Stone tools are older than the genus Homo
The Lower Paleolithic once began with Homo habilis and Oldowan choppers. Then Lomekwi 3 in Kenya yielded tools dated to 3.3 million years ago—before Homo, in late Pliocene time—forcing textbooks to rewrite who first knapped stone.
As the earliest Paleolithic subdivision, the Lower Paleolithic runs from the first stone tools around 3.3 million years ago to about 300,000 years ago. In Africa it overlaps the Early Stone Age: Lomekwian technology, then Mode 1 Oldowan from roughly 2.6 million years ago until 400,000 to 250,000 years ago. The Middle Paleolithic follows with prepared-core industries such as Mousterian. Whether controlled fire belongs to Lower or Middle Paleolithic remains open among specialists.
Oldowan tools, once thought oldest, held the field for nearly a million years between roughly 2.5 and 1.7 million years ago. Early Homo habilis groups likely scavenged, cleaving meat and cracking bones. Climate drying and savanna expansion during Quaternary glaciation help explain the shift from australopithecine fruit-heavy diets toward carnivorous scavenging. Homo erectus appeared by about 1.8 million years via transitional Homo ergaster, moving from scavenging to hunting and locking in hunter-gatherer life that lasted through the Paleolithic.
That hunting niche drove changes culminating in Homo heidelbergensis by some 800,000 to 600,000 years ago. Erectus left Africa; Malaysian stone tools are dated about 1.83 million years old, and Peking Man roughly 700,000. In Europe Oldowan-like Abbevillian traditions split into Clactonian flakes and Acheulean hand-axes, with Levallois flint knapping emerging. The Lower Paleolithic is less a species story than a long apprenticeship in edge and point.
Source: Lower Paleolithic
