiopia: Insights on aspects of Late Pliocene habitats and the beginnings of stone-tool use. Geobios 42(4), 503-511. doi:10.1016/j.geobios.2008.12.002Scientific literature
Limitations
- minorarchaeological attribution
No hominin fossils are directly associated with the Gona artefacts. The makers are unidentified, and both early Homo and Paranthropus were present in the region at this date.
- minorhistorical attribution
Gona held the record for the world's oldest stone tools for roughly two decades, and older literature describes it that way. Since the 2015 publication of Lomekwi 3 at 3.3 million years, Gona is best described as the oldest securely dated Oldowan rather than the oldest stone technology.
