There is more and more certainty that, apart from being the cradle of civilisation, between Tanzania and Ethiopia, and thus also largely on Kenyan territory, East Africa, and in particular Kenya, was also the first land where man began to work.
In fact, studies are progressing positively on the first tools worked for various tasks and uses, which were found a few years ago in the caves of Panga Ya Saidi, in the hinterland of Kilifi.
 

The research was conducted by German archaeologists from the Max Planck Institute for Human Science and published in the specialist journal 'Nature Communications'.
The tools in question were found in the cave on the Kenyan Coast, which is confirmed to have been inhabited by humans for more than ten thousand years starting around 78 thousand years ago, thus straddling the Middle Stone Age (the Mesolithic) and the Iron Age.
Panga ya Saidi is a set of caves covering about one kilometre in area, and the main cave measures 100 square metres.
It is a site that could have housed hundreds of people in the temples.

What the palaeontologists have discovered inside the caves are customs and traditions that have led to artefacts dating back some 67,000 years: in particular, jewellery made from oysters and shells and sharp tools made from bones. Objects that testify to a gradual change in the working of stone and other materials, as well as a new symbolism.
Prior to this study, the east coast of Africa had always been considered marginal in the history of human evolution with most archaeological research concentrated between the Rift Valley and South Africa.
'The discovery will certainly change the perception of palaeontologists,' explains the director of the Department of Archaeology at the Max Planck Institute, Nicole Bonvin. What it adds, as Patrick Roberts, who is leading the team that carried out the stable isotope surveys, notes, is the 'realisation that our species lived in a wide variety of habitats in Africa'.