Study: Sophisticated Tool-making Began in Africa, Before Europe

A new study says prehistoric people in southern Africa developed a skill in shaping stones into sharp-edged tools long before Europeans did.

A group of U.S. and French scientists say that humans at Blombos Cave in what is now South Africa used a highly developed skill to sharpen their tools 75,000 years ago. The same technique, known as “pressure flaking,” was used 20,000 years ago in Europe.

In pressure flaking, a toolmaker presses a sharp bone implement on the edges of a roughly-made stone blade or spearhead to trim out small flakes to get the desired sharpness and thinness of the finished tool.

Paola Villa, a curator at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History and a co-author of the study, says the discovery is important because it shows that the sophisticated method of tool-making is much older than previously thought.

The study is published in the October 29 issue of the U.S. magazine Science.

Some information in this story was provided by AFP and Reuters.