History Hit visits Kent State University, Ohio to film a fascinating ‘cutting-edge’ experiment that takes us to the beginnings of the Stone Age, over 2.6 million years ago.

Kent State is home to one of the world’s leading experimental archaeology laboratories, scientifically exploring the distant past. We follow Dr Metin I. Eren and Dr Michelle Bebber as they investigate a vital technological development, the use and creation of tools, particularly those that cut. It is an opportunity to put the Stone Age to the test and explore a key question: did early hominins use naturally occurring sharp rocks before they began to make their own tools? Using tools to cut was a key step forward in human evolution, enabling butchering and also the beginnings of combining materials to make new things. In the past the assumption has been that there was ‘eureka moment’ and cutting tools were always deliberately made, rather than found in the landscape. But is this right? The experiment, using modern laboratory techniques, takes us closer to the answer.

Helping Metin and Michelle is Emma Finestone of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Emma is an expert in early tool creation and use, working in the field in Kenya to find some of our ancestors’ early tools, dating back over 1.7 million years.

We also have a look at the much later Clovis culture tools that have been discovered in Ohio - highly advanced stone creations, the zenith of stone technology.

Join us for a thought-provoking investigation that reveals the extraordinary advances of the longest era of our past, the Stone Age.

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It was great working with Michelle and Metin to make this film. You can find out more about their ground-breaking work on stone tools in this fascinating paper:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/arcm.13075

And there is more information about the Kent State University Experimental Archaeology Laboratory at:
https://sites.google.com/view/ksuexarchlab/home