That’s what Sci-News.com and Science Daily are reporting that University of Toronto researchers have found. A trove of thousands of really really old tools:
Science Daily
Steven James Walker from the Department of Archaeology at UCT, lead author of the journal paper, says: “The site is amazing and it is threatened. We’ve been working well with developers as well as the South African Heritage Resources Agency to preserve it, but the town of Kathu is rapidly expanding around the site. It might get cut off on all sides by development and this would be regrettable.”…
The Kathu Townlands site is one component of a grouping of prehistoric sites known as the Kathu Complex. Other sites in the complex include Kathu Pan 1 which has produced fossils of animals such as elephants and hippos, as well as the earliest known evidence of tools used as spears from a level dated to half a million years ago.
Sci-News
“The Kathu Townlands was the site of ongoing intensive occupation and exploitation for stone tool manufacture,” Dr Michael Chazan of the University of Toronto’s Department of Anthropology and his colleagues wrote in a paper published in the journal PLoS ONE.“While one function of the site might have been as a quarry, rough-outs and primary flakes are rare, and there is a small component of finished tools (including rare hand axes made on non-local quartzite) suggesting that the site might have had a more diversified function.”