At 2.6 million years old, the Lower Paleolithic site called Gona or Kada Gona in Ethiopia is the earliest site yet to contain evidence of chipped stone tool making.
The tools consist of cores and core fragments, whole and broken stone flakes, and a small number of retouched flakes, an assemblage not unlike that from several somewhat younger sites of the Oldowan tradition, such as Hadar and Omo Kibish in Ethiopia and Lokalalei in Kenya.
Exactly who made the stone tools is a bit of a controversy. At the contemporary site of Bouri (in the Middle Awash of Ethiopia), Australopithecus garhi is implicated; while at Lokalalei, some currently unidentified form of Homo has been suggested.
Sources
This definition is part of the About.com Guide to the Lower Paleolithic.
de la Torre, Ignacio 2004 Omo Revisited: Evaluating the Technological Skills of Pliocene Hominids. Current Anthropology 45(4):439-466.
Semaw, Sileshi 2000 The World’s Oldest Stone Artefacts from Gona, Ethiopia: Their Implications for Understanding Stone Technology and Patterns of Human Evolution Between 2·6–1·5 Million Years Ago. Journal of Archaeological Science 27:1197–1214. Free download.
This glossary entry is part of the Dictionary of Archaeology.
