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What is the oldest-known archaeological site in the world? - Livescience.com

What is the oldest-known archaeological site in the world? - Livescience.com

What is the oldest-known archaeological site in the world? - Livescience.com
Sep 13, 2021 2 mins, 1 sec

The question of what is the oldest archaeological site in the world is "a topic that has since recently divided the archaeological community," Yonatan Sahle, a senior lecturer of archaeology at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, told Live Science in an email. .

The first site, called Lomekwi 3, holds bones of hominins as well as stone artifacts and is located on a low hill in West Turkana, Kenya.

"Lomekwi 3 is the oldest known archaeological site in the world," Jason Lewis, assistant director of the Turkana Basin Institute and a co-author of the paper, told Live Science in an email. ?

Jeremy DeSilva, an associate professor of anthropology at Dartmouth College who was not involved in the study, agreed that Lomekwi 3 is the oldest known archaeological site, but he noted that not all scholars agree?

Indeed, a number of recent papers "call into question the status of the artifacts at Lomekwi 3, arguing that some of the artifacts were not actually found in a context where the age of the artifacts can be certain," David Braun, an anthropology professor at The George Washington University, told Live Science.

"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 3 "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. 

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