Olduvai Gorge in northern Tanzania boasts sediment layers dating back to about 1.8 million years ago. Those layers contain simple stone tools that marked one of the earliest recorded technological transitions. Now, researchers have uncovered a substantial cache of prehistoric bone tools in the same region dating back 1.5 million years. It's the oldest collection of mass-produced bone tools yet known, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature. And while it's still unclear which hominin species crafted the tools, the discovery suggests that our early human ancestors had some advanced reasoning skills a good million years earlier than previously thought.

“The tools show evidence that their creators carefully worked the bones, chipping off flakes to create useful shapes," said co-author Renata F. Peters, an archaeologist at University College London. "We were excited to find these bone tools from such an early timeframe. It means that human ancestors were capable of transferring skills from stone to bone, a level of complex cognition that we haven’t seen elsewhere for another million years.”

As previously reported, species on the hominin family tree have made and used stone tools for about 2.6 million years. For instance, Homo habilis was an early member of our genus who walked upright and had a mixture of human and ape-like features. Starting around 1.2 million years ago, a later hominin species called Homo erectus made more complex stone tools, like hand axes.

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