Ancient humans used bone tools one million years earlier than thought

Objects discovered in Tanzania and dated to 1.5 million years ago help to rewrite human ancestors’ use of carved bone implements

Bone tools excavated in Tanzania are the earliest known to be used by ancient humans.Credit: CSIC

Ancient humans consistently used bone tools at least one million years earlier than was previously thought.

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.

Trench excavation

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 Olduvai Gorge in the Great Rift Valley, Tanzania, has been the site of many fossil discoveries.Credit: Dietmar Rauscher/Alamy

The finds at Olduvai Gorge are among discoveries challenging that narrative. The region has a long history of fossil finds: specimens for the early hominin Homo habilis were discovered there in the 1960s, and researchers have found signs of bone tools in the area for years. Famed palaeoanthropologist Mary Leakey wrote about some of these findings but only partially published her results. This is, in part, because most bone tools were found outside their original context and so couldn’t be accurately dated.

Objects found in carefully excavated trenches are easier to place in time and space. The latest findings are based on digs at Olduvai conducted between 2015 and 2022. Researchers spent several field seasons excavating trenches to study how technology changed when H. erectus — a small-brained predecessor to species including modern humans and Neanderthals — replaced H. habilis in the region, somewhere between 1.8 and 1.5 million years ago.