The ancestors of humans started making tools about 3.3 million years ago. First they made them out of stone, then they switched to bone as a raw material. Until recently, the earliest clear evidence ...

Building the human story based on a few artefacts is tricky – particularly for wooden tools that don’t preserve well, or cave ...

Old beliefs about early human behavior in East Asia are being challenged by the discovery of a richly-layered archaeological ...

Stone tools discovered on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi are rewriting what experts thought they knew about human evolution in this region. The tools date to about 1 million to 1.5 million years ...

Archaeologists have found the oldest known evidence of hafted tools in East Asia, and they challenge a previously held assumption about stone tool use.

ANTH copy has bookplate: Smithsonian Institution Libraries, Gift from the Margery Masinter Foundation Endowment for Illustrated Books. "In Stone Tools in Human Evolution, John J. Shea argues that over ...

A newly excavated archaeological site in central China is reshaping long-held assumptions about early hominin behavior in Eastern Asia. Led by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, an international team of ...

WASHINGTON (Nov. 4, 2025)--Imagine early humans meticulously crafting stone tools for nearly 300,000 years, all while contending with recurring wildfires, droughts, and dramatic environmental shifts.

Sharp stone technology chipped over three million years allowed early humans to exploit animal and plant food resources. But how did the production of stone tools -- called 'knapping' -- start?

Ancient tools from central China are flipping the script, revealing early humans were far more innovative than history once gave them credit for.

Oldowan stone tools made from a variety of raw materials sourced more than six miles away from where they were found in southwestern Kenya. In southwestern Kenya more than 2.6 million years ago, ...

Once overlooked, Morocco has emerged as a focal point of human prehistory, with new discoveries and a landmark report ...