The findings come from a study of bone tools discovered at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania and dated to around 1.5 million years ago. The discovery joins other finds ' such as a 1.4-million-year-old bone axe from Ethiopia ' that suggest the human ancestor Homo erectus often used bones as tools. Bone-tool culture is showing up in the archaeological record 'much earlier than anyone thought possible', says Michael Pante, a palaeontologist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins who was not involved with the research. 'It just speaks to this species having the ability to do things that no other species was able to do.' The findings were published1 on 5 March in Nature. Tool use is a storied tradition among hominins. Members of the genus Australopithecus ' which includes the famed fossil Lucy ' were making stone tools at least 2.6 million years ago. Bone tools appear only much later in the human story, typically at sites in Europe and Asia around 400,000 years ago. The finds at Olduvai...
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