The ancient world is filled with stone monuments so precise, they baffle modern engineers. Did early civilizations possess tools we’ve lost — or did they use something far more advanced? This video ...

Nyayanga site being excavated in July 2016. Credit: J.S. Oliver, Homa Peninsula Paleoanthropology Project “The assumption among researchers has long been that only the genus Homo, to which humans ...

At a site in Kenya, archaeologists recently unearthed layer upon layer of stone stools from deposits that span 300,000 years, and include a period of intense environmental upheaval. The oldest tools ...

Monkeys in southern Thailand use rocks to pound open oil palm nuts, inadvertently shattering stone pieces off their makeshift nutcrackers. These flakes resemble some sharp-edged stone tools presumed ...

A fossil hippo skeleton and associated Oldowan artifacts were exposed at the Nyayanga site. T.W. Plummer, Homa Peninsula Paleoanthropological Project The dead hippo represented a stroke of luck to our ...

A team of archaeologists recently applied high-tech engineering tests to stone tools, and the results suggest that even very early members of our genus, like Homo habilis, knew how to select rocks ...

When monkeys in Thailand use stones as hammers and anvils to help them crack open nuts, they often accidentally create sharp flakes of rock that look like the stone cutting tools made by early humans.

A 1.45-million-year-old hominid leg fossil sports previously unrecognized evidence of our ancient evolutionary relatives butchering and possibly eating one another, a new study claims. An ancient ...

To the untrained eye, the rock would have looked like any other. But when Mohamed Sahnouni pulled it out of the ground in the summer of 2006, he immediately recognized it as a chopper: a palm-size ...

Hitting on a corner of the blade will cause unpredictable breaks and can damage the hammer. The blade of the hammer should make full contact with the stone, as in the photo on the far right. [3, ...

Along the shores of Africa's Lake Victoria in Kenya roughly 2.9 million years ago, early human ancestors used some of the oldest stone tools ever found to butcher hippos and pound plant material, ...