Early man

This blade, together with almost 150 other stone artefacts unearthed recently in Kenya, to the west of Lake Turkana, pushes the age at which early humans are known to have made such tools back 700,000 years, for dating of the strata they were found in suggests they are 3.3m years old. Sonia Harmand of the West Turkana Archaeological Project, in Nairobi, and her colleagues, report the finds in this week’s Nature. Who made these tools is not known, but they are contemporary with a species called either Kenyanthropus platyops or Australopithecus platyops, depending the palaeontologist doing the naming, so it is likely that members of this group were the craftsmen. Stone cores found with the blades show they were made, as was common subsequently, by striking flakes off a large rock.