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Article: Simultaneous Stone Age tool use: signs of early hand-ax making not limited to eastern Africa.(Humans)(Brief article)
- Article from:
- Science News
- Article date:
- January 31, 2009
- Author:
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Although separated by several thousand kilometers, southern and eastern Africa were, in a sense, a stone's throw from each other in ancient times. New evidence suggests that human ancestors in southern Africa fashioned teardrop-shaped stone hand axes 1.6 million years ago, nearly twice as long ago as previously thought and about the same time such tools first appeared in eastern Africa.
Ryan Gibbon of the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and his colleagues dated hand axes and related stone implements, collectively known as Acheulean artifacts, using measures of the relative decay of radioactive forms of aluminum and beryllium in quartz from the soil ...