Only the groups in which gestural or verbal teaching was allowed performed significantly above the reverse engineering baseline on several indicators of toolmaking skill, such as the total number of flakes produced that were long enough and sharp enough to be viable and the proportion of hits that resulted in a viable flake. (sciencemag.org)
The find indicates that hominid populations there made big changes in toolmaking starting around 385,000 years ago, before Homo sapiens left Africa. (sciencenews.org)
Nearly the size of Ireland, it was colonized 34,000 years ago by people with sophisticated toolmaking skills who came across a land bridge from Australia. (discovermagazine.com)