The early origins of bone-tool manufacturing traditions by hominins 1.5 million years ago

Marta Mirazón Lahr is in the Department of Archaeology, Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 1QH, UK.

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The ability to develop a technology is something humans share with a few other species. Crows (Corvus sp.) and chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) wield sticks as probes, southern sea otters (Enhydra lutris) and some macaques (Macaca sp.) use stones to get at shellfish and capuchin monkeys (Cebus sp.) and chimpanzees crack nuts with stones1. However, most technologies made by animals use perishable organic materials. This makes the manufacture of prehistoric tools from stone (lithic tools) by humans — who modified the lithic raw material intentionally — unique. We now know that this lithic tradition extends back to 3.3 million years ago2, and understand the major phases of stone-tool development that followed. But did hominins also use and modify organic raw materials to make tools, and if so, did such tools have a role in the development of technological skills? Writing in Nature, de la Torre et al.3 present evidence of the intentional modification of a series of bones by hominins 1.5 million years ago in Olduvai Gorge, northern Tanzania, providing the earliest known evidence of systematic bone-tool use in prehistory.

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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-00545-x

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The author declares no competing interests.

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