Early human cultural dynamics underpin the Plio-Pleistocene archaeological record and impact how we understand some of our earliest identifiable behaviours. One major outstanding question is whether Early Stone Age material culture represents a single lineage of cultural information, or did we ever lose the knowledge required to make stone tools? No single approach satisfactorily addresses this problem, but to date, objective analyses of temporal data have been absent from the conversation. Here, using a comprehensive database of dated African Oldowan archaeological sites, we demonstrate that there are no temporal breaks large enough, on a relative basis, to infer a loss of stone-tool-making cultural information. Therefore, alongside previously published data, we infer a continuous record of early human stone tool production in Africa from c. 3.3 to 1.5 million years ago. Stone tool-associated behavioural adaptations and evolutionary selective pressures were, therefore, likely to have been ever present during this period.

This paper examines the stone tool evidence associated with extinctions among Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and Homo in Eastern Africa between 0.8 and 3.5 Ma. It does this using Stoneworking Modes A-I, a relatively new framework for comparing stone tool evidence, and data from the Eastern African Prehistoric Stoneworking Survey. While the evolutionary transition between early Homo and H. ergaster/erectus seems correlated with a shift from occasional to habitual stoneworking, Australopithecus’ and Paranthropus’ last appearance dates do not appear correlated with major changes in the archaeological record.

Faunal extinctions correlate with human colonization worldwide during the Quaternary, yet the extent to which human hunting drove these losses remains debated. Resolving these debates depends on accurately dating both human arrival and animal extinction events. Herein I present a simulated overkill scenario modeling interaction between a founding human population and a single prey species. The simulation evaluates expected age offsets, the differences between the actual and observed dates, for extinction and colonization as functions of sample size and human population growth rate. Results show that when extinction is driven by human hunting, age offsets for extinction are expected to be smaller than those for colonization. This difference in age offset is expected because overkill produces a rapid demographic collapse of prey populations and taphonomic processes concentrate late-surviving individuals in the fossil record. In contrast, colonization dates are more offset because human populations are smallest immediately after arrival, and archaeological rarity is compounded by taphonomic effects. Although colonization age offsets are consistently larger than extinction age offsets across sample sizes, they are not extreme, such that archaeological sites should be detectable within five centuries of initial human settlement under modest rates of human population growth.

Whether the last common ancestor (LCA) of Homo and Pan (ca. 6–7 Ma) used stone tools is a foundational question in palaeoanthropology. However, it is often treated as known rather than as a hypothesis requiring substantiation. Lacking fossil evidence for the LCA, this assumption is based on data from extant primates and the available hominin fossil record. Phylogenetic approaches invoking parsimony argue that the presence of stone tool use in both Pan and Homo reflects homology rather than convergent evolution. While methodologically legitimate, we argue that this framework has been applied without sufficient attention to the specific criteria for this to be true. For homology to hold, stone tool use must have been continuously expressed across generations of both lineages from the LCA to the present. We evaluate this claim against three lines of evidence: behavioural data from extant primates, showing that stone tool use is heterogeneous within Pan; the hominin fossil and archaeological record, which leaves a substantial evidential gap between the LCA and the earliest known documented technologies; and comparative data from phylogenetically distant tool using animals, which show that similar behaviours can arise independently under comparable ecological conditions. Together, these lines of evidence favour a model of multiple, context-dependent origins of stone tool use over unbroken inheritance from a tool using LCA.