From East Africa to Santa Cruz, the story of human evolution is being shaped one stone tool at a time, and bringing early human history to life 🪨 🪏 Through the Human Evolution and Lithics Experimental (HELEX) Teaching Laboratory, anthropology professor Jay Reti is investigating cultural patterns and decision-making in human evolution through hands-on stone tool production. This work has taken him halfway across the world to Olduvai Gorge (Tanzania), Koobi Fora (East Turkana, Kenya), and, most recently, from the 1.9 million-year-old West Turkana sites of Kokiselei in northern Kenya. Now, undergraduate students in the lab are modeling how early hominins selected rock, crafted tools, and used them to navigate their world. This led Reti and 15 UC Santa Cruz anthropology undergraduates to partner with local high school teachers to strengthen human evolution curricula, developing new lessons and reaching 180 high school biology students in the past year. With fossil casts and real s...