Digging up history
Fairfield University professor Frances L. Forrest was part of a team that discovered 3 million-year-old tools.
The archaeological site sits on a peninsula in Nyayanga, Kenya, overlooking a lake. Despite the intense heat of 100-degree-plus temperatures, it is quite beautiful, says Frances L. Forrest, a professor of sociology and anthropology at Fairfield University. But as you get away from the water the land becomes arid and barren and that, in some ways, is the key to its importance.
“Where you find fossils and stone tools, it’s usually pretty barren because the fact that it’s undisturbed is part of the reason why we actually find fossils and artifacts that haven’t been removed,” Forrest says.
At this site, Forrest and the team of researchers she was working with found a scientific treasure trove of stone tools, fossils, animal and hominin remains from 2.6 to 3 million years ago. The tools the team discovered are the oldest confirmed tools ever unearthed and push back the earliest proven use of tools by about 1 million years.
The momentous find was published in the journal Science last year with Forrest as one of more than 20 coauthors to the paper with lead author Thomas Plummer of Queens College in New York. The team’s research was also featured in a 2023 Smithsonian Magazine article highlighting discoveries about human evolution. Forrest stresses that it was a team effort but she’s excited to have been part of research looking at such a monumental aspect of evolution.
The tools found are called Oldowan tool kits and include a hammer stone and sharpedged rocks used for cutting meat. “It doesn’t look super impressive because it’s an ancient technology,” Forrest says. But the use of those Oldowan tool kits mark the beginning of the technological revolution that would ultimately separate humans from other animals.
“Part of what makes us unique and what has made us so successful is that we rely so much on technology,” she says. “Everything that we do on a daily basis requires some sort of technology, even if it’s not really sophisticated technology.”
Whether it’s the clothes we wear or the ability to start a fire, these are all technological innovations that have impacted human development and allowed humans to live in areas and climates we are ill-suited to biologically, Forrest says. “What we’re doing is modifying our environment to fit our needs, rather than waiting for our biology to catch up with the environment,” she says “It’s one of the things that makes humans so unique and why this is cool at places like Nyayanga is because it’s the very beginning of that behavior,” she adds. “So we’re starting to see this transition in human behavior to becoming more technologically dependent and using tools to allow us to do things that we didn’t biologically evolve to do.”
But a second major implication of Forrest and her colleagues’ research is that the story of the ultra-ancient tools found at Nyayanga doesn’t
seem to be a human story. At the site, researchers found Paranthropus remains, a type of hominin that did not evolve into humans. “Homo habilis and Homo erectus may have been directly ancestral to us, but Paranthropus definitely wasn’t, it was like a cousin species, or sibling species however you want to think about it,
but a sort of side branch of evolution that we know is not directly ancestral to us,” Forrest says.
For a long time, scientists believed that Paranthropus couldn’t adapt to the changing environment the same way Genus Homo did by making tools, but this finding calls that assumption into question. “We’ve thought for the longest time that they weren’t capable of doing that, and we don’t know for sure that they were making these tools, but if they were it’s a really interesting twist in the story.”
This isn’t the only fascinating uncertainty surrounding the finding. Although Forrest’s team found the oldest Oldowan tools, more than a decade ago another team of researchers at another site in Kenya found a more rudimentary tool than the Oldowan and they believe it dates back 3.3 million years. However, there are concerns about that team’s methodology, with some scientists questioning whether they accurately assessed the tools’ age.
These types of questions and mysteries are part of what drew Forrest to the field. Though she had a lifelong passion for history and science, she never knew about the field of anthropology until she went to Queens College as a student. “It was a good merging of the two things that I was most interested in, which was science and history,” she says.
Five years ago, Forrest began leading fieldwork at a site in the Koobi Fora region of Kenya and was awarded a Leakey Foundation Grant in 2023 to continue research at the site. She will be returning along with a group of students to that site this summer and expects to make more exciting discoveries about history long before the written word.