Tools

A 26-ft deep excavation in Indonesia has revealed that humans and a hominin species that pre-dates humans used the same cave. The enticing possibility even exists that both species overlapped, sharing the space at the same time.

Killer whales have joined the rare club of animal species that craft tools out of nature and use them to their advantage. For the first time, they've been observed making a brush of sorts out of kelp and then using it on each other.

Neanderthals were gluing handles onto their tools over 100,000 years ago, possibly making the species even smarter than previously thought. So says a new study that discovered the use of adhesives on ancient stone tools that were previously overlooked.

Researchers from University College London's Institute of Archaeology have uncovered a cache of 800 stone artefacts dating to more than 300,000 years ago. The find includes one of the largest hand-axes ever unearthed in Britain.

A new study is presenting archeological evidence of the oldest known bone tools used for making clothes. The tools, found in a cave in Morocco, suggest humans were skinning animals for fur to wear as clothes up to 120,000 years ago.

Wild cockatoos have been seen making sets of tools, each with their own design and purpose, and using them in a specific order to crack into fruit. This behavior places them in an exclusive club that previously only included humans and some primates.

Archaeologists have found ancient tools at a dig site in Mongolia, indicating that humans were on the scene about 45,000 years ago, which is much earlier than current evidence suggests. There’s also a chance that the site is one spot where our ancestors mingled with the mysterious Denisovans.

The story of how humans spread across the globe is constantly being rewritten. Dating back to about 13,000 years ago, the “Clovis culture” was long thought to be the earliest humans in North America. Now archaeologists have uncovered stone tools in Texas that could be as old as 20,000 years.

Archaeologists have discovered ancient tools and bones in China that, once again, shake up the timeline of the human origin story. The items are more than two million years old, indicating that early hominins had spread much further east earlier than previously thought.

Minimally invasive surgery often sees large, expensive robots acting as a surgeon's hands inside the patient's body.​ A new cheaper “needle driver” is designed to precisely mimic the motions of a surgeon’s wrist and translate it to a tiny flexible claw, with no electronic or computerized parts.

As anyone familiar with Thor's hammer Mjolnir knows, sometimes the line between tool and weapon can be mighty thin. Now, new research provides evidence that rocks found at an archeological site 30 years ago thought to be tools were more likely projectiles.

Engineers at Bristol University say a real-life version of the sonic screwdriver could be created that would use sonic technology to open locks and undo screws.