# A continuous record of early human stone tool production

## TL;DR

This study shows that early humans continuously made stone tools from about 3.3 to 1.5 million years ago without losing the knowledge.

## Contribution

The study provides the first objective temporal analysis showing no cultural loss in stone tool production.

## Key findings

- There are no significant temporal breaks in stone tool production from 3.3 to 1.5 million years ago.
- Cultural knowledge for making stone tools likely remained continuous in early human populations.

## Abstract

Early human cultural dynamics underpin the Plio-Pleistocene archaeological record and impact how we understand some of our earliest identifiable behaviours. One major outstanding question is whether Early Stone Age material culture represents a single lineage of cultural information, or did we ever lose the knowledge required to make stone tools? No single approach satisfactorily addresses this problem, but to date, objective analyses of temporal data have been absent from the conversation. Here, using a comprehensive database of dated African Oldowan archaeological sites, we demonstrate that there are no temporal breaks large enough, on a relative basis, to infer a loss of stone-tool-making cultural information. Therefore, alongside previously published data, we infer a continuous record of early human stone tool production in Africa from c. 3.3 to 1.5 million years ago. Stone tool-associated behavioural adaptations and evolutionary selective pressures were, therefore, likely to have been ever present during this period.