"For many of us — myself included — unequivocal evidence for the oldest archaeological occurrences comes in the form of 2.6-million-year-old stone tools from Gona," which is located by the Kada Gona river in Afar, Ethiopia, Sahle said.
The stone tools at Gona may have been made by Australopithecus garhi, a human ancestor that lived in east Africa around 2.5 million years ago.Rick Potts, director of the Smithsonian's Human Origins Program, is convinced that Lomekwi 3Â "is the oldest site with solid evidence of stone-on-stone percussion," meaning that it's the oldest site that has stone artifacts made by human ancestors
He noted that the stone artifacts at Lomekwi 3 appear different from those found at Gona; they are cruder and may not have been used as tools at all
The stone artifacts at Lomekwi 3 "show awkward fracturing of the rocks, including large, thick, irregularly shaped flakes that could have been the accidental byproducts of pounding — for what purpose, no one currently knows," Potts wrote in an email, noting that people at Lomekwi 3 may not have been creating tools but rather pounding rocks together for unknown reasons
Brian Villmoare, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Nevada, told Live Science, "I do tend to think that Australopithecus afarensis could have made stone tools," but he noted that he has not examined the Lomekwi 3 artifacts.Â