A little under two million years ago, a prehistoric hominin in Africa made a cognitive leap that enabled it to produce a type of stone tool that was far superior than anything that had come before.

A prehistoric stone hand ax discovered in Sainte-Gabelle, Haute-Garonne, France. From the collection of Charles Fouque, currently seen at the Museum of Toulouse. Courtesy of Didier Descouens/Wikimedia ...

Archaeologists have discovered dozens of primitive tools fashioned by direct human ancestors in Kenya and Ethiopia 1.75 million years ago. The Acheulean age of toolmaking, noted for its thinner, more ...

Our human ancestors may have been sophisticated tool users 1.76 million years ago. Newly discovered hand axes from that period are the oldest examples of the complex Acheulean culture, 350,000 years ...

Even our earliest human ancestors made and used technology — something we can look back on thanks to the lasting nature of stone tools. An exceptionally high density of giant hand axes dated to ...

The Wenquan Paleolithic site in Ruzhou, Central China's Henan Province, has yielded a collection of Acheulean tools, including hand axes, thin-edged axes, and large stone knives. This marks the first ...

Stone handaxes in the Saudi Arabian desert indicate that an ancient style of tool making belonging to our hominin ancestors continued till as recently as 190,000 years ago. Monica Hoyos Flight Stone ...

A new work published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews, led by the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH) in collaboration with the Centre National de Recherches ...

Beginning more than 1.5 million years ago, early humans made stone handaxes in a style known as the Acheulean - the longest lasting tool-making tradition in prehistory. New research has documented an ...