The Oldowan toolkit
Simple flaked cores and sharp flakes become a standard technology used for over a million years.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 20 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 50 thousand years
- Era
- Pliocene, Cenozoic
From about 2.6 million years ago, sites at Gona and elsewhere in Ethiopia yield systematically produced sharp flakes struck from cobbles, together with the cores and hammerstones used to make them. Unlike the isolated Lomekwi assemblage, the Oldowan spreads, persists and is repeatedly reinvented at sites across Africa and later Eurasia. A sharp flake is what lets a slow, clawless, blunt-toothed primate open a carcass faster than a hyena, and access to meat and marrow is the energetic foundation of everything the genus Homo does next.