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

By Kristina Killgrove – LiveScience

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.