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LiveScience
LiveScience
Kristina Killgrove

1.5 million-year-old stone tools from mystery human relative discovered in Indonesia — they reached the region before our species even existed

A person with light skin shows off a chert stone tool with their left hand.

Stone tools discovered on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi are rewriting what experts thought they knew about human evolution in this region. The tools date to about 1 million to 1.5 million years ago, which suggests that Sulawesi was occupied by an unknown human relative long before our species evolved.

"These are simple, sharp-edged flakes of stone that would have been useful as general-purpose cutting and scraping implements," study co-author Adam Brumm, professor of archaeology at Griffith University in Australia, told Live Science in an email.

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