NEW YORK (AP) — Scientists say they've found evidence that stone
tips for spears were made much earlier than thought, maybe even
created by an earlier ancestor than has been believed. Both
Neanderthals and members of our own species, Homo sapiens, used
stone tips, which made more lethal hunting weapons. The new
findings suggest that maybe they didn't invent that technology,
but inherited it from their last shared ancestor. That would be
Homo heidelbergensis (hy-dil-ber-GEN-sis). The study concluded
that a collection of stone tips from South Africa was half-a-
million years old. That's 200,000 years older than stone tips
found elsewhere. The work was published Thursday by the journal
Science.