What comes to mind when you think of “old”? Last year’s shoes, or maybe life before the Internet? Try a little earlier—2.5 million years earlier!
That’s about the time some of the first hominins, or humanlike species that walk upright, started making tools from rocks. Their tools were simple, mainly stones split to form a point or a sharp edge. But they helped hominins to thrive.
The first species to make tools is from the genus (category) we call Homo (human). It is known as Homo habilis, or “handy person,” and it most likely lived in Africa 1.5 to 2.4 million years ago. Homo habilis represented a big change. How big? Big enough that we call its time the Paleolithic era, or the Old Stone Age.
