Jun 05, 2015 09:09 AM EDT
Oldest Kenya Stone Tools Are 3.3 Million Years Old – 700,000 Years Older Than Oldest Discovered Yet [PHOTOS+VIDEO]

In an exciting time for amateur scientists and history lovers, new evidence regarding the oldest Kenya stone tools found may actually be the most ancient ever discovered, stretching back the use of tools by human being for about 700,000 years.

News about the oldest Kenya stone tools might help tell the story of a different time period of our species' history, as it's now known there were beings related to humans capable of creating tools for hunting hundreds of thousands of years before it had been previously thought.

According to CNN, the paper that showed the oldest Kenya stone tools for the first time was published on science journal Nature last April, as their findings turned out to be 3.3 million years old, thus "extending archeological record by almost a third," as co-author of the paper Jason Lewis explained to the news outlet.

Before the unearthing of these oldest Kenya stone tools belonging to genus Homo (to which modern humans belong to), the most ancient tools of the kind found in Ethiopia and were 2.6 million years old.

The New York Times reports that the discovery of the oldest Kenya stone tools came by accident, as a team of Stony Brook archeologists were exploring the arid region near the west of Lake Turkana in the African country and they ultimately took a wrong turn and got lost - only to discover the earliest human technology yet.

According to Gizmodo, the age of these tools is what makes them the most shocking, as carbon isotope dating puts them before the emergence of our oldest human ancestors, which could mean that they were either made by other related species (such as ape-like Kenyanthropus platyops or "Lucy") or humans actually date back longer than previously thought.

Other amazing recent historic findings to compare to the oldest Kenya stone tools have included proof that humans and Neanderthals mixed, the discovery of the oldest known murder victim and the unveiling of mysteries about a lost and mythical Honduras city as well as the discovery that Stonehenge was a much larger complex.

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