When you think of something “old,” you might think about last year's shoes, or maybe life before the Internet. But we’re going to talk about something really old—as in, 2.5 million years ago!
That’s about when some of the first hominins, or humanlike species that walk upright, started making tools from rocks. They were simple tools, 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.
