The oldest known stone tools are older than the genus Homo.

Stone tools sound like a human invention, but the oldest known ones push beyond our own genus. Nature reported 3.3-million-year-old stone tools from Lomekwi 3 in Kenya, and the paper describes them as predating the earliest known Homo fossils. That does not mean modern humans made them. That is the point. The tool story appears to start before the group we usually call human. The mental model break is simple: technology, in its earliest stone form, may be older than Homo itself. The first toolmaker may not fit the label human.

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