Image 2370 Stone Tool Turkey
Photo courtesy of Royal Holloway, University of London

The discovery of the oldest recorded stone tool in Turkey shows that humans may have travelled from Asia to Europe far earlier than previously thought, according to an article published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews.

Anatolia lies at the gateway into Europe and is favoured as a possible route for Early Pleistocene hominin dispersal out of Africa and Asia.

The quartzite flake worked by human hands was found in ancient deposits of the river Gediz in western Turkey, and has been dated to between 1.24-million and 1.17-million years ago.

Working with an international team from the UK, Turkey and the Netherlands, researchers from Royal Holloway, University of London, used high-precision radioisotopic equipment and palaeomagnetic measurements from lava flows to arrive at these dates.

This enabled them to establish what they describe as “the first accurate timeframe” for when humans occupied the area.

In 2007, what were believed to be the oldest hominin fossils in western Turkey were recovered at Koçabas, but the dating of these was uncertain.

In a university media release, Professor Danielle Schreve, of the Department of Geography at Royal Holloway, explains: “Our research suggests that the flake is the earliest securely-dated artefact from Turkey ever recorded and was dropped on the floodplain by an early hominin well over a million years ago.

“I had been studying the sediments in the meander bend and my eye was drawn to a pinkish stone on the surface. When I turned it over for a better look, the features of a humanly-struck artefact were immediately apparent. By working together with geologists and dating specialists, we have been able to put a secure chronology to this find and shed new light on the behaviour of our most distant ancestors,” she said.