本期封面所示为来自肯尼亚图尔卡纳湖西岸 “Lomekwi 3”发掘点的石器。当Louis Leakey 及同事50多年前在坦桑尼亚奥杜威峡谷发现与早期人类化石相关的石器(现在被认为距今180万年前)时，人们假设工具制作是我们这个属(人属)所独有的。自那时以来，工具制作开始的年代也变得愈加久远，与人属关联的排他性也变得越来越差。有一段时间，最早已知利刃石器(距今约260万年前)曾来自埃塞俄比亚。在来自埃塞俄比亚、距今约330万年前的动物骨头上发现的切痕，过去被有争议地与非人类的人族对工具的使用关联了起来。考古记录这一更早的开始时间现在被Sonia Harmand等人所报告的、在“Lomekwi 3”发掘点取得的距今330万年前的发现证实了，它比几个星期前报告的当前最早已知(距今280万年前)的人属化石早大约50万年。这些新发现的石器与在奥杜威和其他地方发现的“奥杜威”工具不同，可能构成一个 “人属前”工具文化，作者建议将该文化称作。

    原文链接：3.3-million-year-old stone tools from Lomekwi 3, West Turkana, Kenya

    原文摘要：Human evolutionary scholars have long supposed that the earliest stone tools were made by the genus Homo and that this technological development was directly linked to climate change and the spread of savannah grasslands. New fieldwork in West Turkana, Kenya, has identified evidence of much earlier hominin technological behaviour. We report the discovery of Lomekwi 3, a 3.3-million-year-old archaeological site wher in situ stone artefacts occur in spatiotemporal association with Pliocene hominin fossils in a wooded palaeoenvironment. The Lomekwi 3 knappers, with a developing understanding of stone’s fracture properties, combined core reduction with battering activities. Given the implications of the Lomekwi 3 assemblage for models aiming to converge environmental change, hominin evolution and technological origins, we propose for it the name ‘Lomekwian’, which predates the Oldowan by 700,000 years and marks a new beginning to the known archaeological record.