Louise Leakey at her laboratory in Kenyaįor the past two decades, Dr. Leakey has been working in Koobi Fora, a region that gets its name from the Koobi Fora Ridge, located on the eastern shore of Lake Turkana in Northern Kenya near the border of Ethiopia. Louise’s parents, Maeve and Richard Leakey, were also paleoarchaeologists and she has followed in the footsteps of her esteemed predecessors.ĭr. The latter’s work and major discoveries in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania of evidence of early humans living there as long as 1.9 million years ago have been instrumental in expanding our understanding of the evolution of early humans. Leakey is the granddaughter of the renowned Kenyan archaeologist and paleoanthropologist, Louis Leakey, who died the year she was born. With Memento, technicians were able to transform photos and scans of the stone tools into 3D models, which can be viewed on the web or 3D printed for display and further study.ĭr. Through the use of Autodesk’s free, cutting-edge software, Memento, 3D digital replicas of these invaluable artifacts were made.
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Leakey and the American multinational software corporation Autodesk, people around the world will be able to share in this remarkable discovery. The find pushed the date of the earliest tool production back by 700,000 years. An article concerning this historical find was recently published in Nature Magazine (May 20, 2015). Louise Leakey and a team of dedicated paleoarchaeologists in Northern Kenya. 3.3 million-year-old stone tools, the oldest ones we now know of, were found by Dr. The earliest toolmakers were more technologically sophisticated than anyone had previously thought, as recent discoveries at a large-scale and decades-long archaeological project now suggest. Homo sapiens, anatomically modern humans, emerged roughly 0.2 million years ago and modern humans began migrating from Africa approximately 60,000 years ago. To provide some perspective, Homo erectus or “upright man,” the first hunter-gatherer societies and the first hominids to use fire, appeared a half-million years after that. Scholars who study human evolution have hypothesized for some time that the very first stone tools were produced by the genus (biological classification) Homo, the hominids that lived around 2.5 million years ago. Discovered by scientists in Kenya, the stone tools date back to 3.3 million years