Oldowan tools and cut marks at Ain Boucherit
Herramientas olduvayenses y marcas de corte de Ain Boucherit
- Date
- c. 2.4 Ma · confidence medium
- Place
- Ain Boucherit, Ain Hanech, Sétif, Algeria
- Credited to
- Plio-Pleistocene hominins (species undetermined)
- Field
- Cosmos & Earth
What was discovered
Oldowan tools and animal bones with cut marks dated to c. 2.4 Ma in northern Algeria (Sahnouni et al., 2018). They show that hominins were already outside the East African Rift, in North Africa, only some 200,000 years after the first stone tools.
Ain Hanech (c. 1.8 Ma) had been known since 1992; the 2018 novelty is the age of Ain Boucherit, obtained by magnetostratigraphy and palaeomagnetism, which is debated less for its method than for its relation to the East African record.
What it led to
- a new framework for the early dispersal of hominins into North Africa
- revision of the idea that Oldowan tools arose only in the East African Rift
- Ain Hanech as the reference for the oldest occupation of the Maghreb