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The oldest “workshop” for making obsidian tools has been found. It was not created by Homo sapiens
Scientists have come across the site where the first stone tools were made. In a prehistoric workshop a million years ago, fists were produced from obsidian.
About 1.2 million years old is a find discovered in Ethiopia. Scientists from Spain and France working in the Auash River Valley examined a layer of sediment in which they came across several hundred prehistoric Stone Age tools. These were so-called “fist tools” — the earliest tools made by human beings. As it turned out, almost all of them were chipped from obsidian.
Researchers believe that this is the oldest known prehistoric workshop. That is, a place where a group of primitive people deliberately produced stone tools using the same technique. The researchers described their discovery in a paper published in the scientific journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.
What were fist tools?
The Stone Age began about 2.6 million years ago. Its end is dated to 3,300 years BC. It is the earliest and longest prehistoric era. It is characterized by one element: the manufacture of stone tools by hominids.
During the Stone Age, species belonging to the human species, most notably Homo erectus, specialized in the manufacture…
