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Stone tools from 50,000 years ago were not created by humans. Who, then, made them?
New research has found that stone tools that date back 50,000 years were created by monkeys. They were used to open nuts. Initially, scientists thought the prehistoric artifacts were the work of Native Americans.
A 2019 study found that capuchins living in Brazil’s Serra da Capivara National Park use stone tools to process food. What’s more, this peculiar “stone age” of primates is thought to have lasted for ca. 3,000 years. A few years earlier in Africa, archaeologists found traces of tool-making by chimpanzees that dated back 4,000 years.
Stone tools from Brazil dated back 50,000 years ago
All indications are that the history of tool-making by primates, may be even longer. In 2016, in the Brazilian state of Piauí, located in the Northeast Region, archaeologists were excavating at Pedra Furada. It’s a site with about 800 archaeological sites.
Scientists then found stone tools, some made of the quartz and quartzite found there. The oldest of them were up to 50,000 years old. Initially, scientists concluded that they were created by the first inhabitants of America. Now this theory has been called into question, and a new hypothesis has been described in the pages of the scientific journal The…
