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 ...

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 ...

Untrained, captive orangutans can complete two major steps in the sequence of stone tool use: striking rocks together and cutting using a sharp stone, according to a new study. Untrained, captive ...

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.

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 ...

A handful of stone tools found on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi has pushed back the date that human relatives arrived in ...

A team of archaeologists recently applied high-tech engineering tests to stone tools, and the results suggest that even very early members of our genus, like Homo habilis, knew how to select rocks ...

A fossil hippo skeleton and associated Oldowan artifacts were exposed at the Nyayanga site. T.W. Plummer, Homa Peninsula Paleoanthropological Project The dead hippo represented a stroke of luck to our ...

Along the shores of Africa's Lake Victoria in Kenya roughly 2.9 million years ago, early human ancestors used some of the oldest stone tools ever found to butcher hippos and pound plant material, ...