Illustration of what toolmaking may have been like in Xigou around 160,000 years ago
Sophisticated stone tools 160,000 years old may not have been made by Homo sapiens and are calling into question a previously accepted assumption about the use of these tools.
On the sidelines of a study this Tuesday in Nature Communicationsarchaeologists from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) discovered that early humans in what is now China used sophisticated stone tools at least 160,000 years ago.
“This discovery is important because it challenges the perception that stone tool technology in Asia lagged behind Europe and Africa during this period,” the research team wrote in a statement, cited by.
At the Xigou site, discovered in 2017 in central China’s Henan province, the team found the remains of more than 2,600 stone tools and determined that some of them were “encabadas” – that is, attached to a piece of wood or another type of rod.
“The identification of finished tools provides, as far as we know, the oldest evidence of composite tools in East Asia“, praised the researchers.
It is true that archaeologists already knew of extremely old examples of tool use in East Asia, with the oldest known wooden tools in that region dating back to 300,000 years ago. However, the new discoveries are the oldest known tools made of two materials, as demonstrated by the finished artefacts.
Michael Petragliadirector of Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution da Universidade de Griffith and corresponding author of the article, explained to Live Science why these tools are so sophisticated: “They improve performance, allowing you to increase leverage and provide more strength for actions like drilling.”
“Microscopic analysis of the edges of stone tools indicates drilling actions, used against plant materialprobably wood or reeds”, he added.
They may not have been made by Homo sapiens
Tool manufacturing techniques “appear to be well established and involve several intermediate steps, showing evidence of planning and foresight,” the team said.
Ben Marwickprofessor of archeology at the University of Washington and co-author of the paper, said that It is not clear that it was the primitive human species that produced the tools.
“The exact identity of the makers of these tools is unclear, because during this period there were likely several hominin species living in the region,” Marwick told Live Science.
“Thus, it could be, for example, the Denisovans, H. longi, H. juluensis or H. sapiens”, he noted.
“It is noteworthy that many of the artifacts are small — less than 50 millimeters — but were made with complex techniques“, noted Marwick.
The newly discovered tools date back to between 160,000 and 72,000 years ago. At this time, people in the region lived as hunter-gatherers.
