Stone tool-making may have arisen independently outside of Africa

According to a new study, early humans may have developed an advanced way of crafting stone tools, something once thought to have only originated in Africa, independently in other places. The researchers behind the study suggest that their finding provide evidence that this ancient technology didn’t spread across the globe solely as a result of humanity’s exodus from the African continent.

The researchers analyzed about 3,000 stone tools from a 325,000-year-old archaeological site outside of Nor Geghi in the Kotayk Province of Armenia. What they found challenges the theory that many scientists have held that the so-called Levallois stone tool-making technique originated in Africa and then spread across the world as human populations began to expand.

Levallois technology, named after the site where it was first discovered in France, involves knocking stone flakes of specific shapes and sizes off of a lump of stone, called a core. The resulting flakes are then refined into knives or various other tools. They were relatively small items that would have been easy to carry, which is an important consideration for the nomadic hunter-gatherers of the era.

Researchers have long argued that Levallois technology originated in Africa, and then spread to Eurasia as humans began their exodus from Africa. However, investigators have discovered the earliest known use of Levallois technology in Eurasia, a discovery which serves as the first clear evidence that the technology was discovered independently outside of Africa.

Read more about the story at Discovery News.

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