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WRONG TURN 1 5 CRACK
But Harmand and Lewis, among others, thought the Oldowan technology was too carefully knapped to represent our ancestors’ first crack at tool-making. Those artifacts belong to a technology known as the Oldowan, named after Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, where Louis Leakey first found such tools in the 1930s.
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While most of the fractured rocks were on the surface, a trio of partially buried ones suggested that the surface finds were eroding out of the sediments-and that more artifacts might be hidden just below.Īt the time, the oldest known stone tools, from a site called Gona in Ethiopia, were dated to 2.6 million years ago. Perched on the otherwise fine-grained surface, the large stone hunks bore fracture marks that to a trained archaeologist’s eye appeared to be caused by purposeful manipulation, rather than natural forces. Sammy Lokorodi, a sharp-eyed native of the Turkana area, had found some curious rocks on the next hill over. After about an hour, Harmand’s walkie-talkie crackled.
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Rather than simply turn around, the team hopped out to survey the area-a shadeless, Badlands moonscape where the wind felt like a blast from a blow dryer. The serendipity began when Harmand steered their 1989 SUV straight into a dead-end riverbed. (Go on a virtual tour of the Turkana site and fossil collection.) The misdirection led to an enormous payoff: a discovery that pushes the date of the earliest known stone tools back by some 700,000 years, according to a report published Wednesday in the journal Nature. He and Harmand, an archaeologist at Stony Brook University, were spearheading a team hunting for traces of human ancestral behavior in sediments millions of years old. “I accept responsibility for that,” says Jason Lewis, a paleoanthropologist at Rutgers University, who-with the help of a geological map and GPS-was supposedly playing the role of navigator. On July 9, 2011, Sonia Harmand took a left turn instead of a right among the dry riverbeds that substitute for roads on the western shore of Kenya’s Lake Turkana, and promptly got lost.