Nyayanga excavation site (IMAGE)
Caption
Nyayanga excavation site in July 2025. Tan and reddish-brown sediments are more than 2.6-million-year-old deposits where fossils and Oldowan tools are found.
Nyayanga is located on Kenya’s Homa Peninsula, a fossil-rich region that juts out into the eastern margins of Lake Victoria, and it contains archaeological finds dating back some three million years. A series of recent excavations at the site yielded a trove of stone tools and hundreds of butchered hippopotamus bones.
Durable and versatile tools found at the site were crafted from special stone materials collected up to eight miles away, according to new research led by scientists at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, Cleveland Museum of Natural History and Queens College. Their findings, published Aug. 15 in the journal Science Advances, push back the earliest known evidence of ancient humans transporting resources over long distances by some 600,000 years.
Credit
T.W. Plummer, Homa Peninsula Paleoanthropology Project.
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