The Acheulean is the most ancient cultural period in Europe, appearing there around 500,000 years ago. But Acheulean sites in East Africa can be more than three times as old as this. The most distinctive stone tool is called a handaxe, a stone of variable size that has been shaped on both sides to produce a teardrop shaped tool.

The exact function of handaxes has been the subject of much debate. Were they just raw material for tool manufacture? Were they the Swiss Army knife of the Palaeolithic? Or were they produced by males to attract females? Why were very large ones occasionally made, when smaller ones would have presumably met the functional purpose for which a handaxe was manufactured. No one knows for sure. But we know that significant care was taken to produce these pieces, and that the final end product was a result of a series of well-defined steps. These are the oldest stone tools for which this can be documented.

East African sites, such as the newly identified Kitasengwa korongo 3 in the Iringa Region of southern Tanzania, have dozens of these distinctive tools. They also often have very large ones, such as the one shown by Marungu Moshi, driver for IRAP, the Iringa Region Archaeological Project directed by Pamela Willoughby (Anthropology). Makorongo or gullies are excellent places to find fossils and artifacts, since they expose ancient sediments and their contents.