Discovery of 3m-year-old stone tools sparks prehistoric whodunnit Presence of teeth from extinct hominin challenges view that only members of Homo genus used complex tools.
The discovery of stone tools dating back nearly 3m years has raised questions about which hominin species was behind the ancient technology.

The artefacts, found at a site in Kenya, are thought to be the oldest known example of a specific set of stone tools used for butchery and pounding plant material. The emergence of the so-called Oldowan toolkit is viewed as a milestone in human evolution and was assumed to be an innovation of our ancestors.

However, the latest excavation revealed a pair of massive molars belonging to Paranthropus, a muscular-jawed hominin on a side branch of our evolutionary tree, alongside the tools. (read on)