Each was about ten kilometers, or six miles, away―a long way to carry an armload of stone.Why the early Olorgesailie people went to such trouble we can only guess, of course.Not only did they lug hefty stones considerable distances to the lakeside, but, perhaps even more remarkably, they then organized the site.The Leakeys' excavations revealed that there were areas where axes were fashioned and others where blunt axes were brought to be resharpened.Olorgesailie was, in short, a kind of factory; one that stayed in business for a million years.Various replications have shown that the axes were tricky and labor-intensive objects to make―even with practice,an axe would take hours to fashion―and yet, curiously, they were not particularly good for cutting or chopping or scraping or any of the other tasks to which they were presumably put.So we are left with the position that for a million years―far, far longer than our own species has even been in existence,much less engaged in continuous cooperative efforts―early people came in considerable numbers to this particular site to make extravagantly large numbers of tools that appear to have been rather curiously pointless.And who were these people? We have no idea actually.We assume they were Homo erectus because there are no other known candidates,which means that at their peak―their peak ―the Olorgesailie workers would have had the brains of a modern infant.
