Reconstruction
Lomekwi 3 lies on the western side of Lake Turkana in northern Kenya, and in 2015 it was published as the oldest stone tool site known: cores, flakes and anvils securely dated to 3.3 million years ago, found in place rather than washed together. That date is 700,000 years earlier than the Oldowan industry that had held the record, and it falls well before the appearance of the genus Homo. The technique is distinctive. Rather than the controlled freehand flaking of later industries, the Lomekwi knappers combined core reduction with battering, working large stones by striking them against a stationary anvil or hammering them directly. The results are big, thick and irregular, but they carry cutting edges, and the assemblage shows a working understanding of how stone fractures. For food history the significance is what a sharp edge and a heavy hammerstone make possible. Teeth cannot open a thick hide or cut through tendon, and the meat and marrow inside a large carcass are effectively sealed to an animal without tools. A flake solves that. A battered cobble solves a different problem, breaking open nuts and pounding fibrous tubers into something a modest jaw can process. Neither requires fire, planning or cooperation beyond the immediate task, and both extend the range of edible material available on a given landscape. The find also broke a long-standing explanation. Toolmaking had been credited to Homo, and linked causally to bigger brains and to the spread of savannah grassland, with the tools arriving as a response to open, drier country. Lomekwi 3 is neither the right date nor the right habitat for that story: the site sits in a wooded palaeoenvironment and predates Homo. What remains is more interesting and less tidy. The capacity to make and use cutting tools appeared in a hominin that was not yet human by any anatomical measure, and it appeared among trees rather than on a plain. Whether the knappers were Australopithecus, Kenyanthropus or something else is not settled by the tools themselves, since no hominin fossil is directly associated with the knapping. What the site establishes is a starting date for the technology on which every later development in food processing depends. It is worth being precise about the limit of that claim. Lomekwi 3 dates the making of sharp stone, not the eating of anything in particular: no cut-marked bone and no plant residue have been reported from the site. The dietary consequences described here are what such tools make possible, drawn from later sites where tools and butchered bone occur together.
Historical context
Roughly 3.3 million years ago, the genus Homo did not exist and Australopithecus afarensis was the best-known hominin in East Africa. Fire was unused and would remain so for well over a million years. The Turkana basin held a large lake fringed by woodland and gallery forest, with hippopotamus, crocodile, elephant and antelope in the surrounding landscape. Hominins were confined to Africa; the earliest known departure from the continent lies almost a million and a half years ahead.
Evidence
Archaeological
StrongCores, flakes and anvils were recovered in situ rather than from a disturbed context, and the assemblage is fully published with refitting and technological analysis.
Dating
StrongThe site is dated by tephrostratigraphy, magnetostratigraphy and argon dating of the enclosing sediments to 3.3 million years.
Preparation method
ModerateKnapping technique is inferred from core morphology and battering damage, indicating passive-hammer and direct-percussion methods rather than controlled freehand flaking.
Food identification
Insufficient evidenceNo cut-marked bone or plant residue is reported from the site. The dietary uses of these tools are functional inference from edge and battering damage, not direct evidence of anything eaten.
Historical interpretation
ModerateThe assemblage predates the Oldowan by roughly 700,000 years and predates Homo, which contradicts the previous account linking toolmaking to Homo, larger brains and savannah expansion.
Sources
- 1.Sonia Harmand, Jason E. Lewis, Craig S. Feibel, et al. (2015). 3.3-million-year-old stone tools from Lomekwi 3, West Turkana, Kenya. Nature 521(7552), 310-315. doi:10.1038/nature14464Scientific literature
- 2.Stony Brook University / Turkana Basin Institute (2015). Scientists Discover Oldest Stone Tools on Record. Stony Brook University Newsroom. news.stonybrook.edu/newsroom/press-release/generModern synthesis
Limitations
- moderatefood identification
No cut-marked bone or plant residue is reported from Lomekwi 3. Every dietary use described here is inferred from what the tools could do, not from evidence of what they were used on.
- moderatearchaeological attribution
No hominin fossil is directly associated with the knapping. Attribution to any particular species, including Kenyanthropus platyops known from the region, is not established by the assemblage.
