Have you ever found yourself in a museum’s gallery of human origins, staring at a glass case full of rocks labeled “stone tools,” muttering under your breath, “How do they know it’s not just any old ...

Captive orangutans can use stone tools without minimal direction from humans, researchers reported today. Besides an affirmation of orangutan intelligence, the finding has implications for ...

Nyayanga site being excavated in July 2016. Credit: J.S. Oliver, Homa Peninsula Paleoanthropology Project “The assumption among researchers has long been that only the genus Homo, to which humans ...

Monkeys in southern Thailand use rocks to pound open oil palm nuts, inadvertently shattering stone pieces off their makeshift nutcrackers. These flakes resemble some sharp-edged stone tools presumed ...

Untrained, captive orangutans can complete two major steps in the sequence of stone tool use: striking rocks together and cutting using a sharp stone, according to a new study. Untrained, captive ...

Captive orangutans that had never seen stone tools have spontaneously picked up rocks and used them as hammers. One individual also used a sharp stone as a cutting tool. The finding suggests that even ...

New technologies today often involve electronic devices that are smaller and smarter than before. During the Middle Paleolithic, when Neanderthals were modern humans’ neighbors, new technologies meant ...

A fossil hippo skeleton and associated Oldowan artifacts were exposed at the Nyayanga site. T.W. Plummer, Homa Peninsula Paleoanthropological Project The dead hippo represented a stroke of luck to our ...

Nearly 3 million years ago, hominids employed stone tool kits to butcher hippos and pound plants along what’s now the shores of Kenya’s Lake Victoria, researchers say. Evidence of those food ...

Along the shores of Africa's Lake Victoria in Kenya roughly 2.9 million years ago, early human ancestors used some of the oldest stone tools ever found to butcher hippos and pound plant material, ...