Exploring Humanity’s Technological Origins

Human evolutionary scholars have long assumed that the earliest stone tools were made by members of the genus Homo, 2.4–2.3 million years ago, and that this technological development was directly linked to climate change and the spread of savannah grasslands. In the last decade, fieldwork in Kenya has revealed evidence of much earlier technological behavior. Sonia Harmand will discuss the discovery of stone tools in Kenya and will show how this discovery is reshaping our understanding of the emergence of human-like manipulative capabilities, as well as the development of cognition in modern humans and all our immediate ancestors.