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

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Stone tools are deliberately made by the hands of hominins, like these worked on by the author. John K. Murray Have you ever found ...

Nyayanga site being excavated in July 2016. Credit: J.S. Oliver, Homa Peninsula Paleoanthropology Project “The assumption among researchers has long been that only the genus Homo, to which humans ...

Nearly 3 million years ago, hominids employed stone tool kits to butcher hippos and pound plants along what’s now the shores of Kenya’s Lake Victoria, researchers say. Evidence of those food ...

Macaques use stones as hammers to smash open food items like shellfish and nuts. (Lydia V. Luncz) When monkeys in Thailand use stones as hammers and anvils to help them crack open nuts, they often ...

At a site in Kenya, archaeologists recently unearthed layer upon layer of stone stools from deposits that span 300,000 years, and include a period of intense environmental upheaval. The oldest tools ...

Monkeys in southern Thailand use rocks to pound open oil palm nuts, inadvertently shattering stone pieces off their makeshift nutcrackers. These flakes resemble some sharp-edged stone tools presumed ...

Consider the possibility that all human technology started with a mistake—or at least a lack of hand-eye coordination. In pursuit of this idea, Lydia Luncz and Tomos Proffitt, both at the Max Planck ...

Have you ever found yourself in a museum's gallery of human origins, staring at a glass case full of rocks labeled "stone tools," muttering under your breath, "How do they know it's not just any old ...

When monkeys in Thailand use stones as hammers and anvils to help them crack open nuts, they often accidentally create sharp flakes of rock that look like the stone cutting tools made by early humans.